Romantic Love and Personal Beauty Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities (part 2 of 3)

Romantic Love and Personal Beauty Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities (part 2 of 3)

One form of hand-caress, dear alike to mothers and lovers, is thus described by Professor Mantegazza: “In a caress we give and receive at the same time. The hand which distributes love, as by a magnetic effusion, receives it in return from the skin of the beloved person. Hence it is that one of the most common and most thrilling of the expressions of love consists in passing the hand through the hair. The hand finds, in this labyrinth of supple, living threads, the means of multiplying infinitely the points of amorous contact. It appears as if each hair were an electric wire, putting us into direct connection with the senses, with the heart, and even with the thoughts, of those we love. It is not without reason that woman’s hair has long been given as a token of love.”

What a clumsy thing is language, what an awkward thing a formal proposal stuttered out by a lover more embarrassed than if he were an amateur actor appearing on the stage for the first time, as Romeo before an international audience of actors and critics! How much less natural, less poetic, it is to hear the confession of Love than to feel it—

“When panting sighs the bosom fill, And hands, by chance united, thrill At once with one delicious pain.”—CLOUGH.

What poet, and were he a genius in condensation, could compress into a line, a page, a volume, such an ocean of emotion as is contained in a momentary caress of the hand? Not even the moment when the lovers are “imparadised in one another’s arms” surpasses this in ecstasy.

Yet there is a more delicious rapture still in the drama of Courtship. “Love’s sweetest language is,” as Herrick says, “a kiss.” All other caresses are valueless without a kiss; for is not a kiss the very autograph of Love?

But labial contact is a subject of such supreme importance in the philosophy and history of Love that it cannot be disposed of briefly as one form of caressing, but demands a chapter by itself.

KISSING—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

“The lips,” says Sir Charles Bell, “are of all the features the most susceptible of action, and the most direct index of the feelings.” No wonder that Cupid selected them as his private seal, without which no passion can be stamped as genuine.

For the expression of all other emotions, by words or signs, one pair of lips suffices. Love alone requires for its expression two pairs of lips. Could anything more eloquently demonstrate the superiority of the romantic passion over all others?

Steele said of kissing that “Nature was its author, and it began with the first courtship.” Steele evidently evolved this theory out of his “inner consciousness,” for the facts do not agree with it. The art of Kissing has, like Love itself, been gradually developed in connection with the higher stages of culture. Traces of it are found among animals and savages; the ancients often misunderstood its purport and object, as did our mediæval ancestors; and it is only in recent times that Kissing has tended to become what it should be—the special and exclusive language of romantic and conjugal love.

AMONG ANIMALS

Honour to whom honour is due. The Chimpanzee seems to have been the first who discovered the charm of mutual labial contact. In the description by Mr. Bartlett just referred to, the two Chimpanzees “sat opposite, touching each other with their much-protruded lips.” And in some notes on the Chimpanzee in Central Park, New York, by Dr. C. Pitfield Mitchell, published in the Journal of Comparative Medicine and Surgery, January 1885, we find the following: “That tender emotions are experienced may be inferred from the fact that he pressed the kitten to his breast and kissed it, holding it very gently in both hands. In kissing, the lips are pouted and the tongue protruded, and both are pressed upon the object of affection. The act is not accompanied by any sound, thus differing from ordinary human osculation.”

Dogs, especially when young, may be seen occasionally exchanging a sort of tongue-kiss; and who has not seen dogs innumerable times make a sudden sly dash at the lips of master or mistress and try to steal a kiss? The affectionate manner in which a cow and calf eagerly lick one another in succession may be regarded as quite as genuine a kiss as a human kiss on hand, forehead, or cheek; and it is probable that even in the billing of doves the motive is a vague pleasure of contact.

AMONG SAVAGES

we meet once more with the anomalous fact that they seem ignorant, on the whole, of a clever invention known even to some animals. Sir John Lubbock, after referring to Steele’s opinion that kissing is coeval with courtship, remarks: “It was, on the contrary, entirely unknown to the Tahitians, the New Zealanders, the Papuas, and the aborigines of Australia, nor was it in use among the Somals or the Esquimaux.” Jemmy Button, the Fuegian, told Darwin that kissing was unknown in his land; and another writer gives an amusing account of an attempt he made to kiss a young negro girl. She was greatly terrified, probably imagining him a new species of cannibal who had made up his mind to eat her on the spot, raw, and without salt and pepper.

Monteiro, in a passage previously quoted, says that in all the long years he has been in Africa he has “never seen a negro put his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side.”

Considering the general obtuseness of a savage’s nerves, it is no wonder that the subtle thrill of a kiss should be unknown to him. In many cases, moreover, Kissing is rendered physically impossible by the habit indulged in of mutilating and enlarging the lips. For instance, Schweinfurth, in his Heart of Africa, says that among the Bongo women “the lower lip is extended horizontally till it projects far beyond the upper, which is also bored and fitted with a copper plate or nail, and now and then by a little ring, and sometimes by a bit of straw, about as thick as a lucifer match.” Many other similar cases could be cited.

Evidently, under these circumstances, kissing would prove a snare and a delusion.

THE ORIGIN OF KISSING

is a topic on which doctors disagree, the opinions of Darwin and Mr. Spencer in particular differing as widely as their views regarding the origin of music. Mr. Spencer traces the primitive delight in osculation to the gustatory sense, Darwin to contact.

“Obviously,” says Mr. Spencer, "the billing of doves or pigeons, and the like action of love-birds, indicates an affection which is gratified by the gustatory sensation. No act of this kind on the part of an inferior creature, as of a cow licking a calf, can have any other origin than the direct prompting of a desire which gains by the act satisfaction; and in such a case the satisfaction is that which vivid perception of offspring gives to the maternal yearning. In some animals like acts arise from other forms of affection. Licking the hand, or, where it is accessible, the face, is a common display of attachment on a dog’s part; and when we remember how keen must be the olfactory sense by which a dog traces his master, we cannot doubt that to his gustatory sense, too, there is yielded some impression—an impression associated with those pleasures of affection which his master’s presence gives.

“The inference that kissing, as a mark of fondness in the human race, has a kindred origin, is sufficiently probable. Though kissing is not universal—though the negro races do not understand it, and though, as we have seen, there are cases where sniffing replaces it—yet, being common to unlikely and widely-dispersed peoples, we may conclude that it originated in the same manner as the analogous action among lower creatures.... From kissing as a natural sign of affection, there is derived the kissing which, as a means of simulating affection, gratifies those who are kissed; and, by gratifying them, propitiates them. Hence an obvious root for the kissing of feet, hands, garments, as a part of ceremonial.”

Darwin, on the other hand, holds that kissing “is so far innate or natural that it apparently depends on pleasure from close contact with a beloved person; and it is replaced in various parts of the world, by the rubbing of noses, as with the New Zealanders and Laplanders, by the rubbing or patting of the arms, breasts, or stomachs, or by one man striking his own face with the hands or feet of another. Perhaps the practice of blowing, as a mark of affection, on various parts of the body may depend on the same principle.”

Has Mr. Spencer ever kissed a girl? Certainly, to one who has, his theory of the gustatory origin of Kissing would seem like a joke were it not stated with so much scientific pomp and circumstance. The billing of doves and love-birds, in the first place, cannot be regarded as a matter of taste, literally, because in birds the sense of taste is commonly very rudimentary or quite absent, as their habit of swallowing seeds and other food whole and dry would make a sense which can only judge of things in a state of solution quite useless. The sense of touch, on the other hand, is exceedingly delicate in the bill of birds, which is, as it were, their feeler or hand.

That the motive which prompts cows and calves to lick one another is likewise tactile rather than gustatory, I had occasion to observe only a few days ago in a place worthy of so romantic a subject as the experimental study of kissing. Scene: a green mountain-meadow above Mürren, Switzerland. Frame of the picture, a semicircle of snow-giants, including Wetterhorn, Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau, Breithorn, etc. Cows and calves in the meadow, not in the least disturbed by the avalanches thundering down the side of the Jungfrau every twenty minutes. Cow licks calf, and calf retaliates by licking the cow’s neck. Cow enjoys it immensely, holding her head up as high as possible, with an expression of intense enjoyment, just like a dog when you rub and pat his neck. Ergo, as cow was not licking but being licked, her enjoyment must have been tactile, not gustatory. To the cow her tongue is what the bill is to a bird—her most mobile organ, her feeler, and hand.

Possibly Mr. Spencer was misled into his gustatory theory by a too literal interpretation of a habit poets have always had of calling a kiss sweet. Among the Romans a love-kiss was distinguished from other kisses by being called a suavium or sweet thing; and a modern German poet boldly compares the flavour of kisses to wild strawberries (perhaps she had just been eating some). Yet all this belongs to fancy’s fairyland. Kisses are called sweet for the same reason that we speak of the sweet concords of music, i.e. because the language of æsthetics is so scantily developed that we are constantly compelled to borrow terms from one sense and apply them to another, when their only resemblance is that they are both agreeable or otherwise.

There is a very prevalent impression that the senses of savages are more delicate than ours. In one way they are. A savage can often see an object at a greater distance, and hear a fainter sound, than a white man. But in what may be called æsthetic as distinguished from physical refinement, savages are vastly our inferiors. A savage can hardly tell the difference between two adjacent notes in the musical scale, while a musician can distinguish the sixtieth part of a semitone. And why would the wondrous harmonies of a Chopin nocturne seem a mere chaos of sound to a savage? Because his ears have not been trained through his imagination and intellect to discriminate sounds and sound-combinations, or to follow the plot or development of a musical narrative or “theme.”

Just so with the sense of touch. A sweetheart’s veil fluttering in a Hottentot’s face would only annoy him. A squeeze of the hand would leave him cold; and would he refrain from putting his arm round her waist if that gave him any pleasure? Obviously, then, the reason why the art of kissing is unknown to him is because his senses are too callous, his imagination too sluggish.

Kissing, like every other fine art, has its sensuous and its imaginative or intellectual side. Of all parts of the visible body the lips are the most sensitive to contact. Here the layer in which the nerves and blood-vessels are contained is not covered over, as elsewhere on the skin, by a thick leathery epidermis, but only thinly veiled by a transparent epithelium; so that when lips are applied to lips, the blood-vessels which carry the vital fluid straight from the two loving hearts, and the soul-fibres, called nerves, are brought into almost immediate contact: whence that interchange of soul-magnetism—that electric shock which makes the first mutual kiss of Love the sweetest moment of life—

“What words can ever speak affection So thrilling and sincere as thine?”—BURNS.

Yet herein the imagination plays a much more prominent rôle than it appears to do at first sight. The real reason why a savage cannot enjoy a kiss is not so much because his lips are deficient in tactile sensibility, as because he has no imagination to invest labial contact with the romance of individualised passion. If a lover’s pleasure lay in the mere labial contact, he would as soon exchange a kiss with any other girl. But should a sweetheart, on being asked for a kiss, refer him, say, to his sister or her sister; though the latter be a hundred times more beautiful, he would chide his love for offering a stone where bread was wanted. His imagination has so long painted to him the superior ecstasy of a kiss from her that, when he finally gets it, the long-deferred gratification ensures the unparalleled rapture anticipated.

ANCIENT KISSES

As the ancient civilised nations were much more addicted than we are to gesture language, it seems natural that so expressive a sign as kissing should have been used for a variety of purposes—for indicating not only family affection, sexual passion and friendship, but general respect, reverence, humility, condescension, etc. Among idolatrous nations, as M‘Clintock and Strong remark, “it was the custom to throw kisses towards the images of the gods, and towards the sun and moon.” Kissing the hand appears to be a modern custom, but many other parts of the body were thus saluted by the ancients: “Kissing the feet of princes was a token of subjection and obedience, which was sometimes carried so far that the print of the foot received the kiss, so as to give the impression that the very dust had become sacred by the royal tread, or that the subject was not worthy to salute even the prince’s foot, but was content to kiss the earth itself near or on which he trod.” A similar observance is the kissing of the Pope’s toe, or rather, the cross on his slipper—a custom in vogue since the year 710. Among the Arabs the women and children kiss the beards of their husbands or fathers. Among the ancient Hebrews, “kissing the lips by way of affectionate salutation was not only permitted, but customary among near relatives of both sexes, both in patriarchal and in later times.” The kiss on the cheek “has at all times been customary in the East, and can hardly be said to be extinct even in Europe.”

Among the ancient Greeks, Jealousy prompted the husbands to “make their wives eat onions whenever they were going from home.” And in the Roman Republic, “Among the safeguards of female purity,” says Mr. Lecky, “was an enactment forbidding women even to taste wine.... Cato said that the ancient Romans were accustomed to kiss their wives for the purpose of discovering whether they had been drinking wine.”

Breath-sweetening cloves and cachous were evidently unknown in the good old times.

The Romans had special names for three kinds of kisses—basium, a kiss of politeness; osculum, between friends; suavium, between lovers. If a man kissed his betrothed, she gained thereby the half of his effects in the event of his dying before the celebration of the marriage; and if the lady herself died, under the same circumstances, her heirs or nearest of kin took the half due to her, a kiss among the ancients being a sign of plighted faith. So seriously, indeed, was a kiss regarded by the ancient Romans, that a husband would not even kiss his wife in presence of his daughters.

It was on account of this strict feeling regarding kisses exchanged by man and woman that the early Christians subjected themselves to fierce attacks and slander, because of the kisses that were exchanged as a symbol of religious union at the Love-Feasts of the first disciples. “But, in 397, the Council of Carthage thought fit to forbid all religious kissing between the sexes, notwithstanding St. Paul’s exhortation, ‘Greet ye one another with a kiss of charity.’”

MEDIÆVAL KISSES

Among many other refinements of the ancients, the mediæval nations lost the sense of the sacredness of kissing between the sexes. England was apparently the greatest sinner in this respect; for it appears to have been customary on visiting to kiss the host’s wife and daughters. Indeed, up to a comparatively recent time, kissing on every occasion was almost as prevalent and permissible as handshaking is at the present day. In the sixteenth century it was customary in England for ladies to reward their partners in the dance with a kiss; and for a long time the minister who united a couple in the holy bonds of matrimony had the privilege of kissing not only the bride but even the bridesmaids! No wonder the ministry was the most popular profession in those days.

“It is quite certain,” says a writer in the St. James’s Magazine (1871), “that the custom of kissing was brought into England from Friesland, as St. Pierius Wensemius, historiographer to their High Mightinesses, the states of Friesland, in his Chronicle, 1622, tells us that the pleasant practice of kissing was utterly ‘unpractised and unknown in England till the fair Princess Romix (Rowena), the daughter of King Hengist of Friesland, pressed the beaker with her lippens, and saluted the amorous Vortigern with a kusjen’ (little kiss).”

Having recovered this lost art, however, the English lost no time in making up for neglected opportunities. Erasmus writes in one of his epistles: “If you go to any place (in Britain) you are received with a kiss by all; if you depart on a journey, you are dismissed with a kiss; you return, kisses are exchanged ... wherever you move, nothing but kisses. And if you, Faustus, had but once tasted them,—how soft they are, how fragrant! on my honour, you would wish not to reside here for ten years only, but for life!!!”

Bunyan, however, frowned on this practice, and inquired most pertinently—and impertinently—why the men only “salute the most handsome and let the ill-favoured alone?”

Pepys, in his Diary for 1660, gives this account of some Portuguese ladies in London: “I find nothing in them that is pleasing; and I see they have learnt to kiss, and look freely up and down already, and I do believe will soon forget the recluse practice of their own country.”

One of the luckiest of mortals was Bulstrode Whitelock, who at the Court of Christine of Sweden was asked to teach her ladies “the English mode of salutation; which, after some pretty defences, their lips obeyed, and Whitelock most readily!”

The following extraordinary kissing story is told in Chambers’s Journal for 1861:—

“When the gallant cardinal, Count of Lorraine, was presented to the Duchess of Savoy, she gave him her hand to kiss, greatly to the indignation of the irate churchman. ‘How, madame,’ exclaimed he, ‘am I to be treated in this manner? I kiss the queen, my mistress, who is the greatest queen in the world, and shall I not kiss you, a dirty little duchess? I would have you know I have kissed as handsome ladies, and of as great or greater family than you.’ Without more ado he made for the lips of the proud Portuguese princess, and, despite her resistance, kissed her thrice on her mouth before he released her with an exultant laugh.”

The fashion of universal kissing appears to have gone out about the time of the Restoration.

MODERN KISSES

The history of kissing, thus briefly sketched, shows that among primitive men this art is unknown because they are incapable of appreciating it. To the ancient civilised nations its charms were revealed; but as usual in the intoxication of a new discovery, they hardly knew what to do with it, and applied it to all sorts of stupid ceremonial purposes. The tendency of civilisation, however, has been to eliminate promiscuous kissing, and restrict it more and more to its proper function as an expression of the affections. And even within this sphere the circle becomes gradually smaller. Although in some parts of Europe men still kiss one another as a token of relationship, friendship, or esteem, yet the habit is slowly dying out, the example having been set in England, where it was abandoned toward the close of the seventeenth century. The senseless custom which women to-day indulge in of kissing each other on the slightest provocation, often when they would rather slap one another in the face, is also doomed to extinction. The witticism that women kiss one another because they cannot find anything better to kiss, differing herein from men, was not perpetrated by a woman. The practice of kissing little children has been often enough condemned on medical grounds, which also hold good in the case of adults. That contagious diseases are thus often conveyed from one person to another was already known to the ancient Romans, one of whose emperors issued a special proclamation in consequence against promiscuous kissing.

From a sentimental point of view, the most objectionable of modern kisses are those which are allowed between cousins. As long as a man may become a suitor for the hand of his cousin he should, both for the sake of his own love-drama and in justice to a possible rival, be debarred from this privilege. Imagine the feelings of a lover who knows that his rival has been permitted to steal the virgin kiss from the lips of his adored one simply because his father happens to be her uncle! Family kisses should, therefore, be allowed only within that degree of relationship which precludes the idea of Love and marriage. Cousins will have to be satisfied in future with a warmer grasp of the hand and an extra lump of sugar in a maiden’s smile.

LOVE-KISSES

The happiest moment in the life of the happiest man is that when he is allowed for the first time to “steal immortal blessing” from the lips of her who has just promised to be his for ever. No wonder the poets have grown eloquent over this supreme moment of pre-heavenly rapture—

TENNYSON—

“O love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul through My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.”

MOORE—

“Grow to my lips thou sacred kiss.”

SHAKSPERE—

“As if he plucked up kisses by the root That grew upon my lips.”

RÜCKERT—

“Meine Liebste, mit den frommen treuen Braunen Rehesaugen, sagt, sie habe Blaue einst als Kind gehabt. Ich glaub’es. Neulich da ich, seliges Vergessen Trinkend hing an ihren Lippen, Meine Augen unterm langen Kusse Oeffnend, schaut’ ich in die nahen ihren, Und sie kamen mir in solcher Nähe Tiefblau wie ein Himmel vor. Was ist das Wer gibt dir der Kindheit Augen wieder? Deine Liebe, sprach sie, deine Liebe, Die mich hat zum Kind gemacht, die alle Liebesunschuldsträume meiner Kindheit Hat gereift zu sel’ger Erfüllung. Soll der Himmel nicht, der mir im Herzen Steht durch dich, mir blau durch’s Auge blicken?”

Love-kisses are silent like deep affection—

“Passions are likened best to floods and streams: The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.”—RALEIGH.

True, Petruchio kissed Katrina “with such a clamorous smack, that at the parting all the church did echo”; but his object was not to express his Love, but to tease and tame the shrew. Loud kisses, moreover, might betray the lovers to profane ears, and bring on a fatal attack of Coyness on the girl’s part—

“The greatest sin ’twixt heaven and hell Is first to kiss and then to tell.”

Love-kisses are passionate and long; for Love is Cupid’s lip-cement—

“Oh, a kiss, long as my exile, Sweet as my revenge.”—SHAKSPERE.

“A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love.”

“For a kiss’s strength I think it must be measured by its length.”—BYRON.

“A kiss now that will hang upon my lip As sweet as morning dew upon a rose, And full as long.”—THOMAS MIDDLETON.

Perhaps the longest kiss on record is that which Siegfried gives Brünnhilde in the drama of Siegfried. But this is not an ordinary kiss, for the hero has to wake with it the Valkyrie from the twenty years’ sleep into which old Wotan had plunged her for disobeying his orders. Thanks to Wagner’s art, the thrill of this Love-kiss, magically transmuted into tones, is felt by a thousand spectators simultaneously with the lover.

Love-kisses are innumerable. Thus sings the Italian poet, Cecco Angiolieri, in the thirteenth century—

“Because the stars are fewer in heaven’s span Than all those kisses wherewith I kept time All in an instant (I who now have none!) Upon her mouth (I and no other man!) So sweetly on the twentieth day of June On the New Year twelve hundred ninety-one.” ROSSETTI’S TRANSL.

Novelists and poets have exhausted their ingenuity in finding adjectives descriptive of Love-kisses and others. An anonymous essayist has compiled the following list:—

“Kisses are forced, unwilling, cold, comfortless, frigid, and frozen, chaste, timid, rosy, balmy, humid, dewy, trembling, soft, gentle, tender, tempting, fragrant, sacred, hallowed, divine, soothing, joyful, affectionate, delicious, rapturous, deep-drawn, impressive, quick, and nervous, warm, burning, impassioned, inebriating, ardent, flaming, and akin to fire, ravishing, lingering, long. One also hears of parting, tear-dewed, savoury, loathsome, poisonous, treacherous, false, rude, stolen, and great fat, noisy kisses.”

HOW TO KISS

Kissing comes by instinct, and yet it is an art which few understand properly. A lover should not hold his bride by the ears in kissing her, as appears to have been customary at Scotch weddings of the last century. A more graceful way, and quite effective in preventing the bride from “getting away,” is to put your right arm round her neck, your fingers under her chin, raise the chin, and then gently but firmly press your lips on hers. After a few repetitions she will find out it doesn’t hurt, and become as gentle as a lamb.

The word adoration is derived from kissing. It means literally to apply to the mouth. Therefore girls should beware of philologists who may ask them with seemingly harmless intent, “May I adore you?”

In kissing, as in everything else, honesty is the best policy. Stolen kisses are not the sweetest, as Leigh Hunt would have us believe. A kiss to be a kiss must be mutual, voluntary, simultaneous. “The kiss snatched hasty from the sidelong maid” is not worth having. A stolen kiss is only half a kiss.

“These poor half-kisses kill me quite; Was ever man thus served? Amidst an ocean of delight, For pleasure to be starved?”—MARLOWE.

HOW TO WIN LOVE

BRASS BUTTONS

Inasmuch as language is the least eloquent and effective mode of expressing Love, and inasmuch as Love is commonly inspired in woman by the possession of qualities which she lacks, it is obvious that Shakspere did not show his usual insight into human nature when he wrote—

“That man that hath a tongue is, I say, no man, If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.”

It seems, indeed, quite probable that Bacon wrote those two lines; if Shakspere had written them he would have said—

“That man that hath a uniform is, I say, no man, If with his uniform he cannot win a woman.”

The extraordinary infatuation for military uniforms shown by women of all times and countries is one of the most obscure problems in mental and social philosophy. Whenever an officer, though ever so humble in rank, is present at a ball or other social gathering, all other men, be they merchants, politicians, lawyers, physicians, artists, students, ministers, are simply “nowhere.”

What is the cause of this singular infatuation? Is it the colour-harmony formed by the complementary blue cloth and yellow buttons? No, for various officials, as well as messenger boys, wear similar uniforms without making any special impression on the feminine heart. Is it the beauty or the wit of the soldier? No, for he may be as stupid as a log, and red-nosed and smallpox-pitted, without losing a jot of his popularity. Nor can it be his valour, for he has perhaps never yet been opposite the “business end” of a rifle, as they say out West. Nor, again, is it likely that women admire soldiers from an inherited sense of gratitude for the services they rendered in former warlike times in protecting their great-great-grandmothers from the enemy’s barbarity; for woman’s gratitude is not apt to be so very retrospective, while gratitude itself is less apt to inspire Love than aversion.

Whatever may be the cause of this mysterious phenomenon, the fact remains that officers are woman’s ideals. Hence the first and most important hint to those who would win a woman’s Love is: Put brass buttons on your coat, have it dyed blue, and wear epaulettes and a waxed moustache. This love-charm has never been known to fail.

CONFIDENCE AND BOLDNESS

Women secretly detest bashful men. It is their own duty, prescribed by etiquette, to be passive, shy, and diffident; hence if men were shy and diffident too, no advances would be made, and all progress in Love-making would be retarded.

Women love courage. He who robs lions of their hearts can easily win a woman’s.

“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt,”

says Shakspere; and Chesterfield remarks à propos, that “that silly sanguine notion which is firmly entertained here, that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen, encourages and has sometimes enabled one Englishman in reality to beat two.”

Ovid knew the value of boldness. And although his object was not to teach how to win permanent Love, but how to get honey without taking care of the bees, yet his psychology is correct, and agrees with Goethe’s aphorism that “if thou approachest women with tenderness thou winnest them with a word; but he who is bold and saucy comes off better.”

Perhaps this is one reason why officers are so successful in Love, for several of them have been known to be bold and saucy.

Another reason may be that their pursuit is more distinctively and exclusively masculine than any other profession.

What, for instance, could be more delightfully masculine, i.e. mediæval, than the way in which, according to the Chronicon Turonense, William the Conqueror wooed and won Mathilde, the daughter of Count Baldwin, Prince of Flanders. At first he was unsuccessful, “for the young girl,” says Professor Scherr, “declared proudly she would not marry a bastard. Then William rode to Bruges, waylaid Mathilde, attacked her when she came from church, pulled her long hair, and maltreated her with his fists and with kicks, after which heroic performance he made his escape. Strange to say, this peculiar mode of Love-making imposed so greatly on the beauty that she declared with tears in her eyes that she would marry no one but the Norman Duke, whom she actually did marry. A parallel case may be found in the German Nibelungenlied (str. 870 and 901).”

Since, according to the old philosophy, human nature, including Love and Love-making, is the same at all times and in all countries, it follows that a modern lover, after donning his brass buttons, should administer his sweetheart a sound thrashing. That will make her mellow and docile.

PLEASANT ASSOCIATIONS

The Germans, it is well known, are deficient in Gallantry, at least in conjugal life, and often treat their wives more as upper servants than as companions. Perhaps it was the unconscious desire to justify this conjugal attitude that induced one of the leading German psychologists, Horwicz, to pen these lines:—

“Love can only be excited by strong and vivid emotions, and it is almost immaterial whether these emotions are agreeable or disagreeable. The Cid wooed the proud heart of Donna Ximene, whose father he had slain, by shooting one after another of her pet pigeons. Such persons as arouse in us only weak emotions, or none at all, are obviously least likely to incline us toward them.... Our aversion is most apt to be bestowed on individuals who, as the phrase goes, are ‘neither warm nor cold’; whereas impulsive, choleric people, though they may readily offend us, are just as capable of making us warmly attached to them.”

How that modern genius, who lived two thousand years ago and called himself Ovid, would have opened his eyes in wonder at this German-mediæval Art of Love! He, queer fellow, believed that a lover should never be otherwise than pleasantly associated in his sweetheart’s mind. If she is spoiled by over-indulgence, do not, he says in effect, take away her dainties with your own hand. If she is unwell, do not hand her the bitter medicine in person: “Let your rival mix the cup for her.”

So long as the professional manslayer is the highest ideal of woman’s tender heart, lovers will do well to follow mediæval methods of Courtship and make themselves as disagreeable as possible. When the millennium arrives, and wholesale duels to avenge offended national “honour” will, like private duels to avenge individual “honour,” have become obsolete, then the Ovidian psychology of Love will begin to prevail. Then will the lover endeavour to avoid all harshness and to be only agreeably associated in the mind of his goddess—through bright, cheerful conversation, harmless and sincere compliments, mutual enjoyment of excursions and artistic entertainments, the avoidance of disagreeable topics, of jealous suspicions and reproaches, etc.; hoping thus to become the nucleus around which her dreams of matrimonial happiness will gradually crystallise.

PERSEVERANCE

Persistence alone may win a woman where all other means fail. She may dream of an ideal lover and vainly wait for his appearance for several years; and in the meantime the image of her ever-present suitor will become brighter and more inviting in her mind. For is not perseverance, is not unflagging devotion to a single aim, one of the noblest of manly attributes, a guarantee of success in life and the highest test of genuine passion?

Perseverance may neutralise more than one refusal.

“Have you not heard it said full oft A woman’s nay doth stand for naught?”

asks Shakspere; and Byron teaches that she

“Who listens once will listen twice; Her heart, be sure, is not of ice, And one refusal no rebuff.”

The fact that a proposal is the sincerest compliment a man can pay a woman, contributes not a little to make a second proposal more acceptable. A third should rarely be attempted. The first proposal may have been refused more from momentary embarrassment than from real indifference. The second, being weighted by reflection, is generally final, though numerous exceptions have occurred; yet in such cases it is probable that the woman gives her hand without her heart, having at last discovered that her heart is impervious to all Love. There are hundreds of thousands of such women, and some of them are very sweet and pretty. The fault lies in their shallow education.

FEIGNED INDIFFERENCE

Of every ten disappointed lovers seven might say: Had I been a less submissive slave, I might have been a more successful suitor.

“It is a rule of manners,” says Emerson, “to avoid exaggeration.... In man or woman the face and the person lose power when they are on the strain to express admiration.”

In other words, one of the ways of winning Love is through stolidity and indifference, real or feigned.

Were women the paragons of subtle insight they are painted, they would favour those who are most visibly affected by their charms, as being best able to appreciate and cherish them. There are such women—a few; but the majority are partial coquettes, to whom Love is known only as a form of Vanity, who neglect a man already won, and reserve their sweetest smiles for those that seem less submissive. The artificial dignity under which so many young society men hide their mental vacuity has an irresistible fascination for the average society girl. And the high collar, which helps to keep the head in a dignified position, unswerved by emotion, is responsible for innumerable conquests.

Ergo, to win a society girl’s heart, wear a high collar, appear awfully dignified and stolid, and show not the slightest interest in anything. Above all, if you are of superior intelligence, carefully conceal the fact. Brains are not “good form” in society; for what’s the use of having flint where there is no steel to strike a spark? “Stolidity,” says Schopenhauer, “does not injure a man in a woman’s eye: rather will mental superiority, and still more genius, as something abnormal, have an unfavourable influence.”

A passage from Diderot’s Paradox of Acting (Pollock’s translation) may be cited in illustration of Schopenhauer’s remark.

“Take two lovers, both of whom have their declarations to make. Who will come out of it best? Not I, I promise you. I remember that I approached the beloved object with fear and trembling; my heart beat, my ideas grew confused, my voice failed me, I mangled all I said; I cried yes for no; I made a thousand blunders; I was inimitably inept; I was absurd from top to toe, and the more I saw it the more absurd I became. Meanwhile, under my very eyes, a gay rival, light-hearted and agreeable, master of himself, pleased with himself, losing no opportunity for the finest flattery, made himself entertaining and agreeable, enjoyed himself; he implored the touch of a hand which was at once given him, he sometimes caught it without asking leave, he kissed it once and again. I the while, alone in a corner, avoided a sight which irritated me, stifling my sighs, cracking my fingers with grasping my wrists, plunged in melancholy, covered with a cold sweat, I could neither show nor conceal my vexation. People say of love that it robs witty men of their wit, and gives it to those who had none before: in other words, makes some people sensitive and stupid, others cold and adventurous.”

Another specialist in Love-lore, Lord Byron, discourses on this text in five pithy lines—

“Not much he kens, I ween, of woman’s breast Who thinks that wanton thing is won by sighs, Do proper homage to thine idol’s eyes, _But not too humbly or she will despise; Disguise even tenderness, if thou art wise_.”

And even the king of German metaphysicians, old Kant, understood this feminine foible, which may have been the reason why he never found a wife: “An actor,” he says, “who remains unmoved, but possesses a powerful intellect and imagination, may succeed in producing a deeper impression by his feigned emotion than he could by real emotion. One who is truly in love is, in presence of his beloved, confused, awkward, and anything but fascinating. But a clever man who merely plays the rôle of a lover may do it so naturally as to easily ensnare his poor victim; simply because, his heart being unmoved, his head remains clear, and he can, therefore, make the most of his wits and his cleverness in presenting the counterfeit of a lover.”

“The counterfeit of a lover.” It is he, then, whom women, according to these French, English, and German witnesses, encourage, instead of the true lover. So that women are not only less capable of deep Love than men, but they do not even promote the growth and survival of Love by favouring the men most deeply affected by it. And the fault, be it said once more, lies in the superficial education not only of their intellect but of their emotions, for the heart can only be reached and refined through the brain. The average woman, being incapable of feeling Love, is incapable of appreciating it when she finds it in a man. She sees only its ridiculous side—and ridicule is fatal, even to Love. Ridicule killed Love in France, which to-day is the most loveless country in the civilised world, its women the most frivolous and heartless,—and its population gradually diminishing.

The ridiculous exaggerations of a lover are indeed harmless if the girl is in love too, for then she does not see them; but to one who has yet to win Love, as girls are now constituted, they are fatal. Perhaps this is the reason why the list of men of genius who failed in their truest Love is so extraordinarily large: for, their Love being more ardent than that of others, they were unable to restrain its excesses and feign indifference; while another way in which they “lost power” was through their extravagant admiration of Beauty, which put their faces “on the strain” to express it.

However this may be, lovers should keep in mind this paradoxical rule, which follows as a corollary from the foregoing discussion:

In order to win a woman, first cure yourself of your passion, then, having won her through feigned indifference (which is easy), fall in love again and bag her before she has had time to discover your change of feeling.

The only difficulty herein lies in the cure. Should this be found impossible, even with the aid of our next chapter, one last resource is open to the lover. Says La Bruyère: “Quand l’on a assez fait auprès d’une femme pour devoir l’engager, il y a encore une ressource, qui est de ne plus rien faire; c’est alors qu’elle vous rappelle.” In other words, if you have failed to win her love, with all your attentions, change your policy: leave her alone, and she will be sure to recall you.

This trait is not simply the outcome of feminine perverseness or coquetry. The explanation lies deeper. Every sensible woman, be she ever so vain and accustomed to flattery, is painfully conscious of certain defects, physical or mental. “Has he discovered them?” she will anxiously ask herself when the sly lover suddenly withdraws; “I must recover his good opinion.” So she sets herself the task of fascinating and pleasing him; and this desire to please (Gallantry) being one of the constituent parts of Love, it is apt to be soon joined by the other symptoms which make up the romantic passion.

COMPLIMENTS

“O flatter me, for love delights in praises,”

exclaims one of Shakspere’s characters; and again—

“Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces; Tho’ ne’er so black, say they have angels’ faces.”

There is one advantage in writing about the romantic passion. Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such an endless variety of forms and shades that you may say almost anything about it you please, and it is likely to be correct. So again here. It is true, no doubt, that skill in the art of flattery helps a man to win a woman’s goodwill, but how does this rhyme with the doctrine that Feigned Indifference is the lover’s sharpest weapon?

Answer: A compliment is not so much an expression of Love as of simple æsthetic admiration; or else it may spring from the flatterer’s desire to show off his wit. A man may compliment a woman for whom he does not feel the slightest Love; and women know it. Therefore even a coquette does not despise and ignore a man who flatters her, as she invariably does one whose actions brand him as her captive and slave.

At the same time, since the desire to be considered beautiful is the strongest passion in a woman’s heart, the avenue to that heart may often be found by a man who can convince her honestly that she is considered beautiful by himself and others. For, as every man of ability has moments when he doubts his genius, so every woman has moments when she doubts her beauty and longs to see it in the mirror of a masculine eye.

The most common mistake of lovers is to compliment a woman on her most conspicuous points of beauty. This has very much the same effect on her as telling Rubinstein he is a wonderful pianist. He knows that better than you do, and has been told so so many million times that he is sick and tired of hearing it again. But show him that you have discovered some special subtle detail of excellence in his performance or compositions that had escaped general notice, and his heart is yours at once and for ever. A lover can have no difficulty in discovering such subtle charms in his sweetheart, for Cupid, while blinding him to her defects, places her beauties under a microscope.

A man who attends a social gathering comes home pleased, not at having heard a number of bright things, but in proportion to his own success in amusing the company. On the same principle, if you give a girl—especially one who mistrusts her conversational ability—a chance to say a single bright thing, she will love you more than if you said a hundred clever things to her.

Sincerity in compliments is essential; else all is lost. It is useless to try to convince a woman with an ugly mouth or nose that those features are not ugly. She knows they are ugly, as well as Rubinstein knows when he strikes a wrong note. “Very ugly or very beautiful women,” says Chesterfield, “should be flattered on their understanding, and mediocre ones on their beauty.”

A clever joke is never out of place. You may intimate to a comparatively plain woman that she is good-looking, and if she retorts with a sceptical answer, you may snub her and score ten points in Love by telling her you pity her poor taste.

Indeed, the art of successful flattery, especially with modern self-conscious girls, consists in the ability of giving “a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery,” as Coleridge puts it. Conundrums are very useful. For instance, Angelina is patting a dog. “Do you know why all dogs are so fond of you?” asks Adolphus. Angelina gives it up. “Because dogs are the most intelligent of all animals.” Angelina goes to Paris, and Adolphus enjoys his last walk with her. They pass a weeping willow. “Why are we two like this tree?” She gives it up again. “A weeping willow is graceful and melancholy; you are graceful, I melancholy.”

“How old am I?” asks Angelina. “I don’t know. Judging by your conversation thirty-five, by your looks nineteen.”

Tell a woman—casually, as it were—of the effect of her charms on a third party, and it will please her more than a bushel of your neatest compliments. As Lessing remarks, Homer gives us a more vivid sense of Helen’s beauty by noting its effect even on the Trojan elders, than he could have done by the most minute enumeration of her charms. Put your flatteries into actions rather than words—“mettre la flatterie dans les actions et non en paroles”—is Balzac’s advice. But “flattery in actions” is simply another name for Gallantry.

There is no danger that the subtlest compliment will ever escape notice. In the discovery of praise the commonest mind has the quickness of genius.

LOVE-LETTERS

The great trouble with compliments is that they have an annoying habit of occurring to the mind about ten or twenty minutes after the natural opportunity for getting them off has passed away. It is here that Love-letters come to the rescue. They enable a man to excogitate the most excruciatingly subtle and hyperbolic compliments, and then “lead up to them” most naturally.

There is an old superstition that Love-letters must be incoherent trash to be genuine evidences of passion. When Keats’s Love-letters to Fanny Brawne were sold at auction, a spicy journalist commented as follows on the occasion:—

“It is open to question whether, like so many of the letter-writers of the age of which Keats inherited the traditions, the singer of Endymion had not a shrewd eye to posterity when he wrote the laboured compositions which the world regards as the record of his wooing. The manuscript is painfully correct, the punctuation worthy of a printer’s reader, the capitals much nicer than fiery lovers usually form, and the periods rounded with painful care. Like so many cultivators of the art of letter-writing, the sensitive poet, ‘who was snuffed out by a review,’ seems to have copied the gush, which last week sold for ten times more than Endymion fetched, before he committed it to the fourpenny post. Hence the veriest scrawl, the most illegible postcard of these times is, as an index to the writer’s character, infinitely more valuable than the ponderous pieces of rhetoric which last century passed for love-making between Strephon, who quotes the elegant Tully, and Chloe, who makes free use of the ‘Elegant Extracts.’ Duller fustian than such priggish love-letters it is hard to conceive. They remind one of nothing so much as the epistles copied out of The Complete Letter-Writer, and must recall to some middle-aged men certain painful experiences of those salad days when their young affections suffered a sudden blight by missives of so severely correct an order that they suggest the idea of having undergone maternal supervision.”

Yet why, pray, should Keats not have written his Love-letters so carefully and copied them so neatly? Is it not a fact that when a man is in love he cares more to make a pleasing impression on one particular person than on all the rest of the world combined? and that even his ambition and fame, for which he labours so hard, seem valuable in his eyes solely as a means of winning Her Love? And if Love is a deeper passion, even in a poet, than ambition, why should he not go to the extent even of taking notes and utilising his very best conceits in his Love-letters? The truth is, in the writing of Love-letters everything depends on the man’s habits. If he is accustomed to writing carelessly, his Love-letters will probably be hasty and slovenly enough to suit orthodox notions on this subject. But if he is a literary artist, he will probably polish his billets-doux more than anything else con amore, considering the probable effect on her mind of every sentence. And although the thought of future publication may enter his mind, it will appear as the veriest trifle compared with the more important object of winning a woman’s Love by a display of complimentary wit and passionate protestations of undying affection.

Sir Richard Steele evidently did not believe that Love-letters, to be genuine, must be slovenly. In one of his letters to Miss Scurlock he apologises for not having time to revise what he had written. In another letter he exclaims: “How art thou, oh my soul, stolen from thyself! how is all my attention broken! my books are blank paper, and my friends intruders.” Again: “It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love, and yet attend business. As for me, all that speak to find me out, and I must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me. A gentleman asked me this morning, ‘What news from Holland?’ and I answered, ‘She is exquisitely handsome.’ Another desired to know when I had been last at Windsor; I replied, ‘She designs to go with me.’” And once more: “It is to my lovely charmer I owe that many noble ideas are continually affixed to my words and actions: it is the natural effect of that generous passion to create in the admirers some similitude of the object admired; thus, my dear, am I every day to improve from so sweet a companion.”

The first score or so of Keats’s Love-letters have the ring of true gold. Here are a few specimens in which the thermometer of endearments rises steadily from My Dearest Lady, through My Sweet Girl, My Dear Girl, My Dearest Girl, My Sweet Fanny, to My Sweet Love, Dearest Love and Sweetest Fanny. In the very first letter he writes:—

“Ask yourself, my love, whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the letter you must write immediately? and do all you can to console me in it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—write the softest words and kiss them, that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself, if I do not know how to express my devotion to so fair a form, I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

“All I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.”

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

“I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. From no others would I take it.”

“At Winchester I shall get your letters more readily; and it being a cathedral city, I shall have a pleasure, always a great one to me when near a cathedral, of reading them during the service up and down the aisle.”

All this is in the true Shaksperian key of Romantic Love, as are the Love-letters of Burns, Byron, Moore, Heine, Bürger, Lenau, and most other poets. Room must be made here for a few extracts from Lenau’s letters to his love, which, in some respects, resemble those of Keats—equally polished, poetic, deep, and sincere:—

“It makes me melancholy to see how incapable I am of sympathizing with the pleasures of my friends. My Love goes out afar towards you; it hearkens and listens and stares in the distance for you, and takes no note of all the love by which it is surrounded here. I am truly ill. I constantly think of you alone and death. It often seems to me as if my time had expired. I cannot write poetry, I cannot rejoice in anything, cannot hope, can only think of you and death. The other day I wrote to you to take good care of your health—though I myself feel so little desire to live.”

“The whole evening I was unable to think of anything but of you and the possibility of losing you. The large crowd of people seemed to have assembled on purpose to show me most painfully what a mere nothing the world would be to me if I had to part from you. I constantly saw but your face, your lovely, divine eye.”

“Alexander wishes me to go to the baths at Leuk with him. He is quite ill. But I cannot go. If I have to see Switzerland without you, I prefer not to see it at all.”

“My poetic composition is in a bad way. Though a thought sprouts in me here and there, it withers before it has reached maturity. When I go to see you I shall bring along a dry wreath of prematurely-faded poetic blossoms, and make them revive in your presence, as there are warm fountains dipped into which faded flowers blossom again.”

“I have lost all pleasure in other people when you are absent. If you had only been at Weinsberg! Even the Æolian harps did not produce the usual impression on me.” It is noticeable how the overtone of Monopoly is accented in all these plaints.

“I have found in your companionship more evidence of an eternal life than in all my investigations and studies of nature. Whenever, in a happy hour, I believed I had reached the climax of Love and the proper moment for death, since a more delicious moment could never follow: it was on each occasion an illusion, for another hour followed in which I loved you still more deeply. These ever new, ever deeper abysses of life convince me of its immortality. To-day I saw in your eyes the full measure of the divine. Most distinctly did I perceive to-day that the swelling and sinking of the eye is the breathing of the soul. In an eye of such beauty as yours we can see, as in a prophetic hieroglyphic, the essence of which some day our immortal body will consist. If I die, I shall depart rich, for I have seen what is most beautiful in the world.”

“The rose you gave me at parting has a most delicious fragrance, as if it were a Good-Night from you! Sleep well, dearest heart! Preserve the second rose as a memento. I love you immeasurably.”

No doubt the average Love-letters read in courts of justice in breach of promise cases, to the intense amusement of the audience, are very different in character from these poetic effusions. But to say that, because the average Love-letters are ludicrous, therefore all Love-letters, to be genuine, must be ludicrous and incoherent, is the very Bedlam of absurdity. What makes common Love-letters so laughable is the fact that the writer, previously a paragon of prosiness, suddenly gets some poetic fancies and tries to put them into language. But as the writing of poetry—in verse or prose—is a more difficult art than piano-playing, first attempts cannot be otherwise than harrowing or amusing. On the other hand, just as a pianist can never improvise so soulfully as when he is in love, so a poet will write his best prose in the letters addressed to his love; the only ludicrous feature being that extravagant and exclusive admiration of one person which is the very essence of Love.

Surely Hawthorne was neither “insincere” nor “thinking of posterity” when he finished one of his Love-letters with this poetic conceit, expressed in his best prose style:—

“When we shall be endowed with spiritual bodies I think they will be so constituted that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance, in no time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of those we love. Oh, what happiness it would be, at this moment, if I could be conscious of some purer feeling, some more delicate sentiment, some lovelier fantasy than could possibly have had its birth in my own nature, and therefore be aware that you were thinking through my mind and feeling through my heart! Perhaps you possess this power already.”

This is true epistolary Love-making—the sublimated essence of complimentary Gallantry.

LOVE-CHARMS FOR WOMEN

As women are not allowed to make Love actively, they resort to various cunning arts with which they indirectly reach the hard hearts of men. Magic is the most potent of these arts, and always has been so considered by women; for, curiously enough, one finds on looking over the folklore of various nations, ancient and modern, that in nineteen cases out of twenty where a Love-charm is spoken of, it is one used by women to win the affection of men.

Probably the real reason why the vast majority of women are so curiously indifferent to the hygienic arts of increasing and preserving Personal Beauty—as shown in their devotion to tight-lacing, their aversion to fresh air, sunshine, and brisk exercise—is because they know they can infallibly win a man’s Love by the use of some simple powder or potion. It is well known that the Roman poet Lucretius took his life in an amorous fit caused by a love-potion; and Lucullus lost his reason in the same way. The grandest musical work in existence would never have been written had not Brangäne given to Tristan and Isolde a love-potion which was so powerful that it made not only both the victims die of the fever of Love, but united them even after death: "For from the grave of Tristan sprang a plant which descended into the grave of Yseult. Cut down thrice by order of the Cornish king, the irrepressible vegetable bloomed verdant as ever next morning, and even now casts its shadow over the tombs of the lovers—

“‘An ay it grew, an ay it threw, As they would fain be one.’”

In mediæval times Personal Beauty was such a rare thing, and created such havoc among men, that the unhappy possessors of it were frequently accused of using forbidden Love-charms, and burnt at the stake as witches.

To-day, thanks to our superior sanitary and educational arrangements, Beauty is such a common affair that it has lost all its effect on the masculine heart; hence girls should carefully note a few of the ways by which a man may be irresistibly fascinated.

Italian girls practise the following method: A lizard is caught, drowned in wine, dried in the sun and reduced to powder, some of which is thrown on the obdurate man, who thenceforth is theirs for evermore.

A favourite Slavonic device is to cut the finger, let a few drops of her blood run into a glass of beer, and make the adored man drink it unknowingly. The same method is current in Hesse and Oldenburg, according to Dr. Ploss. In Bohemia, the girl who is afraid to wound her finger may substitute a few drops of bat’s blood.

Cases are known where invocations to the moon were followed by the bestowal of true Love. And if a girl will address the new moon as follows—

“All hail to thee, moon! All hail to thee! Prithee, good moon, reveal to me, This night who my husband shall be,”

she will dream of him that very night.

A four-leaved clover secretly placed in a man’s shoes will make him the devoted lover of the woman who puts it in.

“Inside a frog is a certain crooked bone, which, when cleaned and dried over the fire on St. John’s Eve, and then ground fine and given in food to the lover, will at once win his love for the administerer.”

If a girl sees a man washing his hands—say at a picnic—and lends him her apron or handkerchief to dry them, he will forthwith declare himself her amorous slave to eternity.

There are men, however, who, owing to some constitutional defect or inherited anomaly, remain unaffected by these and similar arts. Should any woman be so foolish as to crave such a man’s Love, she will do well to bear in mind that Vanity is the backdoor by which every man’s heart may be entered. Thus Byron says of a Venetian flame of his: “But her great merit is finding out mine—there is nothing so amiable as discernment.” “Let her be,” says Thackeray, “if not a clever woman, an appreciator of cleverness in others, which, perhaps, clever folks like better.” “Ne’er,” says Scott,

“‘Was flattery lost on poet’s ears: A simple race! they waste their toil For the vain tribute of a smile.’”

Rousseau’s last love was inspired by a woman’s admiration of his writings. Balzac, celibate for many years, was at last captured by a woman who returned to a hotel room for a volume of his works she had left there, informing him, without suspecting who he was, that she never travelled without it and could not live without it.

“The story of the marriage of Lamartine,” says the author of Salad for the Solitary, “is also one of romantic interest. The lady, whose maiden name was Birch, was possessed of considerable property, and when past the bloom of youth she became passionately enamoured of the poet from the perusal of his Meditations. For some time she nursed this sentiment in secret, and, being apprised of the embarrassed state of his affairs, she wrote him, tendering him the bulk of her fortune. Touched with this remarkable proof of her generosity, and supposing it could only be caused by a preference for himself, he at once made an offer of his hand and heart. He judged rightly, and the poet was promptly accepted.”

Sympathy, beauty, wit, elegant manners, amiability—these are woman’s arrows of Love, ever sure of their aim. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed,” says Othello, “and I loved her that she did pity them.” Or, as Professor Dowden comments on this passage, “the beautiful Italian girl is fascinated by the regal strength and grandeur, and tender protectiveness of the Moor. He is charmed by the sweetness, the sympathy, the gentle disposition the gracious womanliness of Desdemona.”

“The gracious womanliness of Desdemona.” There lies the secret—the charm of charms. It is fortunate that the political viragoes of to-day, who would remove woman from her domestic sphere, have opposed to them the greatest force in the universe—the power of man’s Love! When they have overcome that, they will find it easy to dam the current of the Niagara River, and curb the force of the ocean’s countless breakers.

PROPOSING

Countless as the stars, and only too apposite, are the jokes about lovers who evolve masterpieces of eloquence wherewith to lay their hearts at their idol’s feet; but who, when the crucial moment of the trial arrives, like Beckmesser in Wagner’s comic opera, stutter out the veriest parody of their song of Love. And no wonder, considering what is at stake; for the Yes or No decides whether the lover is to be—literally—the happiest or the unhappiest of all men for weeks or months to come.

Ovid cautions a man not to select a sweetheart in the twilight or lamplight, since “spots are invisible at night and every fault is overlooked; at that time almost every woman is held to be beautiful.”

But proposing is a different matter from selecting. When once the choice is made, and her choice alone remains to be decided, twilight is the only proper time to “pop the question.” For a maiden’s independence and Coyness are inversely related to the degree of light. In the morning, in broad daylight, she can boldly face even the terrible thought of being left an old maid; but in the twilight she feels the need of a man’s protection, and it is at that time that the imagination is least deaf to the whispered and self-suggested fancies of Romantic Love and wedded bliss. A man who proposes in the morning deserves, therefore, to be disappointed.

Nature herself has provided a safeguard against morning proposals. No woman is so beautiful in the daytime as is in the evening; and the moon’s romantic associations are largely due to its magic effect of beautifying the complexion and features of women, and thus urging the lover’s courage to the point of amorous confession.

There is still another reason why a tender and considerate lover should propose in the chiaroscuro of subdued light—to spare her blushes—

“But ’neath yon crimson tree, Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame, Nor mark, within its roseate canopy, Her blush of maiden shame.”—BRYANT.

Not many years ago a plan was described in the newspapers by which a number of Southern youths who had not the courage to propose were happily mated and wedded. An elderly person was selected, vowed to eternal secrecy, and to him each youth and maiden who was in love confided in writing the name of the beloved. Those couples that had chosen one another were informed of the fact, and went away rejoicing, arm in arm.

A fairy story, on the face of it. A woman would sooner cut off her hand than write with it the secret of her Love before she knew it was returned; and that man that hath a tongue is, I say, no man, if he is afraid to ask for a woman’s hand—or to take it unasked, and let it respond to the touching question. “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better,” says Shakspere. The only true proposals are those where spoken words are dispensed with; where the magnetic thrill of the hands, the eloquence of the tell-tale eyes, draw the lovers into mutual embrace, and lips become glued on lips in unpremeditated ecstasy.

DIAGNOSIS OR SIGNS OF LOVE

Though women may often feel in doubt concerning the intentions of men who pay them attentions, they cannot help recognizing deep Love in a man instantly; for the symptoms, as described in a previous chapter, are absolutely unmistakable. A woman, too, who loves deeply, can hardly help betraying herself, by the sly opportunities she finds for meeting her lover (purely accidental, of course), and by the special pains she takes to make it clear to her friends that she does not care for that man certainly; often also by the fact, pointed out by Jean Paul, that “Love increases man’s delicacy and lessens woman’s”; tempting her occasionally to throw away all prudence and regard for public opinion, in the wild intoxication of her passion and her confidence in her lover.

But in cases of doubt—how is a lover to decide whether it is safe and worth while to proceed? A woman’s Coyness, of course, means nothing, and may have been brought on by an assumption of excessive confidence and boldness on the man’s part. Girls are like wild colts. They may be safely approached to a certain distance, whence one step more will cause them to stampede; but stand still at that point, and before long they will cast away fear and meet you half-way.

Trifles are the only safe tests of Love. For they are not so apt as weighty words and actions to be the outcome of a deliberate coquettish desire to deceive. To ascertain if you are loved—and this holds true for both sexes—allude (with a careless assumption of indifference) to some trifling details of previous conversation or common experience. If she (or he) remembers them all, especially if of remote occurrence, the chances are you are loved.

Shakspere evidently had this in mind when he wrote—

“If thou rememberest not the slightest folly That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not loved.”

HOW TO CURE LOVE

All hope abandon ye who enter here. It is a terrible haunt of pessimism, for disappointed lovers only. All others will please pass it by, for the object of this book is to advocate the cause of Love, not to weaken it. Only when all hope of reciprocation is abandoned, should the tender plant ever be crushed underfoot.

An exception must be made in favour of those hopeful lovers who merely wish to cure themselves in order to improve their chances of winning, as explained in the last chapter, under the head of Feigned Indifference.

It is useless to quote to a rejected lover Rosalind’s philosophy: “Our poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause.... Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Useless to tell him, as Emerson does, that it is not a disgrace to love unrequitedly: “It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet.”

To all such efforts at consolation the poor wretch may retort with Shakspere: “Every one may master a grief but he who has it.” Yet he may, at any rate, endeavour to “patch his grief” with the following reflections, based on the experience of centuries.

ABSENCE

Two thousand years ago Ovid advised the readers of his Remedia Amoris who wished to cure themselves of an unwelcome attachment to flee the capital, to travel, hunt, or till the soil till all danger of a relapse should he averted. “Out of sight, out of mind,” wrote Thomas à Kempis; and this theme has been varied by a hundred writers in prose and verse. “Love is a local anguish,” exclaims Coleridge; “I am fifty miles away and am not half so miserable.” Carew puts it thus—

“Then fly betimes, for only they Conquer love, that run away.”

Even the unspeakable Turk has a proverb advising a lover to fly to the mountains. The Himalayas are probably meant, for no other chain would be high enough to allay the anguish of a polygamist rejected by a whole harem.

On the other hand, “I find that absence still increases love,” wrote Charles Hopkins in the seventeenth century; and Bayly gave this paradox the familiar form of “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—to which a modern realistic wag has added the coda “of the other man.” “La Rochefoucauld has well remarked,” says Hume, “that absence destroys weak passions, but increases strong ones; as the wind extinguishes a candle but blows up a fire.”

This simile is not very appropriate, nor is the statement unquestionable. It is more correct to say that short absence increases Love, while long absence cures it.

There are two ways in which a short absence favours Love:

Like the thirst of a man who would wean himself of strong liquor, the lovers ardour is at first increased when he is placed where he can no longer drink in the intoxicating sight of her beauty. Time is needed to annihilate the maddening memory of that pleasure.

Secondly, short absence favours the idealising process in the lover’s mind. Removed from the corrective influence of her actual presence, his imagination may abandon itself to the delightful task of painting a gloriously unreal counterfeit of her charms—which is oil in the flames.

This idealising process is facilitated by the strange difficulty which most people—and lovers in particular—experience in recalling the features of those specially dear to them.

Given sufficient time to fix the idealised image of the beloved in the memory, and a cure may be effected through the shock subsequently felt on comparing this image with the greatly inferior reality.

TRAVEL

It is safer, however, not to risk a return, but to avoid sight of her altogether for several years. The advantages of travel are twofold, not to mention the security from the danger of an accidental meeting. At home the surrounding world is too familiar to afford distraction, whereas in a strange place every object claims the attention and diverts the mind from its amorous reveries. More important still is the fact that in a foreign country the strangeness of national physiognomy invests all women with a heightened charm, so that it is easier to find an antidote by falling in love anew.

EMPLOYMENT

“Great spirits and great business do keep out the weak passion of love,” said Bacon; but long before him Ovid knew that Leisure is Cupid’s chief ally. “If you desire to end your love, employ yourself and you will conquer; for Amor flees business.” He advises military service, agriculture, and hunting as excellent diversions.

Poetry and music, however, as the same poet tells us, and all other occupations tending to stir up the tender feelings, are to be carefully avoided. Novel-reading is particularly bad, for to imagine another’s Love is to revive your own. “Lotte Hartmann played some melodies of Bellini on the piano this evening,” writes Lenau; “I ought to avoid music when I am away from you, for it arouses in me a longing and an anguish of consuming violence. I feel how my heart sadly shrinks within itself, and unwillingly continues to beat.”

MARRIED MISERY

Surely the thought that his romantic adoration will cease with marriage ought to cure a rejected wooer. Unquestionably, marriage is the best cure of Love. For though cynics are wrong in claiming that wedlock changes Love to indifference, it does change it to conjugal affection, which is an entirely different group of emotions. To the rejected lover, unfortunately, matrimony is not available as a cure of his Love. But he may give his overheated imagination an ice-bath by reflecting on the dark side of conjugal life, the promised bliss of which has been described as a mirage by so many great minds.

Professor Jowett thus discourses on how a modern Sokrates in a cynical mood might discourse on the seamy side of married life:—

“How the inferior of the two drags the other down to his or her level; how the cares of a family ‘breed meanness in their souls.’... They cannot undertake any noble enterprise, such as makes the names of men and women famous, from domestic considerations. Too late their eyes are opened; they were taken unawares, and desire to part company. Better, he would say, a ‘little love at the beginning,’ for heaven might have increased it; but now their foolish fondness has changed into mutual dislike.... How much nobler, in conclusion he will say, is friendship, which does not receive unmeaning praises from novelists and poets, is not exacting or exclusive, is not impaired by familiarity, is much less expensive, is not so likely to take offence, seldom changes, and may be dissolved from time to time without the assistance of the courts.”

Dr. Johnson, in a letter to Baretti, points out the difference between Love and Marriage:

“In love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events. There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit. But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and successive amusement.”

“Lose that tenderness of look!” Have you reflected that it is that exquisite tenderness of look which chiefly fascinated you, and have you not noticed that, as Johnson implies, married people rarely regard one another with that look which constantly intoxicated them during Courtship? For “beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense,” says Addison; or, as Hazlitt puts it, “though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.”

“With most marriages,” says Goethe, “it is not long till things assume a very piteous look.” Raleigh: “If thou marry beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which, perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year.” Seneca: “Beauty is such a fleeting blossom, how can wisdom rely upon its momentary delight?” Howells: “Marian Butler was at that period full of those airs of self-abnegation with which women adorn themselves in the last days of betrothal and the first of marriage, and never afterwards.” Alexander Walker: “It looks as if woman were in possession of most enjoyments, and as if man had only an illusion held out to him to make him labour for her.”

Montaigne: “As soon as women are ours we are no longer theirs.” “The land of marriage has this peculiarity that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished thence.” Boucicault: “I wish that Adam had died with all his ribs in his body.” De Finod: “Marriage is the sunset of love.” Goldsmith: “Many of the English marry in order to have one happy month in their lives.” Hood: “You can’t wive and thrive both in the same year.” Southey: “There are three things a wise man will not trust,—the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and a woman’s plighted faith.” Byron: “I remarked in my illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my chief mental faculties. I tried to rouse them, and yet could not—and this is the Soul!!! I should believe that it was married to the body if they did not sympathise so much with each other.” Colley Cibber: “Oh, how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!” Alphonse Karr: “Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him.”

Lady Montagu: “It goes far toward reconciling me to being a woman, when I reflect that I am thus in no immediate danger of ever marrying one.” Schopenhauer: “It is well known that happy marriages are rare.” “The lover, contrary to expectation, finds himself no happier than before.” Byron—

“Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife He would have written sonnets all his life?”

Burton: “Paul commended marriage, yet he preferred a single life.” Buxton: “Juliet was a fool to kill herself, for in three months she’d have married again, and been glad to be quit of Romeo.” Heine: “The music at a marriage procession always reminds me of the music which leads soldiers to battle.” Lessing—

“Ein einzig böses Weib gibt’s höchstens in der Welt, Nur schade dass ein jeder es für das seine hält.”

“Of shrewish women in the world there’s surely only one, A pity, though, that every man says she’s the wife he won.”

Selden: “Marriage is a desperate thing. The frogs in Æsop were extremely wise; they had a great mind to some water, but they would not leap into the well, because they could not get out again.”

When the Pope heard of Father Hyacinthe’s marriage, says Cheales, he exclaimed: “The saints be praised! the renegade has taken his punishment into his own hands. Truly the ways of Providence are inscrutable!”

FEMININE INFERIORITY

Why are women so mysterious, so inscrutable? Cynics say because you cannot calculate what they will do, as they have no fixed compass by which they steer, i.e. no character. But Heine takes up their defence. Far from having no character, he says, they have a new one every day.

The world’s opinion of women is best revealed in the crystallised wisdom, based on experience, called proverbs. It will soothe the wounded lover’s heart to note the unanimity with which woman’s foibles are dwelt on in the proverbs of all nations from ancient Greece to modern China and France. To give only three instances of a thousand that may be found in any collection of proverbs: “Women,” says a French proverb, “have quicksilver in the brain, wax in the heart.” The old Greek poet Xenarchus sang, “Happy the cicadas live, since they all have voiceless wives.” “There is no such poison in the green snake’s mouth or in the hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart,” says a Chinese maxim.

But it is not necessary to rely on such anonymous collections of wisdom as proverbs to convince a man of the folly of linking himself for life with such a miserable inferior being as a woman. From Plato to Darwin there is a consensus of opinion as to woman’s vast inferiority to man.

According to Plato, says Mr. Grote, “men are superior to women in everything; in one occupation as well as in another.” Cookery and weaving having been named as two apparent exceptions, Plato denies woman’s superiority even in these.

“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes,” says Darwin, “is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”

“I found, as a rule,” says Mr. Galton, "that men have more delicate powers of discrimination than women, and the business of life seems to confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so, I understand, are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is of the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised on the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.

“Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table, and though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men think them, on the whole, to be far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”

This disposes of the old myth that women are more sensitive than men. And De Quincy, in his essay on False Distinctions, refutes the equally absurd notion that “women have more imagination than men.” He comes to the conclusion that, “as to poetry in its highest form, I never yet knew a woman, nor yet will believe that any has existed, who could rise to an entire sympathy with what is most excellent in that art.”

One proof of this statement lies in the fact that as a rule men of genius have been refused by the women they loved most deeply.

Regarding the emotional sphere, we have seen that it is only in parental and conjugal feeling that woman surpasses man. In Romantic Love, in all the impersonal feelings for art and nature, she is vastly his inferior. Her superficial education gives her no intellectual interests, and that is the reason why so many married men prefer the club and friendship to home and conjugal devotion—even as did the ancient Greeks.

It is in the seventh book of the Laws, p. 806, that Plato remarks: “The legislator ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he might have made the whole state happy.”

Is it not humiliating to man, who loves to call himself a “reasoning animal,” to find that, after so many centuries, one of our greatest and most liberal thinkers, Professor Huxley, is obliged to write in this same Platonic tone that “the present system of female education stands self-condemned, as inherently absurd,” because it fosters and exaggerates instead of removing woman’s natural disadvantages? “With few insignificant exceptions,” Professor Huxley continues, “girls have been educated either to be drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint nor in the fair sinner; that women are meant neither to be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar to their equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls” (Lay Sermons, p. 25).

Woman, in short, is a failure; and let any disappointed lover ask himself, Is it businesslike to begin life with a failure?

FOCUSSING HER FAULTS

Love being a magic emotional microscope which ignites passion by magnifying the most beautiful features of the beloved, leaving everything else indistinct and blurred, it follows that the simplest way of arresting this flame is to change the focus of this microscope, to fix the attention deliberately on her faults, while throwing her merits and charms into an unfavourable light.

This method is too self-evident and effective not to have occurred to the ingenious Ovid. He advises the lover who wishes to be cured to study the girl’s charms in a hypercritical spirit. Call her stout if she is plump, black if she is dark, lean if slender. Ask her to sing if she has no talent for music, to talk if unskilled in conversation, to dance if awkward, and if her teeth are bad, tell her funny stories to make her laugh.

Her mental faults require no microscope to reveal them. Certainly her taste is execrable, for does she not prefer that vulgar fellow Jones to you, one of the cleverest fellows that ever condescended to be born on this miserable planet?

What folly, indeed, to love such a girl! What fascinates you is simply the mysterious brilliancy of her coal-black eyes—of which you may find ten thousand duplicates in Italy or Spain. Don’t you see that no flashes of wit are ever mirrored in those eyes? that, though beautiful, they are soulless, like a black pansy? that they look at one person as at another, incapable of expressing shades and modulations of tender emotion, because the soul of which they are the windows has never been, and never will be, moved by Love?

She never thinks of anything but her own pleasure; does nothing but visit the dressmaker and the theatre and read novels; never thinks it her duty to provide for her future husband’s comfort and happiness by educating herself in domestic economy and æsthetic accomplishments of real depth—as you have toiled and studied in anticipation of providing for her comfort and happiness. She takes no sympathetic interest in your affairs—how can you expect to be happy with her? If she loves you not, you would be more than a fool to try to get her consent to marriage, for is it not the ecstasy of Love to be loved and worshipped alone and beyond any other mortal?

The beauty of her eyes will not last,—it is nothing, anyway, but sunlight mechanically reflected from a darkly-painted iris—and when its youthful brilliancy vanishes there will be no soul-sparks to take its place. And for this brief honeymoon mirage you are willing to give up your bachelor comforts and pleasures, your freedom to do what you please, go where you please, and travel whenever you please; to exchange your refreshing sleep o’ nights for domestic cares and the pleasure of trotting up and down the room with a bawling baby at two o’clock in the morning? Bah! Are you in your senses?

True, if you are rich some of these disadvantages may be avoided. But if you are rich you will not be refused, for—

“Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair,”

as Byron remarks; and again: “For my own part, I am of the opinion of Pausanias, that success in love depends upon Fortune.”

But of all her shortcomings the most galling and fatal is that she loves you not. This thought alone, says Stendhal, may succeed in curing a man of his passion. You will notice, he says, that she whom you love favours others with little attentions which she withholds from you. They may be mere trifles, such as not giving you a chance to help her into her carriage, her box at the opera. The thought of this, by “associating a sense of humiliation with every thought of her, poisons the source of love and may destroy it.”

Thus wounded Pride is the easiest way out of Love, as gratified Pride is the straightest way in.

REASON VERSUS PASSION

According to Shakspere, though Love does not admit Reason as his counsellor, he does use him as his physician. The most effective way of using Reason to cure Love is by way of comparison. By dwelling on the miseries of married life as just detailed, the disappointed lover may mitigate his pains somewhat, as did that Italian mentioned by Schopenhauer, who resisted the agony of torture by constantly keeping in his mind’s eye the picture of the gallows that would have been the reward of confession.

Again, he may compare his present Love with a former infatuation that seemed at the time equally deep and eternal, though now he wonders how he could have ever loved that girl. History repeats itself.

Compare, moreover, your present idol with her stout and faded mother. In a few years she will perhaps resemble her mother more than her present self.

Compare her charms, feature by feature, with some recognised paragon of beauty. Look at her in the glaring light of the sun, which reveals every spot on the complexion.

LOVE VERSUS LOVE

Longfellow says it is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers from a disappointed passion; and Mr. Hamerton believes that “a wrinkled old maid may still preserve in the depths of her own heart, quite unsuspected by the young and lively people about her, the unextinguished embers of a passion that first made her wretched fifty years before.”

Occasionally this may be true, in the sense in which psychology teaches that no impression made on the mind is ever completely effaced, but may, though forgotten for years, be revived in moments of great excitement, or in the delirium of fever; as, for example, in the case mentioned by Duval, of a Pole in Germany, who had not used his native language for thirty years, but who, under the influence of anæsthetics, “spoke, prayed, and sang, using only the Polish language.” The persistence of an old passion is the more probable from the fact that in mental disease and age, as Ribot points out, the emotional faculties are effaced much more slowly than the intellectual. Feelings form the self; amnesia of feeling is the destruction of self.

Ordinarily, however, and for the time being, it may be possible to practically obliterate a passion. “All love may be expelled by love, as poisons are by other poisons,” says Dryden. And if the allopathic remedies described in the preceding paragraphs should fail to effect a cure, the lover may find the homœopathic principle of similia similibus more successful.

Heine, in his posthumous Memoirs, thus refers to this principle of curing like with like:—

“In love, as in the Roman Catholic religion, there is a provisional purgatory in which mortals are allowed to get used gradually to being roasted before they get into the real eternal hell.... In all honesty, what a terrible thing is love for a woman. Inoculation is herein of no use.... Very wise and experienced physicians counsel a change of locality in the opinion that removal from the presence of the enchantress will also break the charm. Perhaps the homœopathic principle, by which woman cures us of woman, is the best of all.... It was ordained that I should be visited more severely than other mortals by this malady, the heart-pox.... The most effective antidote to women are women; true, this implies an attempt to expel Satan with Beelzebub; and in such a case the medicine is often more noxious still than the malady. But it is at any rate a change, and in a disconsolate love-affair a change of the inamorata is unquestionably the best policy.”

PROGNOSIS OR CHANCES OF RECOVERY

After carefully following all the foregoing rules regarding absence, travel, employment, dwelling on the miseries of marriage, the weaknesses of women in general and one woman in particular, the disappointed lover may boldly return and face her again. The chances are ten to one he will find himself—more in love than ever!

Women are magicians. No wonder they were burned as witches in the Middle Ages.

NATIONALITY AND LOVE

Romantic love—commonly considered immutable—not only displays countless individual variations in regard to duration and degrees of intensity, but has a sort of “local colour” in each country; or, to keep up our old metaphor, a varying clangtint, depending on the greater or less prominence of certain “overtones.”

To describe all these varieties of Love would require a separate volume. And since all the most interesting forms of the romantic passion are to be met with in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and America, it will suffice to briefly characterise Love in those countries.

FRENCH LOVE

As literary luck would have it, the subject of French Love follows naturally upon the subject of the last chapter, the Remedia Amoris.

The French are too clever a nation to leave to individual effort the difficult task of curing the mind of such an obstinate thing as Love. All the papas and mammas in the land have put their heads together and devised two methods of killing Love wholesale, compared with which all the remedies named in the last chapter are mere fly-bites.

These two methods are Chaperonage and Parental Choice, as opposed to Courtship and Individual Sexual Selection.

Paradoxical as it may seem, there is in the midst of modern Europe a nation which, in the treatment of women, Love, and marriage, stands on the same low level of evolution as the ancient, mediæval, and Oriental nations.

This is not a theory, but a fact patent to all, and attested by the best English, German, and French authors.

One of the deepest of French thinkers, whose eyes were opened by travel and comparison, De Stendhal, in 1842, says in his book De l’Amour: “Pour comprendre cette passion, que depuis trente ans la peur du ridicule cache avec tant de soin parmi nous, il faut en parler comme d’une maladie”—"To understand this passion, which during the last thirty years has been concealed among us with so much solicitude, from fear of ridicule, it is necessary to speak of it as a malady."

But Stendhal greatly understates the case. It was not only within thirty years from the time when he wrote, and by means of ridicule, that the French had tried hard to kill Love. They have never really emancipated themselves from mediæval barbarism. Pure Romantic Love between two young unmarried persons has never yet flourished in France—because it has never been allowed to grow. To-day, as in the days of the Troubadours, the only form of Love celebrated in French plays and romances is the form which implies conjugal infidelity.

“Marriage, as treated in the old French epics,” says Ploss, “is rarely based on love;” the woman marries for protection, the man for her wealth or social affiliations. In the eighteenth century girls were compelled from their earliest years to live only for appearance sake: “The most harmless natural enjoyment, every childish ebullition, is interdicted as improper. Her mother denies her the expression of tender emotion as too bourgeois, too common. The little one grows up in a dreary, heartless vacuum; her deeper feelings remain undeveloped.... Real love would be too ordinary a motive of marriage, and therefore extremely ridiculous. It is not offered her, accordingly, nor does she feel any.”

Heine wrote from Paris in 1837 that “girls never fall in love in this country.” "With us in Germany, as also in England and other nations of Germanic origin, young girls are allowed the utmost possible liberty, whereas married women become subjected to the strict and anxious supervision of their husbands.

"Here in France, as already stated, the reverse is the case: young girls remain in the seclusion of a convent until they either marry or are introduced to the world under the strict eye of a relative. In the world, i.e. in the French salon, they always remain silent and little noticed, for it is neither good form here nor wise to make love to an unmarried girl.

“There lies the difference. We Germans, as well as our Germanic neighbours, bestow our love always on unmarried girls, and these only are celebrated by our poets; among the French, on the other hand, married women only are the object of love, in life as well as in literature.”

The difficulty of becoming acquainted with a young lady, Mr. Hamerton tells us, is greatest “in what may be called the ‘respectable’ classes in country-towns and their vicinities. In Parisian society young ladies go out into le monde, and may be seen and even spoken to at evening-parties.”

“And even spoken to” is good, is very good. What a privilege for the young men! The iron bars which formerly separated them from the young ladies have actually been removed, and they are allowed to speak to them—in presence of a heart-chilling, conversation-killing dragon. No wonder Parisian society is so corrupt!

Mr. Hamerton has given in Round My House the most realistic and fascinating account of French courtship and marriage-customs ever written. He is a great admirer of the French, always ready to excuse their foibles, and his testimony is, therefore, doubly valuable as that of an absolutely impartial witness. He had an opportunity for many years of studying French provincial life with an artist’s trained faculties; and here are a few sentences culled from his descriptions:—

“It is not merely difficult, in our neighbourhood, for a young man in the respectable classes to get acquainted with a young lady, but every conceivable arrangement is devised to make it absolutely impossible. Balls and evening-parties are hardly ever given, and when they are given great care is taken to keep young men out of them, and young marriageable girls either dance with each other or with mere children.”

Whereas in England “a young girl may go where she likes, without much risk to her good name,” a French girl “may not cross a street alone, nor open a book which has not been examined, nor have an opinion about anything.” “The French ideal of a well-brought-up young lady is that she should not know anything whatever about love and marriage, that she should be both innocent and ignorant, and both in the supreme degree—both to a degree which no English person can imagine.”

“The young men are not to blame; they would be ready enough, perhaps, to fall in love if they had the chance, like any Englishman or German, but the respectable parents of the young lady take care that they shall not have the chance of falling in love.”

The only opportunity a young man has of seeing a girl is at a distance, at church or in a religious procession. Here he may see her face; her character he can only ascertain through gossip, a lady friend, or the parish priest. It is much more respectable, however, to show no such curiosity, for its absence implies the absence of such a ridiculous thing as Love. “There is nothing which good society in France disapproves of so much as the passion of Love, or anything resembling it.” “When Cœlebs asks for the hand of a girl he has seen for a minute, he may just possibly be in love with her, which is a degrading supposition; but if he has never seen her, you cannot even suspect him of a sentiment so unbecoming.”

There is but one way for the young man to gain admission to a house where there is a marriageable young lady: “He must first, through a third party, ask to marry the young lady, and, if her parents consent, he will then be admitted to see her and speak to her, but not otherwise. The respectable order of affairs is that the offer and acceptance should precede and not follow courtship.”

Would it be possible to conceive a more diabolically ingenious social machinery for massacring Romantic Love en gros?

“Marriages in France are generally arranged by the exercise of reason and prudence, rather than by either passion or affection.” Mr. Hamerton gives an amusing account of how he was asked to be matrimonial ambassador by a young man who had never seen the girl he wanted to marry. Mr. Hamerton obliged the young man, but was told by the mother that if the young man would wait two years he might have a fair chance, provided a richer or nobler suitor did not turn up in the meantime.

Money and Rank versus Love. French mammas have at least one virtue. They are not hypocrites.

The Countess von Bothmer, who lived in France a quarter of a century, says in her French Home Life: “Where we so ordinarily listen to what we understand by love—to the temptations of the young heart in all their forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and our own opinions—the French consult fitness of relative situation, reciprocities of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse.”

To annihilate the last resource of Love—elopement—the Code Napoléon forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and mother, or proof that they are both dead. “It is very troublesome to get married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and formalities which would make an Englishman stamp with rage.”

Social life, of course, suffers as much from this idiotic system as Romantic Love. French hospitality “does not extend beyond the family circle,” we are informed by M. Max O’Rell, who also gives this amusing instance of the imbecility or mental slavery (he does not use these words) produced by the French system of education and chaperonage:—

“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs Elysées with two English ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother. The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over the affair to this day.”

Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of ‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into mature life.”

The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit, which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own, and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in part for the mediæval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English, American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary definition of Provincialism.

The consequences of this mediævalism and provincialism in modern France are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the Westminster Review (1877):—

“Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are launched into life without a single intellectual interest. The whole effort of their early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress, in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the country far and wide.”

No wonder Napoléon remarked that “Love does more harm than good.” And right he was, most emphatically, for the only kind of Love possible in France does infinite harm. It poisons life and literature alike.

We can now understand the fierceness of Dumas’s attacks on mariages de convenance: “The manifest deterioration of the race touches him; it does not touch us. Nor do we at all realise the next to impossibility of a man ever marrying for love in France. There are those who have tried to do it, but they can never get on in life; they are reputed of ‘bad example’” (St. James’s Gazette).

And now we come upon a paradox which has puzzled a great many thinkers. The Countess von Bothmer, while deploring the absence of Love in French courtship, endeavours to show that domestic happiness and conjugal affection are, nevertheless, not rare in France. French husbands “are ordinarily with their wives, accompany them wherever they can, and share their friendships and distractions.” Mr. Hamerton likewise bears witness that French girls “become excellent wives, faithful, orderly, dutiful, contented, and economical. They all either love their husbands, or conduct themselves as if they did so.” He says the notion fostered by novels “that Frenchmen are always occupied in making love to their neighbours’ wives” is nonsense; that there is no more adultery than elsewhere. “There exists in foreign countries, and especially in England, a belief that Frenchwomen are very generally adulteresses. The origin of the belief is this,— the manner in which marriages are generally managed in France leaves no room for interesting love-stories. Novelists and dramatists must find love-stories somewhere, and so they have to seek for them in illicit intrigues.”

This is all very ingenious, but the argument is not conclusive. Even granted for a moment that Mr. Hamerton is right in his defence of French conjugal life, is it not a more than sufficient condemnation of the French system of “courtship” that one-half of the nation are prevented from reading its literature because it is so foul and filthy—because Love has been made synonymous with adultery?

But Mr. Hamerton’s assertion loses its probability when viewed in the light of the following considerations. He himself admits that the French are anxious to read about Love, that the novelists and dramatists must find stories of Love somewhere—mind you, not of conjugal but of Romantic Love—and the Paris Figaro not long ago denounced the French novelists of the period for devoting their stories to Love almost exclusively, whereas Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, and Scott, at least introduced various other matters of interest. Now French novels have the largest editions of any books published; and if so vast an interest is displayed by the French in reading about Love, is it likely that their interest is purely literary? Certainly not. They will seek it in real life. And in real life it can only be found in one sphere, which elsewhere is protected against such invasions, by the young being allowed to meet one another. “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.’” In this respect human nature is the same the world over. The testimony of scores of unprejudiced authors on this head cannot be ignored.

This, however, is only one of the evils following from the French suppression of pre-matrimonial Love. The parents may or may not suffer through conjugal jealousy and infidelity, one thing is certain,—that the children suffer from it, in body and mind. It is leading to the depopulation of France. It was M. Jules Rochard who called attention to the fact that “France, which two centuries ago included one-third of the total population of Europe, now contains but one-tenth”; although the death-rate is smaller in France than in most European countries, and although there has been a gradual increase of wealth throughout the country.

That the suppression of Romantic Love and of all opportunities for courtship is the principal cause of the decline of France, is apparent from the fact that the countries in which population increases most rapidly—as America and Great Britain—are those in which Romantic Love is the chief motive to marriage.

Romantic Love goes by complementary qualities, the defects of the parents neutralising one another in the offspring; so that the children who are the issue of a love-match are commonly more beautiful than their parents. In France there is no selection whatever, except with reference to money and rank. Not even Health is considered, the sine qua non of Love as well as Beauty. Hence the absence of Love in France has led to the almost absolute absence of beauty. And it would be nothing short of a miracle if the offspring of a young maiden, still in her teens, and an old broken-down sinner, chosen by her parents for his wealth or social position, were any different from the puny, hairy men and coarse-featured, vulgar women that make up the bulk of the French nation.

In Paris one does occasionally see a fine figure and a rather pretty face, but they almost always belong to the lower classes. As the lower classes allow the young considerable freedom, it would seem as if beauty in this class ought to be as common an article as in England or the United States. But the incapacity of the young women for feeling and reciprocating Love neutralises these opportunities. For of what use is it for a man to feel Love if the woman invariably bases her choice on money? This matter is most clearly brought out by Mr. Hamerton:—

“Amongst the lower classes, the peasantry and workmen ... girls have as much freedom as they have in England. The great institution of the parlement gives them ample opportunities for becoming acquainted with their lovers; indeed the acquaintance, in many cases, goes further than is altogether desirable. A peasant girl requires no parental help in looking after her own interests. She admits a lover to the happy state of parlement, which means that he has a right to talk with her when they meet, and to call upon her, dance with her, etc. The lover is always eager to fix the wedding-day, the girl is not so eager. She keeps him on indefinitely until a richer one appears, on which No. 1 has the mortification of seeing himself excluded from parlement, whilst another takes his place. In this way a clever girl will go on for several years, amusing herself by torturing amorous swains, until at length a sufficiently big fish nibbles at the bait, when she hooks him at once, and takes good care that he shall not escape. Nothing can be more pathetically ludicrous than the condition of a young peasant who is really in love, especially if he is able to write, for then he pours forth his feelings in innumerable letters full of tenderness and complaint. On her part the girl does not answer the letters, and has not the slightest pity for the unhappy victim of her charms. After seeing a good deal of such love-affairs I have come to the conclusion that in humble life young men do really very often feel

“‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of love.’”

And they ‘wear the chain’ too. Young women, on the other hand, seem only to amuse themselves with all this simple-hearted devotion—

“‘And mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.’”

Schopenhauer pointed out that the French lack the Gefühl für das Innige—the tenderness and emotional depth which characterise the Germans and Italians. It is this that accounts for the inability of the French to appreciate Love, and for the fact that even vice is coarser in France than elsewhere, as remarked by Mr. Lecky, who, in his History of European Morals, contrasts “the coarse, cynical, ostentatious sensuality, which forms the most repulsive feature of the French character,” with “the dreamy, languid, and æsthetical sensuality of the Spaniard or Italian.” And it remained for the French to attempt to deify vice as in that over-rated and repulsive story of Manon Lescaut.

Mme. de Staël, who suffered so much from the provincialism (alias patriotism) of her countrymen, saw clearly the immorality of the French system of marrying girls without consulting their choice. Brandes relates the following anecdote of her: “One day, speaking of the unnaturalness of marriages arranged by the parents, as distinguished from those in which the young girls choose for themselves, she exclaimed, ‘I would compel my daughter to marry the man of her choice!’”

An attempt is being made at present in Paris to introduce the Anglo-American feminine spirit into society. The word flirter has been adopted, and the thing itself experimented with. But the French girl does not know how to draw the line between coquetry and flirtation. She needs a better education before she can flirt properly. This education the Government is trying to give her at present; but it meets with stubborn resistance from the priests, and from the old notion that intellectual culture is fatal to feminine charms and the capacity for affection. If this book should accomplish nothing else than prove that without intellect there can be no deep Love, it will not have been written in vain.

ITALIAN LOVE

In Italy, in the sixteenth century, women were kept in as strict seclusion as to-day in France; and with the same results,—conjugal infidelity and a great lack of Personal Beauty, as noted by Montaigne, who remarks at the same time that it was regarded as something quite extraordinary if a young lady was seen in public.

Byron wrote in 1817 that “Jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice”; and that the Italians “marry for their parents, and love for themselves.”

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s Life and Times of Titian we read that “Though chroniclers have left us to guess what the state of society may have been in Venice at the close of the fifteenth century, they give us reason to believe that it was deeply influenced by Oriental habit. The separation of men from women in churches, the long seclusion of unmarried females in convents or in the privacy of palaces, were but the precursors to marriages in which husbands were first allowed to see their wives as they came in state to dance round the wedding supper-table.”

But even at this early period when women were still treated as babies unable to take care of themselves, we find at least one trace of the Gallantry which is so essential an element in modern love. It was customary for the men, on festive occasions, to stand behind their wives’ chairs at table and serve them.

Extremely ungallant, on the other hand, are some of the Italian proverbs about women of this and other periods. “A woman is like a horse-chestnut—beautiful outside, worthless inside.” “Two women and a goose make a market.” “Married man—bird in cage.” “In buying a horse and taking a wife shut your eyes and commend your soul to heaven.”

Her exuberant health makes an Italian woman naturally prone to Love; but though she falls in love most readily, the passion is apt to be fugitive and superficial. She rarely loves with the passionate ardour of a Spanish woman. “What we notice especially in Italian women,” says Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, “is the absence of that alternation between those extremes of temperament which are so conspicuous in other Southern women. Energy is almost as unknown to her as the moral power of resignation and sacrifice. Hence it can hardly surprise us that Italian history records so few heroic women or pious female martyrs. Italy has produced neither a Jeanne d’Arc nor an Elizabeth of Thuringia; the crowns were too oppressive to be borne by these beauties, and life too enchanting for them to invite to tragic self-sacrifice.”

Probably the most realistic, and certainly the most fascinating, account of Italian love-making ever given is to be found in Mr. Howells’s Venetian Life. As it is too long to quote, I will attempt to condense it, though at some sacrifice of that literary “bouquet,” as an epicure would say, which constitutes the unique charm of Mr. Howells’s style:—

"The Venetians have had a practical and strictly businesslike way of arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has always been made for the dower and for the good of the state; private and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affection have been left to the chances of association.

"Herodotus relates that the Assyrian Veneti sold their daughters at auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably placed in life, the hard-favoured were given to whomsoever would take them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation. The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.

“These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her.”

“With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the poorest, who cannot or will not seclude the youth of either sex from each other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the Capa y espada comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen interviews.”

The “operatic method of courtship” thence resulting commonly assumes this form:—

“They follow that beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically conscious of pursuit. They follow during the whole evening, and, at a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs the number of the house upon the sensitised tablets of his soul. This is the first step in love: he has seen his adored one, and she knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardour.”

The next step consists in his frequenting the caffé, where she goes with her parents, and feasting his eyes on her beauty. After some time he may possibly get a chance to speak a few words to her under her balcony; or, what is more likely, he will bribe her servant-maid to bring her a love-letter. Or else he goes to church to admire her at a convenient distance.

“It must be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and that to see him everywhere at her heels—to behold him leaning against the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation—to be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or turning round at the caffé encounter his pleading gaze—that all this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and finger-nails. Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza? This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this blind pursuit must go on till the Biondina’s inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained.” Then follow the inquiries as to her dowry, after which nothing remains but “to demand her in marriage of her father, and after that to make her acquaintance.”

Topsy-turvy as this last arrangement may seem to Anglo-American notions, here at least Love has some chance to bring about real Sexual Selection, for a Southerner’s passions are momentarily inflamed, and the Italian Cupid needs but a moment to fix his choice. And what distinguishes Italy still more favourably from France is that, whereas the French consider Love ridiculous, and have made the most ingenious contrivances for annihilating it, the Italians worship it, revel in it, and are inclined rather to make too many concessions to it than to ignore it.

The result is patent to all eyes. For every attractive Frenchwoman there are to-day a hundred beautiful Italians. And were Anglo-American methods of courtship introduced in Italy, beauty would again be doubled in amount. It must not be forgotten, however, that Love, as a beautifier of mankind, has in Italy very strong allies in the balmy air and sunshine, tempting to constant outdoor life, which mellows the complexion, brightens the eyes, and fills out the figure to those full yet elegant proportions which instantaneously arouse the romantic passion.

SPANISH LOVE

Spanish veins contain more Oriental blood than those of any other European nation; and to the present day Eastern methods of treating women cast their shadow on Spanish life. But the shadow is so light, and so much mitigated by the rosy hue of romance, that the “local colour” of Love in Spain presents an unusually fascinating spectacle, which countless literary artists have attempted to depict.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Oriental shadow was much darker, and kept the women in extreme subjection and ignorance. “Their life,” says Professor Scherr, speaking even of the queens, “passed away in a luxurious tedium which dulled the sentiments to the point of idiocy. They were only crowned slaves. As an instance of their absolute deprivation of liberty may be cited the case of Elizabeth, wife of Philip II., who, when in 1565 she went to Bayonne to meet her mother, had to wait three days before the gates of Burgos before it was possible to ascertain the king’s decision whether the queen should pass through the city or around it.”

“Women of rank,” he continues, "lived in a seclusion bordering on that of a convent, if not surpassing it. For nuns were at least allowed to speak to male visitors behind bars, whereas married women were strictly forbidden to receive the visit of a man, except with the special permission of the husband. And only during the first year of their wedded life were they allowed to frequent public drives in open carriages by the side of their husband; subsequently they were only allowed to go out in closed carriages. Of cosy family life not a trace.... Even the table did not unite the husband and wife; the master took his meal alone, while his wife and children sat respectfully on the floor on carpets, with their legs crossed in Oriental fashion.

“The poor women, excluded from every refined social diversion, were confined to manual work, gossip with their duennas, mechanical praying, playing with their rosaries, and—intriguing. For the greater the subjection of women, the more does their cunning grow, the more passionate becomes their desire to avenge themselves on their tyrants. The Spaniards found this out to their cost. The most inexorable spirit of revenge, all the parade of ‘Spanish honour,’ bordering in its excess on clownishness, could not prevent the Spanish dames from loving and being loved.”

In course of time this Oriental despotism, with its fatal consequences to conjugal fidelity—as in France—has been greatly mitigated in Spain. In Pepys’s Diary, 1667, we read of an informant who told the writer “of their wooing [in Spain] by serenades at the window, and that their friends do always make the match; but yet they have opportunities to meet at masse at church, and there they make love.”

In an interesting book on Spain, written almost two and a quarter centuries after Pepys’s Diary—Mr. Lathrop’s Spanish Vistas—we still read concerning this ecclesiastic Love-making, in the Seville Cathedral: “Every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly-draped lace veils—losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging from confession into the daylight glare again—are careful to drop some slight conscience-money into the palms that wait. Occasionally, by pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that passes him a silver piece, a tightly-folded note from some clandestine lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of this kind.”

How greatly the facilities for falling in love and for making love have been increased in modern Spain is vividly brought out in the following citation from Schweiger-Lerchenfeld regarding the scenes to be witnessed every evening on the crowded promenade or Rambla at Barcelona:—

“Are these elegantly-attired ramblers one and all suitors, since they put no limit nor restraint on their whispered flatteries? No, that is simply the custom in Barcelona. The women and girls are beautiful, and though they are well aware of it, they nevertheless allow their charms to be whispered in their ears hundreds of times every evening—a freedom of intercourse which is only possible on Spanish soil.... And thus one of these adored beauties walks up and down in the glare of the lamps, and sweet music is wafted to her ears: ‘Your beauty dazzles me,’ whispers one voice; and another, ‘Happiness and anguish your eyes are burning into my soul.’ One compliments the chosen one on her hair, another on her figure, a third on her graceful gait. Young adorers feel a thrill running down their whole body if her mantilla only touches them; while mature lovers are contented with nothing less than a pressure of the hand. It is a picture that is possible, conceivable only in Spain.”

The same writer quotes some specimens of Spanish Love-songs, one of which may be transferred to this page—

“Échame, niña bonita, Lágrimas en tu pañuelo, Y los llevaré a Madrid Que los engarce un platero.”

“Show me, my little charmer, the tear in your handkerchief; to Madrid will I take it and have it set by a jeweller.”

What a contrast between this modern complimentary and poetic form of Gallantry and the form prevalent in the good old times when lovers endeavoured to win a maiden’s favour by flagellating themselves under her window until the blood ran down their backs; and when, as Scherr adds, “it was regarded as the surest sign of supreme gallantry if some of the blood bespattered the clothes of the beauty to whom this crazy act of devotion was addressed!”

Nevertheless, the Spanish still have much to learn from England and America regarding the proper methods of Courtship; for, according to a writer in Macmillan’s Magazine (1874), the unmarried maiden of the higher classes, “like her humbler sister, can never have the privilege of seeing her lover in private, and very rarely, indeed, if ever, is he admitted into the sala where she is sitting. He may contrive to get a few minutes’ chat with her through the barred windows of her sala; but when a Spaniard leads his wife from the altar, he knows no more of her character, attainments, and disposition than does the parish priest who married them, and perhaps not so much.”

In one respect Spanish lovers have a great advantage over their unfortunate colleagues in France. There marriage is impossible without parental consent, whereas in Spain a law exists concerning which the writer just quoted says:—

“Should a Spanish lad and lassie become attached to one another, and the parents absolutely forbid the match, and refuse their daughter liberty and permission to marry, the lover has his remedy at law. He has but to make a statement of the facts on paper, and deposit it, signed and attested, with the alcalde or mayor of the township in which the lady’s parents dwell. The alcalde then makes an order, giving the young man the right of free entry into the house in question, within a certain number of days, for the purpose of wooing and carrying off his idol. The parents dare not interfere with the office of the alcalde, and the lady is taken to her lover’s arms. From that moment he, and he alone, is bound to provide for her: by his own act and deed she has become his property.” Should he prove false “the law comes upon him with all its force, and he is bound to maintain her, in every way, as a wife, under pain of punishment.”

Thus a Spanish girl is protected against perfidious lovers as well as is an English and American girl through the possibility of suing for breach of promise. If the short stories told in Don Quixote may be taken as examples, faithless lovers were very common in Spain at that time; which, doubtless, accounts for the origin of this law. The girls on their part erred by yielding too easily to the promises of the men; though they are partially excused by the great strength of their passions.

In his work on Suicide, Professor Morselli has statistics showing that more women take their life in Spain than in any other country; and he attributes this to the force of their passions, which is greater than in Italy, where the number of female suicides is considerably lower.

Thus Love has a more favourable ground in Spain than either in Italy or in France, notwithstanding certain restrictions. And the result shows itself in this, that all tourists unite in singing the praises of Spanish Beauty. Spain, indeed, unites in itself all the conditions favourable to Beauty: a climate tempting to outdoor life; a considerable amount of intellectual culture and æsthetic refinement; a mixture of nationalities, fusing ethnic peculiarities into a harmonious whole; and Love, which fuses individual complementary qualities into a harmonious ensemble of beautiful features, graceful figure, amiable disposition, and refined manners.

GERMAN LOVE

When Tacitus penned his famous certificate of good moral character for the Germans of his time, he little suspected how many thousand times it would be quoted by the grateful and proud descendants of those early Teutons, and pinned to the lapels of their coats as a sort of prize medal in the competition for ancestral virtue. The more candid historians, however, admit that the Roman historian somewhat overdrew his picture in order to teach his own profligate countrymen a sort of Sunday school lesson, by the vivid contrast presented by these inhabitants of the northern virgin forests.

There is no question that women were held in considerable honour among these early Germans. Many of them served as priestesses, and adultery was punished with death. Polygamy existed only among the chiefs, and even among them it was not common. Yet the men did not treat the women as their equals. “They had more duties than privileges,” says Schweiger-Lerchenfeld. Their husbands were addicted to excessive drinking or gambling when not engaged in war or the chase, leaving the hard domestic and field labour to the women: and all this cannot have tended to refine the women.

“Marriage in the old Germanic times,” says Ploss, “was mostly an affair of expediency.... In the choice of a wife beauty was of less moment than property and good social antecedents. Love before the betrothal rarely occurs.”

Gustav Freytag, in his Pictures of German Life, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, remarks: “Marriage was considered by our ancestors less as a union of two lovers than as an institution replete with duties and rights, not only of married people towards one another, but also towards their relatives, as a bond uniting two corporate bodies.... Therefore in the olden time the choice of husband and wife was always an affair of importance to the relatives on both sides, so that a German wooing from the oldest times, even until the last century, had the appearance of a business transaction, which was carried out with great regard to suitability.”

And a business transaction it is, unfortunately, to the present day, in the vast majority of cases. A certain amount of dower or property on the bride’s part is the first and most essential requisite. Second in importance is the desirability of not descending even a step in the social ladder, though an extra lump of gold commonly suffices to pull down social Pride to a lower level. Health, temper, Personal Beauty, and mutual suitability—these are the trifles which, other things being equal, come in as a third consideration. And thus is the order of Sexual Selection, as ordained by Love, commonly reversed.

What would an English or American youth of twenty-two say to his father if the latter should undertake to write to all his relatives, asking them to look about for an eligible partner for his son, and capping the climax by starting himself on a trip in search of a bride for his son? Would he accept without a murmur the girl thus found, and would an English or American girl thus allow herself to be given away like a cat in a bag, not knowing whither she was going? I have seen several such cases with my own eyes. One of them was most pathetic. For when the blooming bride, a sweet and refined girl, was introduced to the bridegroom selected for her by her parents—a repulsive-looking brute, twice her age—she conceived a perfect loathing for him, and almost wept out her eyes before the wedding-day. But the man was rich, and that settled the matter.

What aggravated this outrage was the fact that the bride’s father also was rich. And herein, in fact, lies the canker of the German system. Money is such a comfortable thing to have that it is useless to preach against it. There are money-marriages enough in England and America. But in these countries it is generally considered sufficient if one party has the money. Not so in Germany. It is not so much the comfort ensured by a certain amount of money that is aimed at as the superior social influence ensured by a large amount of wealth. Hence the rich marry the rich, regardless of other consequences, and poor Cupid is left shivering in the cold. So that, after all, the silly pride of social position is a greater enemy of Romantic Love than money.

And the consequences of such a matrimonial system? They have been most eloquently set forth by the blind old philosopher, Dr. Dühring:—

“The amalgamation of fortunes, and the resulting enervating luxury of living, are the ruling matrimonial motives; and the want of mutual adaptation of the individuals becomes the cause of the degenerate appearance of the offspring. The loathsome products of such marriages then walk about as ugly embodiments and witnesses of such a degraded system of legalised prostitution (Kuppelwirthschaft). They bear the stamp of incongruity on body and mind; for their appearance shows them to be the offspring of disharmonious parents, blindly associated, or even, in many cases, of parents who themselves are already products of this new matrimonial method. This degeneracy necessarily continues from one generation to another, and in this manner maltreated Nature avenges herself by leading to personal decrepitude and the formation of a new sort of idiocy.”

“It is true,” he adds, “that love is not an infallible sign of mutual suitability; but when it is absent, or even replaced by aversion, it is certain that it is useless to expect a specially harmonious composition of the offspring.”

Is this one of the reasons why Personal Beauty is so rare, comparatively, in Germany?

But Individual Preference is not the only element of Love which thus suffers in Germany through false Pride and parental tyranny. Gallantry is another factor which needs mending. German women are sweet and amiable. In fact, they are too sweet and good-natured. They have spoiled the men, who in consequence are excessively selfish in their relations to women—the most selfish men in the world, outside of Turkey or China. True, the German officer in a ballroom seems to be the very essence of officious Gallantry. But his motives are too transparently Ovidian: it is not true Anglo-American politeness of the heart that inspires his conduct. He is either after forbidden sweets or parading his uniform and his vanity. Take the same man and watch him at home. His wife has to get him his chair, move it up to the fire, bring him his slippers, put the coffee in his hand, and do errands for him. When he goes out she puts on his overcoat and buttons it up carefully for him as if he were a helpless big baby. This would be all very well—for why should not women be gallant too?—if he would only retaliate. But he never dreams of it. Even if it comes to a task which calls for masculine muscular power—the carrying of bundles, etc.—he makes the wife do it. He is, in fact, matrimonially considered, not only a big baby but also a big brute, the very incarnation of masculine selfishness.

In former centuries it was customary in Germany, as it is now with us, for women to bow first to men. The modern German has reversed this. Woman has no right to bow until her lord and superior has invited her to do so by doffing his hat.

The German girl, says the Countess von Bothmer in German Home Life, “is taught that to be womanly she must be helpless, to be feminine she must be feeble, to endear herself she must be dependent, to charm she must cling.” “To keep carefully to the sheep-walk, to applaud in concert and condemn in chorus, is the only behaviour that can be tolerated.” “They have one bugbear and one object of idolatry, these monotonous ladies,—a fetish which they worship under the name of Mode; a monster between public opinion and Mrs. Grundy. To say a thing is not ‘Mode’ here, is to condemn it as if by all the laws of Media and Persia. It is not her centre [sic], but the system of her social education, that renders the German woman so hopelessly provincial.”

Of course it is the men who are responsible for this social education and this feminine ideal of absolute dependence. It suits their selfish pleasure to be worshipped and obeyed by the women without any efforts at gallant retaliation on their part.

A native writer tells us that “a true German philosophises occasionally while he embraces his sweetheart; while kissing even, theories will sprout in his mind.”

No wonder, therefore, that one of the German metaphysicians, Fichte, should have made a sophistic attempt to reduce masculine selfishness to a system. He proves to his own satisfaction that it is woman’s duty to sacrifice herself in man’s behalf; while man, on his part, has no such obligations. His reasoning is too elaborate to quote in full; but is too amusingly naïve to be omitted, so I will translate the summary of it given by Kuno Fischer in his History of Philosophy:—

“What woman’s natural instincts demand is self-abandonment to a man; she desires this abandonment not for her own sake, but for the man’s sake; she gives herself to him, for him. Now abandoning oneself for another is self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice from an instinctive impulse is LOVE. Therefore love is a kind of instinctive impulse which the sexual instinct in woman necessarily and involuntarily assumes. She feels the necessity of loving.... This impulse is peculiar to woman alone; woman alone loves [!!!]; only through woman does love appear among mankind.... The woman’s life should disappear in the man’s without a remnant, and it is this relation that is so beautifully and correctly indicated in the fact that the wife no longer uses her own name, but that of her husband [!].”

The latest (and it is to be hoped the last) of the German metaphysicians, the pessimist Hartmann, goes even a step beyond Fichte in arrogating for man special privileges in Love. If Fichte makes Love synonymous with Self-Sacrifice—feminine, mind you, not masculine—Hartmann tries to prove that man may love as often as he pleases, but woman only once. And what aggravates the offence, he does it in such a poetic manner. “Though it may be doubtful,” he says, “whether a man can truly love two women at the same time, it is beyond all doubt that he can love several in succession with all the depth of his heart; and the assertion that there is only one true love is an unwarranted generalisation to all mankind of a maxim which is true of woman alone.... Woman can learn but once by experience what love is, and it is painful for the lover not to be the one who teaches her first. True it is that a tree nipped by a spring frost brings forth a second crown of leaves, but so rich and luxuriant as the first it will not be; thus does a maiden-heart produce a second bloom, if the first had to wither before maturity, but its full and complete floral glory is unfolded only where love, aroused for the first time, passes in full vigour through all its phases.”

Yet it is not ungallant selfishness alone that prompts German men to bring up their women so that they shall be mere playthings at first and drudges after marriage, never real soul-mates. They have the same old stupid continental fear that culture of the intellect weakens the feelings. This fear is based on slovenly reasoning—on the inference that because a few blue-stockings have at all ages made themselves ridiculous by assuming masculine attributes and parading their lack of tenderness and feminine delicacy, therefore intellectual training must be fatal to feminine charms. As if there were not plenty of masculine blue-stockings, or pedants, without disproving the fact that the men of the greatest intellectual power—men of genius—are also the most emotional and refined of all men; or the fact proved by this whole monograph, that Love and general emotional refinement grow with the general intellectual culture of women.

A typical illustration of German feeling on the subject of female education is to be found in Schweiger-Lerchenfeld’s Frauenleben der Erde, p. 530. Referring to the attempts now being made in France to give young girls a rational education, he quotes the opinion of a French legislator that a girl thus brought up would not love less deeply than heretofore, while she would love more intelligently; and then comments as follows: “How far this anticipation may be realised cannot be decided now or in the near future. At any rate we must leave to the French themselves the task of getting along with this classical female generation of the future. Certain it is that their experiment will hardly be imitated, and that the old Romans and Greeks may eventually become more dangerous to masculine supremacy (Autorität) than the pilgrimage stories of Lourdes.”

It is time for German woman to rise in revolt against this mediæval masculine selfishness. Not in active revolt, for a warlike woman is an abomination. But in passive revolt. Let them cease to spoil the men, and these bears will become more gallant. Germany is later in almost every phase of literary and social culture than England. It was not an accident that Shakspere came before Heine, the English before the German poet of Love; for Love is much less advanced in Germany than in England. It has not even passed the stage where a harsh sort of Coyness is still in place. German women want to learn the cunning to be strange, They are too deferential to the men, too easily won. They want to learn to indulge in harmless flirtation, and they want the education which will give them wit enough to flirt cleverly and make the men mellow.

It must be admitted, however, notwithstanding all these strictures, that there is much genuine Romantic Love in Germany, often differing in no wise from Anglo-American Love. At first sight it seems, indeed, as if chaperonage were as strict as in France; and no doubt many German girls are brought up on the spring-chicken-coyness system which regards every man as a hawk, and a signal for hiding away in a corner. But in general German girls have much more freedom than French girls. They may walk alone in the street in the daytime, go alone to the conservatory to attend a music-lesson. They meet the young men freely at evening parties, dances, musical entertainments, etc.; and the chaperons are not nearly so obtrusive and offensive as in France. The mothers appear to have taken to heart Jean Paul’s saying that “in the mother’s presence it is impossible to carry on an edifying conversation with the daughter.” So that there is plenty of opportunity for falling in love; and were it not for parental dictation, Love-matches would perhaps be as common as in England. But the girls lack independence of spirit to defy parental tyranny, which it is their moral duty to defy where money or rank are pitted against Love. For the health and happiness of the next generation are at stake.

German girls also enjoy an advantage over the French in having a literature which is pure and wholesome; and by reading about Romantic Love they train and deepen their feelings. It is often said that Heine’s influence has been chiefly negative. The truth is, Heine is the greatest emotional educator Germany has ever had. More young men and girls have wept over his pathetic lyrics than over any other poetry. His Buch der Lieder has done more to foster the growth of Romantic Love in Germany than all other collections of verse combined; not only by their own unadorned beauty, but through the soulful music wedded to these poems by Schubert, Schumann, and other magicians of the heart. The fact that the copyright on Heine’s works was soon to expire, and the country to be flooded with cheap editions, has long caused Master Cupid to rub his hands in gleeful anticipation of brisk business; and he has just given orders in his arsenal for one hundred thousand new golden arrows.

Heine indeed fathomed the secrets of Love much more deeply than Goethe. Whereas Heine sang of Love in every major and minor key, Goethe appears to have emphasised chiefly its transitoriness. “Love, as Goethe knows it,” says Professor Seeley, “is very tender, and has a lyric note as fresh as that of a song-bird. In his Autobiography one love-passage succeeds another, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each case he was to blame is a matter of controversy. But he seems to betray a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental sultan. ‘I was in that agreeable phase,’ he writes, ‘when a new passion had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.’ About Frederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating, bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the deepest impressions and receive new ones; and he never looks back.... Goethe was a man of the old régime.... Had he entered into the reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate women.... He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the status of women (‘woman’s fate is pitiable’), and how narrowly confined was their happiness (wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück) ... but he was not a reformer of institutions.”

A reformer of institutions, however, has apparently just arisen in Berlin. For we read that at a private female seminary the girls received the following subject for an essay: “There is from the Ideas of Plato, the atoms of Democritus, the Substance of Spinoza, the monads of Leibnitz, and from the subjective mental forms of Kant, the proof to bring, that the philosophy it never neglected has the to-be-calculated results of their hypotheses with their into-perception-falling effects to compare.”

Such subjects, so elegantly expressed, are no doubt eminently calculated to bring out the latent possibilities of feminine feeling and culture.

To close this chapter with a sweet, soothing concord—major triad, horns and ’cellos, smorzando—it must be admitted that the Germans have one ingredient of Romantic Love which all other nations must envy them. They have one more thrill in the drama of Love, in the ascending scale of familiarities, than we have, namely, the word Du, which is something very different from the stilted Thou, because still a part of everyday language. The second person singular is used in Germany towards pet animals and children, between students, intimate friends, relatives, and lovers. French “lovers” do not say tu to each other till after marriage, and even then they do not use it in public. But the German lover has the privilege, as soon as he is engaged, of exchanging the formal Sie for the affectionate Du; and the first Du that comes from her lips can hardly be less sweet than the first kiss.

There is a game of cards, popular among young folks in Germany, during which you have to address every one with Du whom you otherwise would have to call Sie, and vice versâ; cards have to be called spoons, white black, etc. If there is a young man in the company secretly in love with a young lady, you can always “spot” him by the eagerness he shows to speak to her, and the fact that he always gets the Du right and everything else wrong; while she, strange to say, appears to have never heard of such a thing at all as a personal pronoun.

ENGLISH LOVE

Concerning Romantic Love in England and America, there is less to be said under the head of National Peculiarities than in case of the continental nations of Europe, for the simple reason that almost everything said in the pages on Modern Love refers especially to these two countries. Anglo-American Love is Romantic Love, pure and simple, as first depicted by Shakspere, and after him, with more or less accuracy, by a hundred other poets and novelists. There is no lack of colour in this Love—colour warm and glowing—but it is no longer a mere local colour, a national or provincial peculiarity, but Love in its essence, its cosmopolitan aspect; Love such as will in course of time prevail throughout the world, when the Anglisation of this planet—which is only a question of time—shall have been completed.

England has many a bright jewel in the crown of her achievements in behalf of civilisation, but the brightest of all is this, that she was the first country in the world—ancient, mediæval, or modern—that removed the bars from woman’s prison-windows, opened every door to Cupid, and made him thoroughly welcome and comfortable. And grateful Cupid has retaliated by setting up English manners and customs as a model which all other nations are slowly but surely copying. Eighteen million souls in the United States, or almost two persons in every five, are not of English origin; yet of these there are not one million who have not given up their old country methods of courtship as antiquated, and adopted the Anglo-American style. The Germans in America make love not after the German but after the English fashion. So do the French, though somewhat more reluctantly and tardily. In San Francisco and Chicago it is said that but one name in ten is of English origin; yet who ever heard of a San Franciscan or Chicagoan making love in foreign style? During the last hundred years the majority of the immigrants to America have come from non-English countries; yet, though the parents enter the country as adults with all their national traditions stamped on their memories, they invariably allow their sons and daughters to court and be courted in American style. And now that England is gradually extending her influence to every one of the five continents, Romantic Love—to whose sway, quite as much as to their outdoor active life, the English owe the fact that they are to-day the handsomest and most energetic race in the world—is also rapidly extending its sphere, and will finally oust the last vestiges of Oriental despotism, feminine suppression, and mediæval masculine barbarism.

For some centuries woman has been more favoured by law, and especially by national custom, in England than in any other European state. It is true that the Englishman who beats his wife is the most brutal savage on the face of the globe, but he is to be found only among the lowest classes. Nor has wife-selling ever been quite such a universal custom in England as foreigners imagine; although cases are on record as far back as 1302 and as late as 1884. In an article in All the Year Round (Dec. 20, 1884) more than twenty cases are enumerated with full details, the price of a wife varying from twenty-five guineas to a pint or half a pint of beer, or a penny and a dinner; and the Times of July 22, 1797, remarks sarcastically: “By some mistake or omission, in the report of the Smithfield market, we have not learned the average price of wives for the week. The increasing value of the fair sex is esteemed by several eminent writers the certain criterion of increasing civilisation. Smithfield has, on this ground, strong pretensions to refined improvement, as the price of wives has risen in that market from half a guinea to three guineas and a half.”

That these cases occurred only among the lowest classes is self-evident; yet even the lowest classes often resented the brutal transaction by pelting the offenders with stones and mud; whereas, as far as the women were concerned, the offence was mitigated by the fact that in all cases on record they appear to have been only too glad to be sold, so as to get rid of their tyrants.

It cannot be said that English women are all exempt from the hardest manual labour even to-day; but the tendency to relieve them of tasks unsuited to feminine muscular development has existed longer in England than elsewhere. The difference can be best observed with regard to agricultural labour. Any one who travels through Italy, Switzerland, France, or Germany in the autumn, gets the impression that most of the harvesting is done by the women; whereas in England, as shown by statistics, there are twenty-two men to every woman engaged as field-labourers. Yet even at that rate there are still 64,840 women in England engaged in agricultural labour unsuited to their sex.

On the other hand, English women, like American women, are manifesting a great disposition at present to try their hand or brain at almost every employment heretofore considered exclusively masculine. The census enumerates 349 different classes of work, and of these all but about 70 have been invaded by women; including 5 horse-dealers, 14 bicycle makers and dealers, 16 sculptors, 18 fence makers, 19 fossil diggers, etc.; whereas there are as yet no female pilots, dentists, police officers, shepherds, law students, architects, cab-drivers, commercial travellers, barristers, etc. [Full list in Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 3, 1884.]

Inasmuch as there are almost a million more women than men in England, it is not surprising that women should thus seek to extend their sphere of usefulness. We live in an experimental epoch, when it is to be ascertained what is and what is not becoming to woman regarded as a labourer. It is therefore of the utmost importance that there should be some standard by which each employment is to be judged. And this standard, fortunately, is supplied by Romantic Love.

We have seen that the tendency of civilisation has been to differentiate the sexes more and more in appearance, character, and emotional susceptibilities, and that on this differentiation depends the existence and power of Love, because it individualises man and woman, and Love is the more intense the more it is individualised.

Hence every employment which tends to make woman masculine in appearance or habits is to be tabooed by her because antagonistic to Love. If she, nevertheless, persists in it, Love will have its revenge by eliminating her through Sexual Selection. No man will marry a masculine woman, or fall in love with her, so that her unnatural temperament will not be transmitted to the next generation and multiplied.

But what is to be accepted as the standard of femininity? The answer is given us by Nature. Throughout the animal world, with a few insignificant exceptions, the sexes are differentiated distinctly; and the female is the more tender and gentle of the two, the more devoted to domestic affection and the care and education of the young, the more amiable, and, above all, less aggressive, bold, and pugnacious than the male. “Any education which women undergo,” says the Spectator, “should be an education not for the militant life of war against evil but for the spiritual life inspiring a persuasive or patient charity.... Even in a field properly suited to them—the field of charitable institutions, of poor-law work, of educational representation—women no sooner take up the cudgels than they lose their appropriate influence, and are either unsexed or paralysed.”

According to Mr. Ruskin, “woman’s work is—(1) To please people. (2) To feed them in dainty ways. (3) To clothe them. (4) To keep them orderly. (5) To teach them.”

Statistics concerning the employments instinctively sought by the majority of women bear out Mr. Ruskin’s table quite well. Woman’s first duty is to please people by being beautiful, amiable, and fascinating in conversation and manners. No man would marry a woman unless she pleased him in one way or another; hence matrimony is the most successful female profession, which in England includes 4,437,962 women. But there are other ways in which women seek to please and prosper; hence there are in England 2368 actresses as against 2197 actors, and 11,376 women whose profession is music, as against 14,170 men.

Domestic service, which includes the “feeding in dainty ways” (though too often the “dainty” must be omitted), employs 1,230,406 women in England—about 30,000 fewer than industrial employments, which are somewhat more popular owing to the greater individual liberty they allow the employed. Yet domestic service is a much better preparation for married life than labour in a manufactory; so that, other things being equal, a labouring man looking for a wife would be apt to select one who has learned how to take care of his home. This thought ought to help to render domestic service more popular.

“To clothe them.” Dressmaking, staymaking (alas!), and millinery, employ 357,995 women in England.

“To keep them orderly.” Bathing and washing service employ 176,670 women; medicine and nursing, almost 50,000; missions, 1660.

“To teach them.” This, one of woman’s special vocations, eminently suited to her capacity, employs 123,995 females.

If I have failed in correctly interpreting Mr. Ruskin’s oracle, I stand subject to correction from that earnest labourer in the task of finding for woman her proper sphere—a work for which he has not yet received the recognition and thanks he deserves.

That marriage, and not miscellaneous employment, is woman’s true destiny, is shown by the way in which Cupid influences statistics. Thus there are in England about 29,000 school-mistresses aged 15-20, and 28,500 aged 25-45; but the time from 20-25, the period of courtship and marriage, has only 21,000. In the case of dressmakers this fact is brought out still more strikingly: 15-20—84,000; 20-25—76,000; 25-45—129,000, in round numbers.

Although, therefore, as Emerson remarks, “the circumstances may be easily imagined in which woman may speak, vote, argue cases, legislate, and drive coaches, if only it comes by degrees,” facts show that there is more philosophy of the future in Mrs. Hawthorne’s remark that “Home, I think, is the great arena for women, and there, I am sure, she can wield a power which no king or emperor can cope with.”

A consideration of all the foregoing facts shows that Love may be safely accepted as a guiding-star in making a proper division of the world’s labour between men and women. And the reason why England and America have made so much more progress than other nations in ascertaining woman’s true capacity and sphere, is because she has been educated to a point where she can assert her independence, and where she can inspire as well as feel Love—thus making man humble, gallant, gentle, ready to make concessions and remove restrictions. It is in England and America alone that Love plays a more important rôle in marriage than money and social position; that the young are generally permitted to consult their own heart instead of parental command; and that the opportunities for courtship are so liberal and numerous that the young are enabled to fall in love with one another not only for dazzling qualities of Personal Beauty, viewed for a moment, but for traits of character, emotional refinement, and a cultured intellect.

These two nations alone have fully taken to heart and heeded Addison’s maxim that “Those marriages generally abound most with love and constancy that are preceded by a long courtship. The passion should strike root and gather strength before marriage be grafted on it. A long course of hopes and expectations fixes the idea in our minds, and habituates us to a fondness of the person beloved.”

There is, however, a difference between English and American Love which shows that we have learned Addison’s lesson even better than his own countrymen. As Mr. Robert Laird Collier remarks in English Home Life: “The American custom, among the mass of the people, of leaving young men and young women free to associate together and to keep company with each other for an indefinite length of time, without declaring their intentions, is almost unknown in any country of Europe. It is not long after a young man begins to show the daughter attentions before the father gives intimation that he wishes to know what it means, and either the youth declares his intentions or is notified to ‘cut sticks.’” “Courtships in England are short, and engagements are long.”

The London Standard doubtless exaggerates the difference between English and American girls and their attitude toward men in the course of an article, part of which may, nevertheless, be cited: “American girls offer a bright example to their English sisters of a happy, unclouded youth, and instances seem to be few of their abusing the liberty which is accorded to them. Perhaps their immunity from sentimental troubles arises from the fact that from earliest childhood they have been comrades of the other sex, and are therefore not disposed to turn a man into a demi-god because they only see one at rare intervals under the eagle eye of a mother or aunt. A great revolution in public opinion would be required ere English girls could be emancipated to the extent which prevails on the other side of the Atlantic, and even then it is doubtful whether the system would work well. The daughters of Albion, with but few exceptions, are single-hearted, earnest, and prone to look upon everything seriously. They often make the mistake of imagining that a man is in love because he is decently civil.”

Yet in German Home Life, written from an English point of view, we read that “There is no such thing as country life, as we understand it, in Germany; no cosy sociability, smiling snugness, pleasant bounties and hospitalities; and, above all, for the young folk, no freedom, flirtation, boatings, sketchings, high teas, scamperings, and merriments generally.” And again: “The sort of frank ‘flirtation,’ beginning openly in fun and ending in amusement, which is common amongst healthy, high-spirited boys and girls in England, and has no latent element of intrigue or vanity in it, but is born of exuberant animal spirits, youthful frolics, and healthy pastimes shared together, is forbidden to her” (the German girl).

The Standard itself apparently contradicts itself in another article on “Flirtation,” concerning which it says: “It is usually so innocent that it has become part of the education most of our young women pass through in their training for society. The British matron smiles contentedly when she sees that her daughter, just entered on her teens, exhibits a partiality for long walks and soft-toned confabulations with her cousin Fred or her brother’s favourite schoolmate. Three or four such juvenile attachments will do the girl no harm, if they are gently watched over by the parental eye. They serve to evolve the sexually social instincts in a gradual way. Through them the bashful maiden learns the nature of man in the same fashion as she takes lessons on the piano. In a word, she is ‘getting her hand in’ for the real game of matrimony that is to be played in a few years. Her youthful swains, of course, derive their own instructions from these innocent amours.... Chivalrous feeling is developed which it takes a deal of worldly wisdom to smother in after years.... When we observe this sentimentality in a boy, we derive great amusement from it, but it should raise the lad in our estimation. He has something in him to which ideals appeal, and his early-developed susceptibility will—to use a beautiful but forgotten word—engentle his nature.”

Perhaps the difference between English and American courtship and flirtation is not so great as often painted, and is becoming less every year, owing to the Americanisation of Europe.

AMERICAN LOVE

It is in the United States of America that Plato’s ideal—so completely ignored by his countrymen—that young men and women should have ample opportunity to meet and get acquainted with one another before marriage, is most perfectly realised; as well as Addison’s supplementary advice that marriage should be preceded by a long courtship.

As boys and girls in America are commonly educated in the same schools, they are initiated at an early age into the sweets and sorrows of Calf-love Courtship, which has such a refining influence on the boys, and renders the girls more easy and natural in society when they get older; destroying among other puerilities that spring-chicken Coyness which makes many of their European sisters appear so silly. In the Western country-schools each girl has her “beau”—a boy of fourteen to seventeen—who brings her flowers, apples, or other presents, accompanies her home, and performs various other gallant services; nor has any harm ever been known to result from this juvenile Courtship—except an occasional elopement, in case of a prematurely frivolous couple, whom it was just as well to get rid of in that way as any other.

When they get a little older, the young folks go to picnics without a chaperon, or they enjoy a drive or sleigh-ride, or go a-skating together; and after a party, dance, church fair, or other social gathering, where the elders commonly keep out of the way considerately, each young man accompanies a young lady home. Were you to insinuate to him the advisability of having a chaperon for the young lady, he would inform you pointedly that the young lady needed no protection inasmuch as he was a gentleman and not a tramp. It is this high sense of gentlemanly honour that protects women in America—a hundred times better than all the barred windows of the Orient and the dragons of Europe. Thanks to this feeling of modern chivalry, a young lady may travel all alone from New York to Chicago, or even to San Francisco, and, if her manners are modest and refined, she will not once be insulted by word or look, not even in passing through the roughest mining regions.

It is the consciousness of this chivalrous code of honour among the men that gives an American girl the frank and natural gaze which is one of her greatest charms, and that allows her to talk to a man just introduced as if they were old acquaintances. It is a knowledge of this gentlemanly code that makes parents feel perfectly at ease in leaving their daughter alone in the parlour all the evening with a visitor. In a word, American customs prove that if you treat a man as a gentleman he will behave like a gentleman.

Unquestionably there are girls who abuse the liberty allowed them, and encourage the men to encourage them in their freedom. Mr. Henry James has done a most valuable service in holding up the mirror to one of these girls, to serve as a warning to all Daisy Millers and semi-Daisy Millers. There are not a few of the latter kind, and I have myself met three full-fledged specimens of the real “Daisy” in Europe—girls who would not have hesitated to go out rowing on a lake at eleven o’clock in the evening with a man known to them only a few hours, or to go next day with him to visit an old tower, or to say that mamma “always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I do introduce them—almost always. If I didn’t introduce my gentlemen friends to mother, I shouldn’t think I was natural.” It is this class of American tourists that have, unfortunately, given foreigners a caricatured notion of the American girl’s deportment.

Etiquette differs somewhat in various American cities and among the different classes. For instance, a young lady of the “upper circles,” who in Chicago is permitted to drive to the theatre in a carriage with a young man, is not allowed the same privilege in New York.

The New York Sun, an excellent authority in social matters, gives the whole philosophy of American Courtship and Love in answering a young man’s question as to whether, in asking a young lady of the highest circles to accompany him to a place of amusement, it is necessary to invite a chaperon at the same time. He is told that he must,—in those circles:—

"But these people are only a few among the many. What is called society more exclusively in New York comprises, all told, no more than a hundred or two hundred families. Outside of them, of course, there are larger circles, to which they give the law to a greater or less extent, but the whole number of men and women in this great town of a million and a half of inhabitants who pay obedience to that law is not over a few thousand.

"Nine girls out of ten in New York, with the full consent of their parents and as a matter of course, accompany young men to amusements without taking a chaperon along. They feel, and they are, entirely able to look out for themselves, and they would regard the whole fun as spoiled if a third person was on hand to watch over them. A large part of the audience at every theatre is always made up of young men and young women who have come out in pairs, and who have no thought of violating any rule of propriety. Very many of these girls would never be invited to the theatre by their male acquaintances if they were under the dominion of such a usage, for the men want them to themselves, else they would not ask their company, and besides do not feel able to pay for an extra ticket for an obnoxious third person; or, if they have a little more money to spare, they prefer to expend it at an ice-cream saloon after the play.

"Nor can it be said that the morals of these less formal young people are any worse than those of the more exacting society. Probably they are better on the average, and if the laws of Murray Hill prevailed throughout this city, the marriage-rate of New York would be likely to decline, for nothing discourages the passion of the average young man so much as his inability to meet the charmer except in the presence of a third person, who acts as a buffer between him and her. He feels that he has no show, and cannot appear to good advantage under the eyes of a cool critic, whereas if he could walk with the girl alone in the shades of the balmy evening, the courage to declare his affection would come to him.

“Therefore it is that engagements, even in the most fashionable society, are commonly made in the country during the summer, where the young people come together more freely and more constantly than in the town.”

The attempt made in certain corners of New York “Society” to introduce the foreign system of chaperonage is one of the most absurd and incongruous efforts at aping foreign fashions (which are on the decline even in Europe) ever witnessed in our midst. In Europe Chaperonage is in so far excusable, as it is a modified survival from barbarous times when men were mostly brutes, being drunk half the time and on military expeditions the other half. To treat American men, who are brought up as gentlemen, and commonly behave as such, as mediæval ruffians, is a gratuitous insult, which they ought to resent by avoiding those houses where Oriental experiments are being tried with the daughters. That would bring the “mammas” to reason very soon.

Yet it would seem as if New York “Society” had already had enough of the Oriental experiment; for the same high authority just quoted asserted last autumn that “A regular stampede in favour of the liberty of the young unmarried female is to be undertaken this winter by a number of ‘three-years-in-society’ veterans, supported and encouraged by nearly all this seasons débutantes. The first step is to be the establishment of a right on the part of young girls to form parties for theatre matinées and afternoon concerts, untrammelled by the presence of even a matron of their own age, and to which all ‘reliable and well-behaved young men are to be eligible.’... Rule No. 2 establishes beyond all dispute the often-mooted question whether the presence of a brother and sister in a party of young people going to any place of evening amusement throws a shield of respectability over the others of the party. Society long ago frowned upon this mongrel kind of chaperonage; but upon the principle that no young man would permit indiscretions or improprieties in a party of which his sister made one, the ‘veterans’ have voted in favour of it. The young man with a sister is therefore to enact the part of dragon on these occasions, and will be largely in demand. Failing a convenient sister, he may get a cousin, perhaps, to take her place.”

When it comes to the cousin, the reversion to Americanism, pure and simple, will be complete.

The gentlemanliness and Gallantry of Americans have at all times been acknowledged by observers of all nationalities; and it is indeed hardly too much to say that the average American is disposed to treat the whole female sex with a studied Gallantry, which in most European countries is reserved by men for the one girl with whom they happen to be in love. Even the irate and vituperative Anthony Trollope in his book on North America was obliged to admit that “It must be borne in mind that in that country material wellbeing and education are more extended than with us, and that therefore men there have learned to be chivalrous who with us have hardly progressed so far. The conduct of the men to the women throughout the states is always gracious.... But it seems to me that the women have not advanced as far as the men have done.... In America the spirit of chivalry has sunk deeper among men than it has among women.”

Anthony Trollope is by no means the only writer who has put his finger on the greatest foible of American women. No doubt they have, as a class, been spoiled by excessive masculine Gallantry. They do not, like the women of the Troubadour period, who were similarly spoilt, go quite so far as to send their knights on crusades and among lepers, but they often shroud themselves in an atmosphere of selfishness which is very unfeminine—to choose a complimentary adjective.

In the East, where there is already a large excess of women over men, this evil is less marked than in the West, where women are still in a minority. Thus the Denver Tribune, in an article on “The Impoliteness of Women,” remarks: “If there is any characteristic of Americans of which they are more proud than any other, it is the courtesy which the men who are natives of this country exhibit towards women, and the respect which the gentler sex receives in public. This is a trait of the American character of which Americans are justly proud, and in which they doubtless excel the people of any other country. But while this is true of the men, it is a matter to be deeply regretted that as much cannot be said of the women of this country.” After praising American women for their beauty, vivacity, high moral character, and other charms, the Tribune adds that they “seem very generally to be prompted in their conduct in public by a spirit of selfishness which very often finds expression in acts of positive rudeness.” They are ungrateful, it continues, to the men who give up their seats in street-cars; they compel men to step into a muddy street, instead of walking one behind the other at a crossing; and at such places as the stamp-window of the post-office they do not wait for their turn, but force the men to stand aside.

Another Western paper, the Chicago Tribune, complains that in that city there are 10,000 homes in which the daughters are ignorant of the simplest kind of household duties. It adds “That they do not desire to learn; that, having been brought up to do nothing except appear gracefully in society, their object in life is to marry husbands who can support them in idle luxury; that this state of things has substituted for marriages founded on love and respect a market in which the men have quoted money-values, and where a young man, however great his talents, has no chance of winning a wife from the charmed circle.”

So that the pendulum has apparently swung to the other extreme. In mediæval times the women were married for their money by the lazy, selfish men; now the women are lazy and selfish, while the men toil and are married for their money.

Yet there is much exaggeration in this view, which applies to only a small portion of the American people. We are far from the times when Miss Martineau complained of the feeble health of American women, and attributed it to the vacuity of their minds. Their health is still, on the average, inferior to that of English and German damsels, from whom they could also learn useful lessons in domestic matters; but intellectually the American woman has no equal in the world; while her sweetness, grace, and proverbial beauty combine into an ensemble which makes Cupid chuckle whenever he looks at a susceptible young man.

Goldsmith says somewhere that “the English love with violence, and expect violent love in return.” Certainly this holds true no less of the Americans. There are indeed several favourable circumstances which combine to make Romantic Love more ardent and more prevalent in the United States than in any other part of the world.

(1) The first is the intellectual culture of women just referred to, which they owe partly to the leisure they enjoy, partly to the fact that America has the best elementary schools in the world, so that their minds are aroused early from their dormant state. As Bishop Spalding remarks: “Woman here in the United States is more religious, more moral, and more intelligent than man; more intelligent in the sense of greater openness to ideas, greater flexibility of mind, and a wider acquaintance with literature.” Now the whole argument of this book tends to show that the capacity for feeling Romantic Love is dependent on intellectual culture, and increases with it; hence we might infer that there is more Love among the women of America than among those of any other country, even if this were not so patent from the greater number of Love-matches and various subtle signs known to international observers.

And as the sweetest pleasure and goad of Love lies in the conviction that it is really returned, man’s Love is thus doubled in ardour through woman’s responsive sympathy.

(2) That Courtship proper is longer than in England, and engagement shorter, is a circumstance in favour of America. For nothing adds so much to the ardour of Love as the uncertainty which prevails during Courtship; whereas, after engagement, all these alternate hopes and doubts, confidences and jealousies, are quieted, and the ship approaches the still waters of the harbour of matrimony, which may be quite as deep but are less sublime and romantic than mid-ocean, with its possibilities of storm and shipwreck.

Moreover, the longer the time of tentative Courtship, the fewer are the chances of a mistake being made in selecting a sympathetic spouse.

In Germany an engagement is so conclusive an affair that it is announced in the papers, and cards are sent out as at a wedding. In America we meet with the other extreme, for it is not very unusual for a couple to be engaged some time before even the parents know it. Though there is such a thing as breach of promise suits against fickle young men, such engagements, if unsatisfactory to either side, are commonly broken off amicably. And, as one of Mr. Howells’s characters remarks in Indian Summer: “A broken engagement may be a bad thing in some cases, but I am inclined to think it is the very best thing that could happen in most cases where it happens. The evil is done long before; the broken engagement is merely sanative, and so far beneficent.”

Were engagements less readily dissolved, divorces would be more frequent even than they are now.

(3) Parental dictation is almost unknown in America; nowhere else have young men and women such absolute freedom to choose their own soul-mate. Hence Individual Preference, on which the ardour of Love depends in the highest degree, has full sway. The comparative absence of barriers of rank and social grade also makes it easier for a man to find and claim his real Juliet.

(4) This dependence of Love on Individualisation gives it another advantage in America. For nowhere is there so great a mixture of nationalities as here; and, away from home, a national peculiarity of feature or manners has a sort of individualising effect. Till we get used to such national peculiarities through their constant recurrence we are apt to judge almost every woman in a new city attractive. From this point of view Love may be defined as an instinctive longing to absorb national traits, and blend them all in the one cosmopolitan type of perfect Personal Beauty.

(5) There are beautiful women in all countries of the world, but no country has so many pretty girls as America. Money and rank find it hard to compete with such loveliness, hence Love has its own way. Here alone is it possible to find heiresses who have failed to get married through lack of Beauty. Personal Beauty is the great matchmaker in America; and thus it comes that Beauty is ever inherited and multiplied. For Love is the cause of Beauty as Beauty is the cause of Love.

One more characteristic of American Love remains to be noted—the most unique of all. American women are of all women in the world the most self-conscious, and have the keenest sense of humour. To these quick-witted damsels the sentimental sublimities of amorous Hyperbole, which may touch the heart of a naïve German or Italian girl, are apt to appear dangerously near the ludicrous; hence an American lover, if he is clever enough, deliberately covers the step which separates the sublime from the ridiculous. He gilds the gold of his compliments by using the form of playful exaggeration, which is the more easy to him because exaggeration is a national form of American humour. Mr. Howells’s heroes often make love in this fashion. The lover in The Lady of the Aroostook spices his flatteries with open burlesque, and succeeds admirably with this new Ars Amoris; and Colville in Indian Summer says to Imogene: “Come, I’ll go, of course, Imogene. A fancy-ball to please you is a very different thing from a fancy-ball in the abstract.”

“Oh, what nice things you say! Do you know, I always admired your compliments? I think they’re the most charming compliments in the world.”

“I don’t think they’re half so pretty as yours; but they’re more sincere.”

“No, honestly. They flatter, and at the same time they make fun of the flattery a little; they make a person feel that you like them even while you laugh at them.”

Perfect success in this form of flattery requires a talent for epigram. Not many, unfortunately, even in America, are poets and wits at the same time, like Mr. Howells; but there is an abundance of clever compliments nevertheless, and they are apt to assume the form of playful exaggeration.

SCHOPENHAUER’S THEORY OF LOVE

A first hasty perusal of Schopenhauer’s brilliant essay on the “Metaphysics of Sexual Love” (in the second volume of his Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) will dispose most readers to agree with Dühring that the great pessimist “makes war on love.” But a more careful consideration of his profound thoughts shows that this is not the case, notwithstanding his habitual cynical tone.

In the first place, his theory can do no possible harm, because, as he himself admits, no lover will ever believe in it. Secondly, the gist of Schopenhauer’s theory is to show that a lover is the most noble and unselfish martyr in the world, because his usual attitude and fate is self-sacrifice.

LOVE IS AN ILLUSION

The fundamental truth which Schopenhauer claims to have discovered is that love is an illusion—an instinctive belief on the lover’s part that his life’s happiness absolutely depends on his union with his beloved; whereas, in truth, a love-match commonly leads to lifelong conjugal misery. The lover, on reaching the goal so eagerly striven for, finds himself disappointed, and realises, to his consternation, that he has been the dupe of a blind instinct. Quien se casa por amores, ha de vivir con dolores, says a Spanish proverb (“to marry for love is to live in misery”): and this doctrine Schopenhauer re-echoes in a dozen different forms: “It is not only disappointed love-passion that occasionally has a tragic end; successful love likewise leads more commonly to misery than to happiness.” “Marriages based on love commonly end unhappily,” etc.

INDIVIDUALS SACRIFICED TO THE SPECIES

The reason of this curious fact is given in this sentence: “Love-marriages are formed in the interest of the species, not of the individuals. True, the parties concerned imagine that they are providing for their own happiness; but their real [unconscious] aim is something foreign to their own selves—namely, the procreation of an individual whose existence becomes possible only through their marriage.”

What urges a man on to this sacrifice of individual happiness to the welfare of his offspring is, as already intimated, a blind instinct known as Love. The universal Will (Schopenhauer’s fetish, or name for an impersonal deity underlying all phenomena) has implanted this blind instinct in man, for the same reason that it implants so many other instincts in various animals—to induce the parents to undergo any amount of labour, and even danger to life, for the sake of benefiting the offspring, and thus preserving the species. All these animals, like the lovers, are urged on blindly to sacrifice themselves in the belief that they are doing it for their own pleasure and benefit; whereas it is all in the interest of their offspring.

Why was the Will compelled to implant this blind instinct in man? Because man is so selfish wherever guided by reason, that it would have been unwise to entrust so important a matter as the welfare of coming generations to his intellect and prudence. Prudence would tell young people to choose not the most attractive and healthy partners, who would be able to transmit their excellence to the next generation, but the ones who are most liberally supplied with money and useful friends. That is, they would invariably look out first for “Number One,” indifferent to the deluge that might come after them. It was to neutralise this selfishness that the Will created the instinct of Love, which impels a man to marry not the woman who will make him the most happy and comfortable, but whose qualities, combined with his own, will be likely to produce a harmonious, well-made group of children.

Schopenhauer’s Will, it must be understood, is an æsthetic sort of a chap. He has his hobbies, and one of these hobbies is the desire to preserve the species in its typical purity and beauty. There are a thousand accidents of climate, vice, disease, etc., that tend to vitiate the type of each species; but Love strives for ever to restore a harmonious balance, by producing a mutual infatuation in two beings whose combined (and opposite) defects will neutralise one another in the offspring.

SOURCES OF LOVE

More definitely speaking, there are three ways in which the Will preserves the purity of its types—three ways in which it inspires the Love whose duty it is to achieve this result. Physical Beauty is the first thing desired by the lover, because that is the expression of typical perfection. Secondly, he may be influenced by such Psychic Traits as will blend well with his own; and thirdly, he will be attracted by perfections (or imperfections) which are the opposite of his own. These three sources must be considered briefly in detail.

(1) Physical Beauty.—The most important attribute of Beauty, in the lover’s eye, is Youth. Men prefer the age from eighteen to twenty-eight in a woman; while women give the preference to a man aged from thirty to thirty-five, which represents the acme of his virility. Youth without Beauty may still inspire Love; not so Beauty without Youth.

Health ranks next in importance. Acute disease is only a temporary disadvantage, whereas chronic disease repels the amorous affections, for the reason that it is likely to be transmitted to the next generation.

A fine framework or skeleton is the third desideratum. Besides age and disease, nothing proves so fatal to the chances of inspiring Love as deformity: “The most charming face does not atone for it; on the contrary, even the ugliest face is preferred if allied with a straight growth of the body.”

A certain plumpness or fulness of flesh is the next thing considered in sexual selection; for this is an indication of Health, and promises a sound progeny. Excessive leanness is repulsive, and so is excessive stoutness, which is often an indication of sterility. “A well-developed bust has a magic effect on a man.” What attracts women to men is especially muscular development, because that is a quality in which they are commonly deficient, and for which the children will accordingly have to rely on the father. Women may marry an ugly man, but never one who is unmanly.

Facial beauty ranks last in importance, according to Schopenhauer. Here too the skeleton is first considered in sexual selection. The mouth must be small, the chin projecting, “a slight curve of the nose, upwards or downwards, has decided the fate of innumerable girls; and justly, for the type of the species is at stake.” The eyes and the forehead, finally, are closely associated with intellectual qualities.

(2) Psychic Traits.—What charms women in men is preeminently courage and energy, besides frankness and amiability. “Stupidity is no disadvantage with women: indeed, it is more likely that superior intellectual power, and especially genius, as being an abnormal trait, may make an unfavourable impression on them. Hence we so often see an ugly, stupid, and coarse man preferred by women to a refined, clever, and amiable man.” When women claim to have fallen in love with a man’s intellect, it is either affectation or vanity. Wedlock is a union of hearts, not of heads; and its object is not entertaining conversation, but providing for the next generation. This part of Schopenhauer’s theory is evidently an outcome of his doctrine that children inherit their intellectual qualities from the mother, and their character from the father. Hence the feeling that they are capable of supplying their children with sufficient intellect is part of the feminine Love-instinct, and makes women indifferent to the presence or absence of those qualities in men.

It does not follow from all this that a sensible man may not reflect on his chosen one’s character, or she on his intellectual abilities, before marriage. Such reflection leads to marriages of reason, but not to Love-marriages, which alone are here under consideration.

(3) Complementary Qualities.—The physical and mental attributes considered under (1) and (2) are those which commonly inspire Love. But there are cases where perfect Beauty is less potent to inflame the passions than deviations from the normal type.

“Ordinarily it is not the regular perfect beauties that inspire the great passions,” says Schopenhauer; and this seems to be borne out by the experience of Byron, who says: “I believe there are few men who, in the course of their observations on life, have not perceived that it is not the greatest female beauty who forms [inspires] the longest and the strongest passions.”

How is this to be accounted for? By the anxiety of Nature (or the Will) to neutralise imperfections in one individual by wedding them to another’s excesses in the opposite direction; as an acid is neutralised by combining it with an alkali. The greater the shortcoming the more ardent will be the infatuation if a person is found exactly adapted for its neutralisation. The weaker a woman is, for example, in her muscular system, the more apt will she be to fall violently in love with an athlete. Short men have a decided partiality for tall women, and vice versâ. Blondes almost always desire brunettes; and if the reverse does not hold true, this is owing to the fact, he says, that the original colour of the human complexion was not light but dark. A light complexion has indeed become second nature to us, but less so the other features; and “in love nature strives to return to dark hair and brown eyes, as the primitive type.”

Again, persons afflicted with a pug-nose take a special delight in falcon-noses and parrot-faces; and those who are excessively long and slim admire those who are abnormally short and even stumpy. So with temperaments; each one preferring the opposite to his or her own. True, if a person is quite perfect in any one respect, he does not exactly prefer the corresponding imperfection in another, but he is more readily reconciled to it.

Throughout his essay, Schopenhauer tacitly assumes that the parental peculiarities are fused or blended equally in the offspring, and that this blending is what the Will aims at. But on this point Mr. Herbert Spencer has some remarks, in his essay on “Personal Beauty,” which directly contradict Schopenhauer, of whose theory, however, he does not seem to have been cognisant:—

“The fact,” he says, "that the forms and qualities of any offspring are not a mean between the forms and qualities of its parents, but a mixture of them, is illustrated in every family. The features and peculiarities of a child are separately referred by observers to father and mother respectively—nose and mouth to this side; colour of the hair and eyes to that; this moral peculiarity to the first; this intellectual one to the second—and so with contour and idiosyncrasies of body. Manifestly, if each organ or faculty in a child was an average of the two developments of such organ or faculty in the parents, it would follow that all brothers and sisters should be alike; or should, at any rate, differ no more than their parents differed from year to year. So far, however, from finding that this is the case, we find not only that great irregularities are produced by intermixture of traits, but that there is no constancy in the mode of intermixture, or the extent of variations produced by it.

“This imperfect union of parental constitutions in the constitution of offspring is yet more clearly illustrated by the reappearance of peculiarities traceable to bygone generations. Forms, dispositions, and diseases, possessed by distant progenitors, habitually come out from time to time in descendants. Some single feature, or some solitary tendency, will again and again show itself after being apparently lost. It is notoriously thus with gout, scrofula, and insanity.”

Again, unite a pure race “with another equally pure, but adapted to different conditions and having a correspondingly different physique, face, and morale, and there will occur in the descendants not a homogeneous mean between the two constitutions, but a seemingly irregular combination of characteristics of the one with characteristics of the other—one feature traceable to this race, a second to that, and a third uniting the attributes of both; while in disposition and intellect there will be found a like medley of the two originals.”

The fact that the more remote ancestry must be taken into account besides the parents, in considering the traits of the offspring, is one which Mr. Galton has done much to emphasise, and which Schopenhauer completely ignores. It tells against the metaphysical part of his theory; for all the efforts of the Will to merge opposite characters into homogeneous traits must prove futile if a blue-eyed man, for instance, who marries a black-eyed girl, finds that their children have neither the father’s blue nor the mother’s black, but the grandmother’s gray eyes.

Yet in the long run diverse traits of figure and physiognomy do tend to a harmonious fusion. Though a man with a prominent nose, which he inherited from his father, is likely to transmit it to his son, though his wife may have a snub-nose, yet there will be a slight modification even in the son’s organ; and if the son keeps up the tradition of marrying a snub-nosed girl, and his children follow his example, the chances are that in a few generations the nose of that family will be a feature of moderate size and classic proportions. The very fact emphasised by Mr. Galton that all the ancestral influences count, will here aid the ultimate fusion. Conspicuous instances of the long-continued prevalence of a particular nose—or other feature—may be accounted for by the fact that other kinds of that organ were rare in the vicinity, or that marriage was decided by so many other considerations that the dimensions of one organ could not come into consideration, much as the bride or groom might have preferred an improvement in that respect.

So far as Schopenhauer’s theory concerns only the fact that Love is apt to be based on complementary qualities, he is doubtless correct; but it needs no erratic metaphysical fetish, as a deus ex machina, to account for that fact. A simple application of psychologic principles explains the whole mystery.

In the first place, nothing could be more remote from the truth than the cynical notion that every woman considers herself a Venus. She may, on the whole, consider herself equal to the average of Beauty; but if she has any special fault—a mouth too large or too small, an upper lip too high, a nose too flat or too prominent, too much or too little flesh, excessive height or shortness—she is not only conscious of the defect, but morbidly conscious of it, and uses every possible device to conceal it. Thus constantly brooding over her misfortune her mind, by a natural reaction, will conceive a special admiration for an organ that exceeds the line of Beauty in the opposite direction. Every day one hears a petite girl admiring a specially tall woman; and this admiration will prompt her, other things being equal, to fall in love with a tall man.

Secondly, familiarity breeds indifference to one’s own charms, and a disposition to admire what we lack ourselves.

Novelty comes into play. A Northern blonde among a nation of brunettes cannot fail to slay hearts by the hundred, while the mystic flashes of a Spanish woman’s black eyes are fatal to every Northern visitor.

Nations, like individuals, admire and desire what they lack. The Germans and the English are deficient in grace—hence that quality is what chiefly charms them in the French, who have much more of it than of Beauty, and in the Spanish. Byron was so much smitten with the sun-mellowed complexions and the graceful proportions and gait of the Spanish maidens, that he became quite unjust to his own lovely countrywomen—

“Who round the North for paler dames would seek? How poor their forms appear! How languid, wan, and weak!”

Were savages susceptible to Love, it might be suggested that their practice of exogamy, or marrying a woman from another tribe, had something to do with their admiration of novelty and complementary qualities; but we know that they do not admire such qualities, but only such typical traits as prevail among their own women, and these, moreover, in an exaggerated form. This is one reason why savages are so ugly. They have no Romantic Love to improve their Personal Beauty by fusing heterogeneous defects into homogeneous perfections.

Thus we may freely endorse Schopenhauer’s doctrine regarding the benefits derived by the offspring (ultimately, in several generations) from marriages based on complementary Love, without bowing down before his fetish—a fetish which appears doubly objectionable because it is old-fashioned; i.e. it strives to “maintain the type of the species in its primitive purity,” whereas modern science teaches that this “primitive type” of human beauty had a very simian aspect.

Nor need we at all accept the pessimistic aspect of his theory—the notion that Love is an illusion, and that Love-marriages commonly end unhappily, the lover sacrificing himself for his progeny.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology, elaborates an idea which so curiously leads up to this phase of Schopenhauer’s doctrine that it must be briefly referred to for its evolutionary suggestiveness.

Among the lowest animals—the microscopic protozoa—the individual, as he remarks, is sacrificed after a few hours of life, by breaking up into two new individuals, or into a number of germs which produce a new generation. The parents are here entirely sacrificed to the interests of the young and the species. As we ascend in the scale of life this sacrifice of parents to the young and the species becomes less and less prevalent. Among birds, for instance, “The lives of the parents are but partially subordinated at times when the young are being reared. And then there are long intervals between breeding-seasons, during which the lives of parents are carried on for their own sakes.... In proportion as organisms become higher in their structures and powers, they are individually less sacrificed to the maintenance of the species; and the implication is that in the highest type of man this sacrifice is reduced to a minimum.”

Here is the point where Schopenhauer, had he been an evolutionist, might have dovetailed his theory with Spencer’s, by saying that in man it is no longer the life of the individual, or most of his time, that is sacrificed, but merely his conjugal happiness, which the Love-instinct induces him unconsciously to barter for the superior physical and mental beauty of his offspring.

Unfortunately, Schopenhauer did not take any pains to verify his theory by testing it by vulgar facts. There are plenty of unhappy marriages, but no one who will search his memory can fail to come to the conclusion that the vast majority of them are cases where money or rank and not Love supplied the motive of an unsympathetic union. Though Conjugal Affection consists of a different group of emotions from Romantic Love, yet there is an affinity between them; and it is not likely that Conjugal Love will ever supervene where before marriage there was an entire absence of sympathy and adoration. Even an imprudent Love-match which leads to poverty—is it not preferable to a mariage de convenance, which leads to lifelong indifference and ennui? Is it not better to have one month of ecstatic bliss in life than to live and die without ever knowing life’s highest rapture?

Again, the French marry for money and social convenience, and their children are ugly; the Americans marry for Love, and have the most beautiful children in the world. Is it not more conducive to conjugal happiness to know that one has lovely children and that the race is increasing, than to have ugly children and to know that the race is dying out?

Love-matches would never end unhappily if the lovers would take proper care of their own happiness by transfusing the habits of Courtship into conjugal life, as elsewhere explained in this book.

Schopenhauer’s whole argument is vitiated by the fact that it is chiefly the physical complementary qualities that inspire Love, not the mental—the latter, in fact, being barely noticed by him. Mental divergence might indeed occasionally lead to an unhappy marriage, but physical divergence—the fact that he is large and blond, she small and a brunette—cannot possibly lead to matrimonial discord. This knocks the whole bottom out of Schopenhauer’s erotic pessimism. The only sense in which Love is an illusion is in its Hyperbolic phase—the notion that the beloved is superior to all other mortals; and that is a very harmless illusion.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism, it should be added, is greatly mitigated by the poetic halo of martyrdom with which he invests the lover’s head. Society and public opinion, he points out, applaud him for instinctively preferring the welfare of the next generation to his own comfort. “For is not the exact determination of the individualities of the next generation a much higher and nobler object than those ecstatic feelings of the lovers, and their super-sensual soap-bubbles?” It is this that invests Love with its poetic character. There is one thing only that justifies tears in a man, and that is the loss of his Love, for in that he bewails not his own loss but the loss of the species.

Apart from the suggestive details of his essay, Schopenhauer’s merit and originality lies, first, in his having pointed out that Love becomes more intense the more it is individualised; secondly, in emphasising the fact that in match-making it is not the happiness of the to-be-married couple that should be chiefly consulted, but the consequences of their union to the offspring; thirdly, in dwelling on the important truth that Love is a cause of Beauty, because its aim always is either to perpetuate existing Beauty through hereditary transmission, or to create new Beauty by fusing two imperfect individuals into a being in whom their short-comings mutually neutralise one another.

Love, however, is only one source of Personal Beauty. Personal Beauty has four sources; and these must now be considered in succession, in the order which roughly indicates their successive evolution—Health, Crossing, Love, and Mental Refinement.

The remainder of this work will be devoted exclusively to the subject of Personal Beauty, as it influences and is influenced by Romantic Love. And here, as in the preceding pages, I shall always cite the ipsissima verba of the greatest specialists who have written on any particular branch of this subject.

FOUR SOURCES OF BEAUTY

I.—HEALTH

Plants, Animals, Savages.—In two of the most exquisite passages, not only in his own works, but in all English literature, Mr. Ruskin has emphasised the dependence of physical beauty in plants on their healthy appearance, and the independence of this beauty on any idea of direct utility to man.

“It is a matter of easy demonstration,” he says, “that, setting the characters of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form is in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy; as in a rose-bush, setting aside all considerations of gradated flushing of colour and fair folding of line, which it shares with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find in and through all this certain signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and enjoyment in the particular individual plant itself. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be constantly exercising that function, and, as it seems, solely for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that reflection will show us that the plant is not living for itself alone, that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives as well as receives, but no sense of this whatever mingles with our perception of physical beauty in its forms. Those forms which appear to be necessary to its health, the symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant’s own happiness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they give us pleasure in our sympathising with that of the plant, and if we see a leaf withered or shrunk or worm-eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel it to be most painful, not because it hurts us, but because it seems to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and failure of life in it.”

“The bending tree, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us. The same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It serves as a bridge,—it has become useful; it lives not for itself, and its beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent on its lines and colours, not its functions. Saw it into planks, and though now adapted to become permanently useful, its whole beauty is lost for ever, or to be regained only in part when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand of Nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of life.”

In the animal world we find the same dependence of Beauty upon Health. As Mr. Wallace has shown, “colour and ornament are strictly correlated with health, vigour, and general fitness to survive.” It is the superior vitality, vigour, and vivacity of certain male animals that leads the choicest females to prefer them to others less favoured; and thus it happens that, thanks to the dependence of Beauty on Health, animals have become more and more beautiful. Moreover, it is Love in its primitive form that urges animals to prefer those that are most healthy. And thus we have the three great agents acting and reacting upon one another. Health produces Beauty, and together they inspire Love; while Love selects Health, and thus preserves and multiplies Beauty. But this whole subject has been so fully discussed in the chapter on Love among Animals that it is needless to recapitulate the facts here.

Concerning savages, there is a prevalent notion that, owing to their free and easy life in the forests, they are healthier on the average than civilised mankind. As a matter of fact, however, they are as inferior to us in Health as in Beauty. Their constant exposure and irregular feeding habits, their neglect and ignorance of every hygienic law, in conjunction with their vicious lives, their arbitrary mutilations of various parts, and their selection of inferior forms, prevent their bodies from assuming the regular and delicate proportions which we regard as essential to Beauty. They arrive at maturity at an earlier age, and lose their vitality sooner than we do. “Decrepitude,” says Dr. Topinard, “shows itself sooner in some races than in others. The Australians and Bosjesmans are old men at a period when the European is in the full enjoyment of his faculties, both physical and intellectual. The Japanese the same, according to Dr. Krishaber, physician to the Japanese embassy.”

Women everywhere pay less attention to the laws of Health than men. They have less exercise, less fresh air and sunshine than men. Hence, although the most beautiful women are more beautiful than the handsomest men, yet in probably every country of the world the average man is a more perfect specimen of masculine than the average woman of feminine Beauty. Concerning savages, Mr. Spencer says: “Very generally among the lower races the females are even more unattractive in aspect than the males. It is remarked of the Puttooahs, whose men are diminutive and whose women are still more so, that ‘the men are far from being handsome, but the palm of ugliness must be awarded to the women.’ The latter are hard-worked and apparently ill-fed.” Again, of the inhabitants of the Corea Gutzlaff says: “The females are very ugly, whilst the male sex is one of the best formed of Asia.... Women are treated like beasts of burden.” Many similar cases are cited by Dr. Ploss in Das Weib.

Concerning modern civilised nations a well-known art-critic has given his testimony to the effect that “Possibly owing to the fact that men are freer to follow their normal lives, I have found that in a majority of the countries I have visited there are more handsome men than beautiful women. This is peculiarly the case with the modern Greek, and was, if antique sculpture could be accepted as witness, with the ancient.”

Greek Beauty.—In the preceding chapters of this work an attempt has been made to show that there is a general connection between the growth of Love and the growth of Beauty throughout the world. To some readers, no doubt, the thought has suggested itself, “How, if this be true, did the loveless Greeks succeed in reaching such uncommon physical beauty—beauty which artists of all times have admired?”

It must be borne in mind, however, that we are very liable to exaggerate in our notions of Greek Beauty, because we are apt to generalise from the fine statues that have come down to us, and to imagine that they represent the common type of Greek Beauty. But it is well known that the Greeks idealised their statues according to certain physiognomic rules; and, moreover, as Winckelmann remarks, “Beauty was not a general quality even among the Greeks, and Cotta in Cicero says that, among the great numbers of young persons at Athens, there were only a few possessing true beauty.”

Besides, it has not been claimed that Love is the only cause of Beauty. Taking into consideration the other sources of Beauty, it is easy enough to account for such physical attractiveness as the Greeks did possess. The intellectual culture which the men enjoyed gave them a great advantage over the women; and equally important, if not more so, was the attention which the men (and in some cases the women too) paid to Health. Their habitual life in the open air, while the women were locked up at home, combined with their daily gymnastic exercises in making their complexion healthy, their eyes sparkling, their limbs supple, vigorous, and graceful.

Other causes that tended to keep up an average of healthy bodily development were the refusal to bring up sickly and deformed infants, and the existence of numerous slaves, who did all the drudgery for the Greeks.

It is most characteristic that the author of a very old Greek ode formulates his wishes in this order: First, health; then, beauty; thirdly, wealth honestly got; fourth, the privilege of being gay and merry with his friends.

First, Health; then, Beauty. There lies the secret, for they always go together; and in aiming at one the Greeks got the other too.

There was every reason why Greek parents should have striven eagerly to follow those laws of Health which ensure beautiful children. In ancient Greece Beauty was a possession which led to national fame. Some persons, Winckelmann informs us, were even characterised by a particular name, borrowed from some specially fine feature. Thus Demetrius Poliorketes was named, from the beauty of his eyelids, χαριτοβλέφαρος i.e. on whose lids the graces dwell.

“It appears, indeed,” the same writer continues, "to have been a belief that the procreation of beautiful children might be promoted by the distribution of prizes for beauty, as there is reason to infer from the contests of beauty which were instituted in the remotest ages by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, in the time of the Heraclidæ, on the banks of the river Alpheus, in Elis; and also from the fact that at the festival of the Philesian Apollo, a prize for the most exquisite kiss was conferred on the youthful. Its assignment was subject to the decision of a judge, as was probably also the case at Megara, at the tomb of Diocles.

“At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of Juno, and among the citizens of Parrhasia, the women contended for the prize of beauty. The regard for this quality was so strong that, as Oppian declares, the Spartan women placed in their sleeping-rooms an Apollo, or Bacchus, or Nereus, or Narcissus, or Hyacinthus, or Castor and Pollux, in order that they might bear beautiful children.”

Some hint as to what the Greeks regarded as beautiful is given by the epithets Homer bestows on Helen—"the well-rounded" “the white-armed,” “fair-haired,” “of the beautiful cheeks.”

Mediæval Ugliness.—This is a topic which might as well be introduced under any of the other Sources of Beauty, for it is difficult to say which of these sources was most completely and deliberately choked up during the Dark Ages.

It is a curious irony of language that makes asceticism almost identical with æstheticism, of which it is the deadly enemy. As diseases are transmitted from generation to generation, so it seems that the fear of Beauty born of mediæval asceticism has not yet died out completely; for it is related that some years ago a pious dame in Boston seriously meditated the duty of having some of her daughter’s sound teeth pulled out, so as to mitigate her sinful Beauty.

If this worthy lady had followed St. Jerome’s injunction—"I entirely forbid a young lady to bathe"; if she had taught her that it is unladylike to have a healthy appetite; if she had locked her up in a house rendered pestilential by defective drainage; allowed her mind to rot in fallow idleness; taught her that to be really saintly and virtuous she must be pale and hysterical; or imitated the lady who was praised by a bishop in the fourth century for “having brought upon herself a swarm of diseases which defied all medical skill to cure,”—if the worthy Boston lady had but followed this mediæval system, she would have succeeded in a short time in overcoming her daughter’s sinful Beauty, and making her “ugly as a mud-fence,” as they say out West.

That Personal Beauty cannot flourish where Health is regarded as a vice and Disease as a virtue is self-evident. And one needs only to look at mediæval pictures to note how coarse and void of refined expression are the men, how hard and masculine the women. The faces of the numerous mediæval women in Planché’s Cyclopædia of Costume have almost all an expression approaching imbecility, and features as if they had been chiselled by a small boy trying his hand at sculpture for the first time. Thackeray does not hesitate to speak even of “those simpering Madonnas of Rafael.” Mr. G. A. Simcox remarks that in manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (like the Harleian Gospels and Maccabees) we meet with “short, thickset figures, mostly with the long, square, horsey face, moving stiffly in small groups, in heavy dresses; and even the daughter of Herodias dances upon her head [sic] in a gown that might have stood alone. On the other hand, the faces are more set, more articulate, less flabby, though they are all mean, or almost all, and look askance out of the corners of their eyes” (Art Journal, 1874, p. 58).

There may be Oriental countries where woman is kept more closely under lock and key than she was in Europe during the Dark Ages; but nowhere else has man so well succeeded in reducing the pursuit of unhappiness to a science, in snubbing, scorning, abusing, maltreating woman. How all this must have tended to increase Personal Beauty is well brought out in the following advice given by Mr. Ruskin: “Do not think you can make a girl lovely if you do not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on a good girl’s nature—there is not one check you give to her instincts of affection or of effort—which will not be indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue.”

Modern Hygiene.—Disease is Beauty’s deadliest enemy. Yet for the sake of gratifying a silly vanity—for the sake of being distinguished from ordinary mortals—a certain pallor and blasé languor have long been considered in certain influential circles as more distingué than ruddy cheeks and robust health. Yet even if pale cheeks were more beautiful than rosy cheeks, would it be worth while to purchase them at the cost of premature decay—of the certainty that a few years of pale cheeks will be followed by many years of sallow cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, deeply sunk into their orbits?

Though beauty is still of lamentably rare occurrence in every country, there is infinitely more of it than during the Middle Ages; and certainly not the least cause of this is the increased attention paid to Hygiene—public and personal. The difference in this respect between us and our ancestors is well brought out by the statistics regarding the average length of life. In ancient Rome, it is stated, "the average longevity among the most favoured classes was but thirty years, whereas to-day the average longevity among the corresponding class of people is fifty years. In the sixteenth century the average longevity in Geneva was 21·21 years. Between 1814 and 1833 it was 40·68, and as large a proportion now live to seventy as lived to forty-three three hundred years ago." Dr. Corfield, comparing the statistics of 1842 with those of 1884, states that the mean duration of life in London has increased from twenty-nine to thirty-eight years. “In the reign of Queen Elizabeth the death-rate of the metropolis as it then was amounted to 40 per thousand. In the reign of Queen Victoria, almost entirely by the reduction of mortality by means of improved drainage, ventilation, and water, it has often touched 15 and 14, and even fallen as low as 13 in the thousand,” while “in many of the suburban districts, and in the fashionable region about Hyde Park it ranges from 11 to 12.”

In France, according to M. Topinard, the mean duration of life, which was twenty-nine at the close of the eighteenth century, and thirty-nine from 1817 to 1831, increased to forty from 1840 to 1859, thanks to the progress of sanitary science and civilisation.

As Hygiene is receiving more and more attention every year, it is possible that in course of time Dr. W. B. Richardson’s ideal will be realised—a town ideally perfect in sanitary matters, having a death-rate of 9 per 1000, and 105 years the duration of a man’s life.

As decrepitude and premature old age means a premature loss of Beauty, personal attractiveness would be correspondingly prolonged and increased with life itself.

Even at the present time not one house in a thousand is so constructed that every room has good ventilation. Architects are, however, less to blame than the people who will persist in their absurd old superstition that draughts and night air are injurious. Professor Reclam, the distinguished hygienist, not long ago opened a crusade against the horror of night air and draughts which is especially prevalent among his countrymen. “Sleeping with open windows,” he says, “is most unjustly decried among the people, as well as night air in general. But night air is injurious only in swampy regions, whereas on dry soil, in the mountains, and everywhere in the upper stories of a house it is more salubrious than day air.... Draughts are not injurious unless we are in a glow. To healthy persons they cannot possibly do so much harm as the stagnant air in a close room. The fear of draughts is entirely groundless, though it affects most people in a manner which is simply ludicrous.”

Electricity, no doubt, will in less than a decade abolish horses from our cities, and with them the dust, foul odours, and sleep-murdering noise. The gain to Health, and through it to Beauty, from this alone, will be enormous. Doubtless one of the reasons why there is so much Beauty, so many fresh and sparkling eyes, in Venice, is because there are no horses in that city, and the inhabitants are not roused and half-roused from sleep every fifteen minutes during the night by a waggon rattling down the street.

It is not sufficiently known that street-noise may injure the Health even of those whom it does not entirely wake up. The restorative value of sleep lies in its depth and the absence of dreams. A noisy waggon interferes with the depth of sleep and starts a current of dreams, thus depriving it of half its potency.

“Beauty sleep” is an expression which rests on a real physiological truth. Sleep before midnight really is more health-giving and beautifying than after midnight, for the reason that in all towns and cities there is less noise in the early hours of the night than after four in the morning, wherefore sleep is deeper between ten and twelve than between six and eight o’clock. The reason why so many more proposals (by city folks) are made in the country than in the city is not only because there are more frequent opportunities of meeting at a summer hotel, but because the young folks retire early, and appear in the morning with an exuberance of Health, born of fresh air and sound sleep, which cannot fail to inspire Love.

Other matters of Hygiene will be discussed in connection with the organs which they specially concern.

II.—CROSSING

Darwin has proved experimentally that in the vegetable kingdom “cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious. This is shown by the difference in height, weight, constitutional vigour, and fertility of the offspring from crossed and self-fertilised flowers, and in the number of seeds produced by the parent plants.” He also showed that “the benefit from cross-fertilisation depends on the plants which are crossed having been subjected during previous generations to somewhat different conditions.”

Similarly, concerning animals, we read in Topinard, that “breeders who select their subjects with a definite object to breed in and in, that is to say, between near relations, rapidly obtain excellent results. They know, however, that fertility then diminishes, and that it will cease altogether if they do not have recourse from time to time to crossing, in order to strengthen the race.”

But both in the vegetable and the animal kingdom, as we have seen, superior Health also implies superior Beauty.

The inference is natural that the human race also must be benefited by marriages of individuals of different races, or of the same race, but brought up under different conditions of life. And the facts are entirely in favour of this supposition, as are the best authorities in Anthropology. Dr. Topinard gives the following instances among many others: “Immigration into the United States, which has taken so considerable a flight during the last thirty years, has already been enormous. Every variety of cross has been going on between English, Irish, Germans, Italians, French, etc., with the greatest possible success. We may also mention numberless Spaniards from the Peninsula, among whom are found the features of the Saracen invaders of the ninth century; then that population on the Barbary coast, called Moors, and which is a medley of races of every description, the Arab and Berber blood predominating. On tracing back the yellow races, we also discover a perfect eugenesis.... De Mas speaks in the highest terms of mixed breeds of Chinese and Mongolians, and MM. Mondières and Morice of those of Chinese and Annamites under the name of Minuongs. Dr. Bowring describes a race in the Philippine Islands, intermediate between the Malays and Chinese, as the principal agent of civilisation in these latitudes.”

On the other hand, “it is undeniable that in Africa the Negro races do not cross to any great extent.” Nor has any one ever accused the Negroes of an excessive amount of Beauty. Whereas in Lima, which has the finest women in South America, “there are twenty-three different names to designate the varieties of mixed breeds of Spaniards, Peruvians, and Negroes.” “The number of mongrels on the face of the globe has been estimated at twelve millions, of whom no fewer than eleven millions are in South America.” South American women are already famous for their Beauty, and there is reason to believe that when the fusion of all these elements is complete the race will be one of the finest in the world. What Beauty it has now seems to be owing chiefly to the magic of Crossing; for attention to Health there is little but what comes from life in the open air; while Romantic Love is perhaps as rare as Mental Refinement, inasmuch as Courtship is not so free and easy a matter as in North America. All the more honour to the potency of Crossing.

Take a few more cases. The African Negroes, as just stated, do not mix much, and are an ugly type. Among the Polynesians, on the other hand, there are many very fine types of human beauty; and it is therefore not surprising to read that to-day in Polynesia, “mixed breeds are so numerous that it would be difficult to find among them any individuals of pure race.”

Again, concerning the Magyars or Hungarians, Schweiger-Lerchenfeld remarks that “they are a splendid race, physically and intellectually.... The girls and young women are of most piquant charm, models of health in mind and body.” But these Magyars, when they first came to Europe, were, as Waitz states, “of a repulsive ugliness in the eyes of all their neighbours.” That they have mixed with the Indo-Germanic type is shown by their appearance, as well as by peculiarities of their language. “Where they have probably remained less mixed,” Waitz continues, “and at the same time less cultivated, in some remote regions, especially in the mountains, the ugly primitive type may be found to the present day; in the plains may be found every transitional form from this to the nobler type; at Szegedin both are found face to face.”

The Magyars, in turn, have, like the Slavo-Italians, Czechs, etc., assisted the Austrians in evolving a superior type of Beauty by fusing with them. That there is very much more Beauty in Vienna than in any purely German city is an almost proverbial commonplace; and the reason why may be found in the statistics: in Germany 31·80 per cent are blond, 14·05 brunet, 54·15 mixed; in Austria 19·59 per cent are blond, 23·17 brunet, and 68·04 mixed.

The European Turks have much nobler forms of the head and features than their Asiatic relatives; and the inference seems inevitable that they owe these improvements to intermarriage with Circassian women.

A negative instance, showing the disadvantages of abstaining from Crossing, is given by the Jews. There are handsome Jews and, up to a certain age, very beautiful Jewesses. But the typical Jew is certainly not a thing of beauty. The disadvantages of Jewish separatism are shown not only in the long, thick, crooked nose, the bloated lips, almost suggesting a negro, and the heavy lower eyelid, but in the fact that the Jews “have proportionately more insane, deaf mutes, blind, and colour-blind” than other Europeans. From an intellectual and industrial point of view, the Jews are one of the finest races in the world, and their absorption by the natives of the countries in which they have settled could not but benefit both parties concerned. From this point of view there may be something said even in favour of the money-marriages, which are now so frequent between extravagant German officers and Jewish heiresses. Unfortunately, the Jews have kept apart so long from the rest of the world that they do not readily mix with non-Jews. Contrary to the general rule, mixed marriages of Jews and Christians are less fertile than pure Jewish unions.

The precise manner in which a mixture of races improves physical appearance is a question still open to debate. Professor Kollmann (Plastische Anatomie) thinks “the result of the crossing of two forms is comparable, not to a chemical, but to a mechanical mixture”; and this agrees with the view of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who endeavours to trace to this fact the frequent want of correspondence between intellectual and physical beauty. He believes, however, the time will come “when the present causes of incongruity will have worked themselves out,” and intellectual beauty emerge in harmony with physical, in all details, as it no doubt exists in general.

There is no lack of facts supporting the view that sexual fusion is a mere mechanical mixture. The “Bourbon nose” seems to defy mitigating circumstances for generations; and “M. de Quatrefages knew a great-grandson of the bailiff of Suffren who was a striking likeness of his ancestor after four generations, and who, nevertheless, bore no resemblance either to his father or his mother.” A child may resemble its father, mother, aunt, uncle, grand-parents, or several of them at once; and the resemblance may vary at different ages.

More extraordinary are the following cases cited by Topinard: “Sometimes the child possesses altogether the character of one or other parent: for example, the child of a European father and a Chinese mother, Dr. Scherzer says, is altogether a European or altogether a Chinese. A Berber with blue eyes and with the lobule of the ear absent, married to a dark Arab woman with a well-formed ear, had two children, one like himself, the other like his wife. An English officer, fair, with blue eyes and florid complexion, had several children by an Indian negress. Some were the image of the father, others exactly like the mother.... A decided negro, having had a white among his ancestors, has unexpectedly a child with a white skin by a negress.”

Yet all these are exceptional cases, which, like the winning number in a lottery, get a disproportionate amount of attention. Moreover, this “mechanical” form of assimilation seems to occur chiefly where very unrelated races are fused, and then especially in the first generation. In subsequent generations the union doubtless tends to become more and more chemical—no longer a negro character floating on a white one, like oil on water, but a mixture, as of wine and water.

Take the American quadroons, for instance, famous for their beauty of form and features. They are mongrels of the third generation, having one-eighth black, seven-eighths white blood in their veins. Surely these characters are not “mechanically” mixed in such a woman, but “chemically.” That is, you do not find her with the eyes and nose of a negro, the lips and ears of a white, one part of her skin dark the other light: but in everything there is a fusion of the ancestral elements. Her nose is not flat like that of her ancestress, nor her lips swollen, but both are intermediate between those of her white and black ancestors. Her lip is still thicker than that of the whites, and that gives her a sensuous aspect, kiss-inviting. Her eyes, again, have lost the fierce glare and opaque blackness of the negro-grandmother, and assumed a more crystalline, tender lustre; while their form and surroundings have become more refined and expressive. All this is homogeneous fusion, not “heterogeneous mixture.”

Finally, it is hardly correct to state dogmatically that a certain person resembles this or that ancestor. In nothing else do opinions vary so constantly and so ludicrously. No one who has ever been “trotted around” among his relatives in the “old country,” can have failed to be amused at the countless resemblances to this and that uncle, aunt, or grand-parent discovered in him, until he came to the conclusion that he must be a veritable epitome of the whole genealogy. A man who at home is supposed to be absolutely unlike his brother, is elsewhere mistaken for him and addressed as such; while another man finds a friend who knew his father in his youth, and declares he is exactly like him; though a second friend who knew only the mother, claims a similar hereditary influence for her. All of which tends to show that there is more of both parents in each person than is commonly supposed; and that the reason why opinions differ so, is because the fusion is chemical rather than mechanical, which makes it difficult to put the finger on distinct points of resemblance.

It is in the more closely allied races, like the English and German, or Italian and Spanish, that “chemical” fusion is most readily attained, and Beauty most rapidly evolved. Such are the unions which take place on such a large scale in the United States and Canada; and this may account for the fact that there is more Beauty in North America than in South America, where the races that intermingle are less related. There is a golden mean here as in everything else.

III.—ROMANTIC LOVE

What Crossing does on a national scale, Love continues with individuals, by fusing dissonant, but complementary, parental qualities into a harmonious progeny. How this is done is sufficiently shown in the chapter on Schopenhauer.

This, however, is only one of the ways in which Love increases the amount of Beauty in the world. There are several others.

The second is that—apart from complementary considerations—Romantic Love always urges the choice of a mate who approaches nearest to the ideal type of Beauty. As Beauty is hereditary, and as a beautiful father and mother may have six or more beautiful children, this predilection for Beauty shown by Love necessarily preserves and multiplies it—

“From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby Beauty’s rose might never die,”

says Shakspere, anticipating the modern theory of heredity.

On this particular topic nothing more need be said here, because all the remainder of this book will be taken up with a consideration of those features of Personal Beauty for which the æsthetic taste which forms part of Romantic Love shows a decided preference.

The third way in which Love promotes the cause of Beauty is by the great attention it pays to Health in its choice. For though Health is not always synonymous with Beauty, it is the soil on which alone Beauty can germinate and flourish.

The fourth way is through the elimination of ugliness. Love, says Plato, is devotion to Beauty: “with the ugly Eros has no concern.”

From the æsthetic point of view, ugliness is disease. Now there is a cast-iron Lykurgean law prevailing throughout Nature which eliminates the diseased and the ugly. It is a cruel agency, called Natural Selection, and has not the slightest regard for individuals, but provides only for the weal of the species, as Schopenhauer erroneously says is the case with Love. In a bed of plants, if there are more than can find sustenance, the stronger crowd out the weaker. Among animals, wherever there is competition, the best-developed, handsomest lion survives in combat, and the most fleet-footed, and consequently most graceful, deer escapes, while the clumsy, the ugly, and diseased perish miserably, inexorably. Savages leave the old and feeble to die, and weak or deformed children are either deliberately put out of the way or perish from want of proper care. Nor among the ancient civilised nations were such methods unknown. Plato and Aristotle, says Mr. Grote, agree in this point: “Both of them command that no child born crippled or deformed shall be brought up—a practice actually adopted at Sparta under the Lykurgean Institutions, and even carried further, since no child was allowed to be brought up until it had been inspected and approved by the public nurses.” The Romans, too, were legally permitted to expose deformed children.

Christianity, the religion of pity and charity, abhors such practices. Christianity is antagonistic to Natural Selection. One of its chief functions is the building of hospitals in which the cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, are gratuitously and tenderly cared for, instead of being allowed to perish, as they would under the sway of Natural Selection.

This artificial preservation of disease and deformity, in and out of hospitals, due to Christian charity, might in the long run prove injurious to the welfare of the human race, were it not for the stepping in of Modern Love as a preserver of Health and Beauty. What formerly was left to the agency of Natural Selection is now done by Love, through Sexual Selection, on a vast scale.

From a moral point of view, the substitution of Sexual for Natural Selection is a great gain, in harmony with the spirit of Christianity. For Cupid does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of Health and Beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness.

IV.—MENTAL REFINEMENT

“After all,” says Washington Irving, speaking of Spanish women, “it is the divinity within which makes the divinity without; and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty.”

It is one of the commonest commonplaces of conversation that in moments of intellectual or emotional excitement the features of plain people assume an aspect of exquisite beauty. Love transfuses a homely girl’s countenance with a glow of angelic loveliness; and biographies are full of statements concerning the countenances of men of genius, which, ordinarily unattractive, assumed an expression of unearthly beauty while their minds were active and electrified the facial muscles.

“There is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon the features,” says Mr. Ruskin; and again, he speaks of “the operation of the intellectual powers upon the features, in the fine cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them of signs of sensuality and sloth, by which they are blunted and deadened, and substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy and insipidity (by which wants alone the faces of many fair women are utterly spoiled and rendered valueless); and by the keenness given to the eye and fine moulding and development to the brow, of which effects Sir Charles Bell has well noted the desirableness and opposition to brutal types.”

An English clergyman, the Rev. F. P. Lawson, diocesan inspector for Northamptonshire, issued a report not long ago concerning the results of his observations in 325 urban and rural schools during several years, regarding the effects of good education in improving the appearance of the children. “A school, thoroughly well taught, seldom failed to exhibit a considerable number of interesting little faces, and a striking absence of such faces might invariably be associated with poverty of tone and superficial instruction. Nothing struck him more forcibly in a school that has been suddenly lifted out of the mire by a firstrate teacher than the bright and thoughtful look which the children soon acquire.”

Negative evidence to the same effect might also be cited by the volume, but one case may suffice. “It is unhappily a fact,” says Mr. Galton, “that fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become established, and are one of the saddest disfigurements of modern civilisation.”

The connection between culture and a superior type of Beauty is strikingly revealed in the following remarks on the far-famed Georgian women of the Caucasus, made by a great connoisseur of feminine beauty, the poet Bodenstedt: "In Europe the notion prevails that a Georgian woman is a tall, graceful being, of luscious form, clothed in wide, rich garments, with dense black hair, long enough to enchain all masculine hearts, an open, noble forehead, and a pair of eyes which contain within their dark, mysterious, magic circle all the secrets of human delight that come through the soul or the senses. Her gait is rapture. Joy precedes, and admiration follows her.... With such notions in their heads, strangers generally arrive in Georgia, and find themselves wofully disappointed. The tourists who come with such great expectations to visit this country, invested with the atmosphere of a fairyland by history and legend, either adhere stubbornly to their preconceived notions, or else they instantly go over to the opposite extreme, and find everything dirty, ugly, disgusting, dreadful.

"The truth lies between these extremes. The Georgians are, all in all, one of the handsomest nations on the earth. But although I am a great admirer of women, I am compelled in this case to award the prize to the men instead of the women. This opinion is endorsed by all educated inhabitants of Georgia who have eyes, taste, and an impartial judgment.

“I must add that of that higher beauty where heart and intellect and soul are mirrored in the eye, I found few traces in the whole Caucasus, either among men or women. I have seen the greater number of the beauties which Georgia boasts, but not one face have I seen that satisfied me completely, though the picturesque native costume does much to heighten the charms of the women. The face entirely lacks that refined mental expression which makes a beautiful European woman such a unique enchantress. Such a woman may still inspire love and win hearts long after the time of her bloom; whereas in a Georgian everything fades with youth. The eyes, which, notwithstanding their apparent fire, never expressed anything but calm and voluptuous indolence, lose their lustre; the nose, which even in its normal relations exceeds the limits of beauty, assumes, in consequence of the premature hollowness of the cheeks, such abnormal dimensions that many people imagine that it actually continues to grow; and the bosom, which the national costume makes no effort to conceal, prematurely loses its natural firmness—all of which phenomena are observed in European women much less frequently, and in a less exaggerated form. If you add to this the habit, so prevalent among Georgians, young and old, of using white and red cosmetics, you will understand that such rude and inartistic arts of the toilet can only add to the observer’s sense of dissatisfaction.”

America affords many illustrations of the manner in which refinement of mind and manners increases Beauty in a single generation. There are in every city thousands of parents who began life as ordinary labourers, but soon got rich through industry or good luck. They bring up their children in houses where every attention is paid to sanitary rules; they send them to school and college; and when they come back you would hardly believe that those coarse-featured, clumsy-limbed, ungraceful persons could be their father and mother. The discrepancy is sometimes so great that when the young folks invite people of “their set” to their house, the old birds keep out of the way discreetly, either of their own accord or by filial dictation, which in America appears to be displacing parental authority.

But if there is such an intimate connection between culture and Beauty, how is it that we so often find plain features joined with a noble mind and fine features with a mean mind? Mr. Spencer has endeavoured to explain this apparent discrepancy by assuming that in such cases plain features are inherited severally and separately from ancestors of diverse physiognomies, which being merely mechanically mixed, not fused, fail to harmonise. There may be something in this, but a simpler explanation is at hand.

Noble minds are often the result of individual effort, and persistence in it. Many men of genius have had humble parents not specially gifted. From these parents and their ancestors they inherited their plain faces. Now individual effort, in the short period of a lifetime, is insufficient to alter the proportions of a face, which depend on its bony parts; but it does suffice to alter the expression, which depends on the movements of the soft, muscular parts. Hence every person, however plain-featured, may acquire a beautiful expression by cultivating his mind and refining his manners and temper. Whenever, therefore, we meet a man or woman whose features are less attractive at rest than when moved to expression of emotion, we may feel sure that they owe their mental refinement more to individual effort than to inherited capacity.

The children of such persons will be more beautiful than they are themselves, because they will inherit the parents’ habit of expressive muscular action of the features. And owing to the fact that all the bony parts of the body are modified in accordance with the action of the muscles attached to them, the bony parts, the proportions, of the face will also be gradually modified and moulded into nobler shapes, through the continuance of refined emotional expression.

It is in this manner that intellectual growth and emotional refinement have gradually differentiated our features from those of our savage ancestors. Our lips have become more delicate, our mouths smaller, our jaws less gigantic, ponderous, and projecting, because civilisation has taught us to use the hands in preparing food, and to cut it instead of tearing it off the bone with the teeth, as savages and other wild animals do.

Use increases, disuse diminishes the size of an organ. Hence for the same reason that our jaws have become less projecting and heavy, our forehead has lost its backward slope and become straight and noble, owing to the growth of the brain. And similarly with other peculiarities of the face, indicating the connection between mental refinement and physical beauty. “Thus is it,” says Mr. Spencer, “with depression of the bridge of the nose, which is a characteristic both of barbarians and of our babes, possessed by them in common with our higher quadrumana. Thus, also, is it with that forward opening of the nostrils, which renders them conspicuous in a front view of the face,—a trait alike of infants, savages, and apes. And the same may be said of widespread alæ to the nose, of great width between the eyes, of long mouth, of large mouth—indeed of all those leading peculiarities of feature which are by general consent called ugly.”

EVOLUTION OF TASTE

SAVAGE NOTIONS OF BEAUTY

In all the preceding remarks concerning the connection between mental and physical beauty, the assumption has been made tacitly that what we consider beautiful is so in reality; and that our taste is a safe guide to follow. Yet this assumption may be challenged, and has, indeed, been often challenged. Every nation, every savage tribe, has its own standard of Beauty; what right, therefore, have we to claim dogmatically that we are infallible judges?

Ask the devil, says Voltaire, what is the meaning of το καλὸν—the Beautiful—and he will tell you “Le beau est une paire de comes, quatre griffes, et une queue”—a couple of horns, four claws, and a tail. Ask a North American Indian, says Hearne, what is Beauty, he will answer: “A broad, flat face, small eyes, high cheek-bones, three or four broad black lines across each cheek, a low forehead, a large, broad chin, a clumsy hook-nose, a tawny hide, and breasts hanging down to the belt.” In the Chinese empire “those women are preferred who have ... a broad face, high cheek-bones, very broad noses, and enormous ears.” “One of the titles of the Zulu king,” says Darwin (who gives many other instances à propos in chapter xix. of the Descent of Man), “is ‘You who are black.’ Mr. Galton, in speaking to me about the natives of South Africa, remarked that their ideas of beauty seem very different from ours; for in one tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls were not admired by the natives.”

Darwin himself appears to have been staggered and puzzled by this diversity of taste, and to have partly inclined to the theory that Beauty is relative to the human mind (though elsewhere he repudiates it)—a theory which Jeffrey has so boldly formulated in the assertion that “All tastes are equally just and true, in as far as concerns the individual whose taste is in question; and what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful is beautiful to him, whatever other people may think of it.”

Fiddlesticks! The Alison-Jeffrey school of Scotch æstheticians, having been among the first in the field, have done more to confuse the English mind on the subject of Beauty than several generations of other clever writers will be able to clear up again.

There are about half a dozen sound, square, solid, scientific reasons why we have a better right to our opinion concerning the nature of Beauty than a Hottentot or a North American Indian.

NON-ÆSTHETIC ORNAMENTATION

One of the things most commonly forgotten by those who wonder at the strange “taste” of savages is that many of their customs have nothing whatever to do with the sense of beauty. The habit of putting on “war-paint” originated not in a desire for ornamentation, but in the wish to make themselves frightful in appearance to the enemy. For the same reason heads are mutilated. As Waitz notes in speaking of Tahiti: “A very ugly mutilation is that to which most of the boys had to subject themselves. Immediately after birth their mothers compressed their forehead and the back of the head, so that the former became narrow and high, the latter flat; this was done to make their aspect more terrible, and thus turn them into more formidable warriors.” Tattooing, likewise, was originally intended to be an easy sign of recognition, or of social or religious distinction, rather than an ornament of the body. And when we consider how prone the mind of our own fashionable ladies is to violate every canon of good taste in their wild effort to surpass one another in some novel extravagance just from Paris; when we note that if a Fifth Avenue lady wears a gull on her hat, her coloured cook will invest in a turkey or ostrich for hers, we understand at once that many of the mutilations approved by savages are the outcome of vanity and emulation, not of æsthetic taste.

PERSONAL BEAUTY AS A FINE ART

Yet there are undoubtedly a number of physiognomic and other peculiarities which savages admire while we consider them ugly; and some, again, which we admire and they dislike. Have we a right to consider them inferior to us in taste because they fail to admire what we adore?

Certainly; beyond the shadow of a doubt. It takes genius to fully appreciate genius; it takes a refined taste to appreciate refined beauty. This is what the savage lacks.

Look at any one of the fine arts. Why does the savage prefer his monotonous drumming and ear-piercing war-songs to a soft, beautiful, dreamy Chopin nocturne? Because he cannot understand the nocturne.

Why does he prefer his painted, clumsy, coarse-featured squaw to a civilised woman with delicate contours, refined features, graceful gait? Because he does not understand the beauty of the latter. It is too subtle for his coarse nerves, his feeble imagination. The smiles and manifold expressions that chase one another across her lovely features, like the subtly-interwoven melodies in a symphonic poem, are the visible signs of thoughts and emotions which he has never experienced, and therefore cannot understand. It is like giving him a page of Sanskrit to read.

It is for this reason that a negro never falls in love with a white woman, and that a peasant prefers his plump, crude country-girl to the fair, delicate city visitor. He requires more vigorous arms, broader features, than the city girl possesses, to make an impression on his callous nerves of touch and sight. And it is fortunate for the peasant girl that her lover does lack taste, else she would soon find him a fickle deserter.

The savage, in a word, prefers his style of “beauty” to ours for the same reason that he prefers a piece of raw liver and a glass of oil to the subtle flavours of French cookery and French wines. His senses are too coarse, his mind too vulgar, to perceive the poetry of refined features. Everything must be loud and exaggerated to make an impression on him—loud music, loud and glaring red and yellow colours, loud and coarse features.

This doctrine that differences of taste are merely due to differences in the degree of æsthetic culture, and that there is such a thing as an absolute standard of human beauty, derives further support from the facts (1) that the ideal of beauty set up by the æsthetic Greeks two thousand years ago corresponds so remarkably with that of modern artistic minds; (2) that e.g. a Japanese student in the United States soon learns to prefer American female beauty to the Japanese variety; (3) that an English, Italian, or American audience who at first admire Norma and find Lohengrin tiresome, can in a few seasons be so educated as to prefer Lohengrin and actually scorn Norma; but not vice versâ, in either case (2) or (3).

Mr. Ruskin takes a similar view regarding differences of taste when he says that “respecting what has been asserted of negro nations looking with disgust on the white face, no importance whatever is to be attached to the opinions of races who have never received any ideas of beauty whatsoever (these ideas being only received by minds under some certain degree of cultivation), and whose disgust arises naturally from what they suppose to be a sign of weakness or ill-health.”

That this consideration of health does affect the negro’s judgment regarding the beauty of the white complexion, is also shown by what Mr. Winwood Reade told Mr. Darwin, namely, that the negro’s “horror of whiteness may be attributed ... partly to the belief held by most negroes that demons and spirits are white, and partly to their thinking it a sign of ill-health.”

But of all the theoretical truths emphasised in the Modern Painters none is so important as this: “That not only changes of opinion take place in consequence of experience, but that those changes are from variation of opinion to unity of opinion,—that whatever may be the difference of estimate among unpractised or uncultivated tastes, there will be unity of taste among the experienced; and that, therefore, the result of repeated trial and experience is to arrive at principles of preference in some sort common to all, and which are part of our nature.”

Let us now see what are those principles of Beauty that may be considered independent of a more or less crude and undeveloped taste. Some are negative, some positive.

NEGATIVE TESTS OF BEAUTY

(a) Animals.—"It has been argued," says Darwin (by Schaffhausen), “that ugliness consists in an approach to the structure of the lower animals, and no doubt this is partly true with the more civilised nations, in which intellect is highly appreciated; but this explanation will hardly apply to all forms of ugliness.”

Curiously enough, savages themselves use animals as a negative test of beauty. Thus we read that “the Indians of Paraguay eradicate their eyebrows and eyelashes, saying that they do not wish to be like horses.” “On the Eastern coast, the negro boys, when they saw Burton, cried out, ‘Look at the white man; does he not look like a white ape?’” “A man of Cochin China ‘spoke with contempt of the wife of the English ambassador—that she had white teeth like a dog, and a rosy colour like that of potato-flowers.’”

A few centuries ago it was a favourite pastime of physiognomists to draw elaborate parallels between men and animals. Thus, in 1593, there appeared a work, De Humana Physiognomia, with numerous illustrations, in which always a human face was matched with some animal’s head. Professor Wundt thus sums up the essence of this book: “A broad forehead, we are told, indicates fearfulness, because the ox with his broad head lacks courage. A long forehead, on the other hand, indicates erudition, as is shown by means of an intelligent dog who has the honour of serving as a pendant to Plato’s profile. Persons with shaggy hair are good-natured, as they resemble the lion. He whose eyebrows are turned inwards, towards the nose, is uncleanly like the pig, which this resembles. The narrow chin of the ape signifies malice and envy. Long ears and thick lips, such as the donkey possesses, are signs of stupidity. A person who has a nose crooked from the forehead inclines, like the raven, to theft, etc. These animal-physiognomists appear to have favoured a thoroughly pessimistic view of man’s capacities, inasmuch as for every creditable resemblance they find at least ten discreditable ones.”

Apart from these puerilities, it is in most cases simply absurd to compare man with animals. Except in the case of apes there are no proper terms of comparison, because the types are so distinct; and, moreover, from the point of view of its own type, the average animal of any species is more beautiful than the average man or woman from the human point of view. This assertion is indirectly corroborated by Mr. Galton’s testimony, that “our human civilised stock is far more weakly through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animals, whether wild or domestic.”

Schopenhauer considered animals beautiful in every way, and suggested that whenever we do find an animal ugly it is due to some irrelevant, inevitable association of ideas, as when a monkey suggests a man, or a toad mud. And Mr. Ruskin pertinently suggests that “That mind only is fully disciplined in its theoretic power which, when it chooses, throwing off the sympathies and repugnancies with which the ideas of destructiveness or of innocence accustom us to regard the animal tribes, as well as those meaner likes and dislikes which arise, I think, from the greater or less resemblance of animal powers to our own, can pursue the pleasures of typical beauty down to the scales of the alligator, the coils of the serpent, and the joints of the beetle.”

When Sir Charles Bell intimated that in Greek sculpture the guiding principle was remoteness from the animal type, he stated only one side of the truth, of which the other is thus noted by Winckelmann: among the Greeks, he says, “The study of artists in producing ideal beauties was directed to the nature of the nobler beasts, so that they not only instituted comparisons between the forms of the human countenance and the shape of the head of certain animals, but they even undertook to adopt from animals the means of imparting greater majesty and elevation to their statues ... especially in the heads of Hercules.” Jupiter’s head “has the complete aspect of the lion, the king of beasts, not only in the large, round eyes, in the fulness of the prominent, and, as it were, swollen forehead, and in the nose, but also in the hair, which hangs from his head like the mane of the lion, first rising upward from the forehead, and then, parting on each side into a bow, again falling downward.”

So that we may safely reject the theory that ugliness consists in an approach to the structure of the lower animals, whatever savages and Chinamen may think on this subject. Coarse minds little suspect what exquisite beauty is to be found in the head of a cow or a donkey, a puppy or a lamb—beauty which, like a lovely melody, may bring tears to the eyes of one who is sensitive to æsthetic impressions. Objectively considered, even the destructive emotions do not appear ugly in an animal. The ferocity of a lion does not make him appear vicious, because ferocity is his nature. He knows no better; can only live by fighting. But a man is disfigured by ferocity because he does know better; he can live without fighting; and it is the consciousness of his selfish meanness that puts the stamp of ugliness on his distorted features.

In apes alone does fierceness seem ugly and brutal instead of sublime. For apes bear so much resemblance to us, and have a brain so superior in structure to that of other animals, that we feel justified in applying the human standard. Hence apes alone afford us a negative test of beauty. Their heads and faces are cast in our mould, and therefore afford the means of direct comparison. In looking at their massive, brutal jaws, their receding foreheads, their undifferentiated hands and feet, their coarse, hairy skin, their clumsy, inexpressive, gigantic mouths, their flat noses and nostrils open to the view, we are justified in calling them ugly, compared with ourselves, and in feeling proud that civilisation has gradually raised us so far above our country cousins, in beauty as in everything else, except the art of climbing trees.

(b) Savages are valuable as negative tests of beauty for the same reason: they enable us to see what progress we have made in refining our features into harmonious proportions, and making them susceptible of diverse emotional expression. It should be noted that Nature constantly endeavours to make primitive mankind beautiful, as it does with all other animals. Tourists constantly note the occurrence of remarkable instances of Personal Beauty among the young in most tribes. But this natural Beauty is not appreciated by the vulgar taste of savages, as we saw a few pages back in a case mentioned by Mr. Galton. Beauty must be distorted and exaggerated before it pleases the savage’s taste. Paint must be laid on an inch thick, the nose perforated and “adorned” with a ring, and ditto the abnormally lengthened lips. This corrects the notion that savage hideousness is a product of Nature. Nature may blunder, but never so sadly as in the appearance of a savage belle or warrior; and in scorning these we do not therefore scorn Nature, but merely the artificial products of the vulgar taste of primitive man.

(c) Degraded Classes.—Poverty, suffering, want of leisure for mental culture, want of money for sanitary modes of living, have, unfortunately, produced in all countries a large class in whom Personal Beauty occurs only as an accident. That such unhappy mortals afford a negative test of Beauty is seen by the fact that, just as savages are intermediate between monkeys and them, so they stand between savages and refined men in features and expression.

Poverty alone does not produce this vulgar type of personal appearance; it is intellectual indolence, moral vice, and hygienic indifference that are responsible for it. Hence this third negative teat of Beauty is not at all difficult to find in any sphere of society, from the hod-carrier to the aristocrat with a pedigree of a hundred generations. In every scale of the social ladder may be found “features seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse; bodies consumed with sloth, broken down by labour, tortured by disease, dishonoured in foul uses; intellects without power, hearts without hope, minds earthly and devilish” (Ruskin).

(d) Age and Decrepitude.—It is not true, as a famous Frenchwoman has remarked, that age and beauty are incompatible terms. Even age and Love are not incompatible, as we saw in the chapter on Genius in Love; and Byron has remarked that Love, like the measles, is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

There is a special variety of Beauty for every period of life, and the Beauty of old age certainly is not the least attractive of these varieties. What could be more majestic, more admirable, than the head of a Longfellow in his last days? Provided health of mind and body has been maintained, even the folds in the cheeks, the wrinkles on the forehead of old age, are not unbeautiful. But when senility means decrepitude, brought on by a neglectful or otherwise vicious life, then it is positively ugly. The loveliest thing in the world is a fair and amiable maiden; the ugliest a vicious old hag—savages and apes not excepted.

(e) Disease.—Temperance preachers and other hygienic reformers commonly dwell too exclusively on the dangers to health, domestic peace, moral progress, and refinement which the indulgence in various vices entails. If they would insist with equal, or even greater, emphasis on the havoc which diseases brought on by intemperance and neglect of the laws of Health make on Personal Beauty, they would double their influence on their audiences or readers. For in woman’s heart the desire to be beautiful is and always will be the strongest motive to action or nonaction; nor are men, as a rule, much less interested in the matter of preserving a handsome appearance. It may make some impression on a man to tell him that if he takes ice-water before breakfast, or “cock-tails” at various odd hours on an empty stomach, he will ruin his digestion; but the impression will be six times as deep if you can convince him that he will ere long look like that confirmed dyspeptic Jones, with lack-lustre eyes, sallow complexion, and a general expression of premature senility, which accounts for the fact that he has been twice already refused by the girl he adores.

Or take that girl over there who never takes a walk, always sleeps with her windows hermetically closed, and never allows a ray of sunshine to touch any part of her body. Tell her she is ruining her health and she may be momentarily alarmed by this vague warning, and walk half a mile for a week or so, until she has forgotten it. But make it clear to her what is the exact consequence of such neglect of the primal laws of health—namely, the premature loss of every trace of Personal Beauty and youthful charm, with old-maidenhood inevitably staring her in the face, owing to her apathetic appearance and gait, her sickly complexion, her features distorted by frequent headaches, brought on by lack of fresh, cool air—each of which leaves its permanent trace in the form of an addition to a wrinkle or subtraction from the plumpness of her cheeks,—tell her all this, and that her eyes will soon sink into their sockets and have blue rings like those of an invalid, and a ghastly stare—and she will, perhaps, be sufficiently roused to save her Health for the sake of her Beauty.

We are now confronted with the question, Why is it that disease is a mark of ugliness, health a mark of Beauty? The old Scotch school of æstheticians think it is all a matter of association. We consider certain forms characteristic of health as beautiful simply because we associate with them various emotions of affection, the pleasures of love, etc., and conversely with disease and vice. According to Stendhal, “La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur,” or, in American, Beauty is simply the promise of a “good time.” But it is Lord Jeffrey who, to use another appropriate American expression, “goes the whole hog” in this matter, by practically denying the existence of such a thing as a pure, disinterested, æsthetic sense. Suppose, he says, "that the smooth forehead, the firm cheek, and the full lip, which are now so distinctly expressive to us of the gay and vigorous periods of youth—and the clear and blooming complexion, which indicates health and activity—had been, in fact, the forms and colours by which old age and sickness were characterised; and that, instead of being found united to those sources and seasons of enjoyment, they had been the badges by which Nature pointed out that state of suffering and decay which is now signified to us by the livid and emaciated face of sickness, or the wrinkled front, the quivering lip, and hollow cheek of age; if this were the familiar law of our nature, can it be doubted that we should look upon these appearances, not with rapture, but with aversion, and consider it as absolutely ludicrous or disgusting to speak of the beauty of what was interpreted by every one as the lamented sign of pain and decrepitude?

“Mr. Knight himself, though a firm believer in the intrinsic beauty of colours, is so much of this opinion that he thinks it entirely owing to those associations that we prefer the tame smoothness and comparatively poor colours of a youthful face to the richly fretted and variegated countenance of a pimpled drunkard.”

Bosh! and a hundred times bosh! One feels that these men lived at a time when port was drunk by the bottle, like claret, and when variegated noses were to a certain extent fashionable.

Though every reader feels the sophistry and absurdity of the above argumentation, it is not easy to refute it. Professor Blackie declaims against it, Ruskin sneers at it, but nowhere have I been able to find a definite direct refutation of the thesis. The following suggestions may, therefore, be of some value.

In the first place, Jeffrey’s supposition is equivalent to saying that if black were white, white would be black. For if all the phenomena of human nature were reversed, our taste, being also a “phenomenon,” would be reversed too. If health meant emaciation, then a lover would not be happy unless he could kiss a pair of leathery lips and embrace a skeleton. Hence his sense of touch, like his sight, would have to be the reverse of what they are now; and that being the case, æsthetic taste, which is based on the senses, would of course be reversed too. But that is simply saying that if you stand a man on his head his feet will be in the air.

Secondly, Lord Jeffrey’s argument involves the old fallacy that the useful and the beautiful are identical—that we only consider those things beautiful which afford us some utilitarian gratification. If this theory were correct, a coal-boat would be more beautiful than a yacht; a savage’s big jaw-bone more beautiful than our delicate ones; a clumsy, dirty, coarse-featured labourer more beautiful than a society belle.

No; we have, thank heaven, an æsthetic sense which enables us to see and admire beauty quite independently of any “associations” which it may have with our utilitarian cravings. It is possible, however, and even probable, that the æsthetic sense was originally developed from utilitarian associations. On this subject Mr. Grant Allen has some exceedingly valuable remarks in his interesting work on the Colour-Sense. He there eloquently sets forth the view that it was the bright tints of luscious fruits that first taught primitive man to derive pleasure from the sight of coloured objects. This gradually led to a “predilection for brilliant dyes and glistening pebbles; till at last the whole series culminates in that intense and unselfish enjoyment of rich and pure tints which make civilised man linger so lovingly over the hues of sunset and the myriad shades of autumn.... The disinterested affection can only be reached by many previous steps of utilitarian progress.” But—and here lies the kernel of the argument—"fruit-eaters and flower-feeders derive pleasure from brilliant colours ... not because those colours have mental associations with their food, but because the structures which perceive them have been continually exercised and strengthened by hereditary use," until at last they formed a special nervous or cerebral apparatus which presides over impressions of beauty, and takes a special pleasure in its own activity, apart from all utilitarian considerations.

Lord Jeffrey apparently lacked this special æsthetic sense, as shown by his whole argument, and by his inability, which he shared with Alison, of finding beauty in Nature, unless it was in some way associated with man’s presence and man’s mean utilities.

How different this from the feelings of the man who of all writers on Beauty has the most highly developed æsthetic sense—Mr. Ruskin, who has just told us in his Autobiography that his love of Nature, ardent as it is, depends entirely on the wildness of the scenery, its remoteness from human influences and associations.

It is this specially-developed æsthetic taste that would prevent man from calling flabby cheeks, sallow complexions, pimpled noses, and sunken eyes beautiful, if by some miracle they should be changed into signs of health. For this sense of beauty was first educated not by the sight of human beauty, but of beauty in Nature—fruits, pebbles, shells, lustrous metals, etc.; and the notions of beauty thus obtained have been gradually transferred to human beings as standards of attractiveness. It can be shown that what the best judges pronounce the highest human beauty, is so because it partakes of certain characteristics which we find beautiful throughout Nature. And conversely, what we consider ugly in the human form and features would also be called ugly in external objects; in both cases, be it distinctly understood, without any direct reference to utilitarian considerations, and sometimes even in opposition to them, as in our admiration of a beautiful poisonous plant or snake, or a tiger.

It is these universal characteristics of Beauty, found in man as in animals, that we now have to consider. They are the positive criteria of Beauty, and may be regarded as a new set of “overtones” or leading motives for the remainder of this volume, although the old ones will occasionally reappear and combine with them.

POSITIVE TESTS OF BEAUTY

Of these there are at least eight—Symmetry, Curvature, Gradation, Smoothness, Delicacy, Colour, Lustre, Expression, including Variety and Individuality.

(a) Symmetry.—"In all perfectly beautiful objects," says Mr. Ruskin, “there is found the opposition of one part to another, and a reciprocal balance obtained; in animals the balance being commonly between opposite sides (note the disagreeableness occasioned by the exception in flat fish, having the eyes on one side of the head); but in vegetables the opposition is less distinct, as in the boughs on opposite sides of trees, and the leaves and sprays on each side of the boughs, and in dead matter less perfect still, often amounting only to a certain tendency towards a balance, as in the opposite sides of valleys and alternate windings of streams. In things in which perfect symmetry is, from their nature, impossible or improper, a balance must be at least in some measure expressed before they can be beheld with pleasure.... Symmetry is the opposition of equal quantities to each other. Proportion the connection of unequal quantities with each other. The property of a tree in sending out equal boughs on opposite sides is symmetrical. Its sending out shorter and smaller towards the top, proportional. In the human face its balance of opposite sides is symmetry, its division upwards, proportion.”

Mr. Darwin thus gives his testimony as to the prevalence of symmetry in Nature: “If beautiful objects had been created solely for man’s gratification, it ought to be shown that before man appeared there was less beauty on the face of the earth than since he came on the stage. Were the beautiful volute and cone shells of the Eocene epoch, and the gracefully sculptured ammonites of the Secondary period, created that man might ages afterwards admire them in his cabinet? Few objects are more beautiful than the minute silicious cases of the diatomaceæ: were they created that they might be examined and admired under the higher powers of the microscope? The beauty in this latter case, and in many others, is apparently wholly due to symmetry of growth” (Origin of Species, chap. vi.)

In the floral world, again, the natural tendency is always towards symmetry. Wind-fertilised flowers are symmetrical in form; and “as Mr. Darwin has observed, there does not appeal to be a single instance of an irregular flower which is not fertilised by insects or birds” (Lubbock), and therefore modified in form in the effort to adapt itself to useful insects and to exclude pirates.

Throughout the animal kingdom, including man, this law of symmetry is true. Hence it is not likely that we should ever admire a lame leg, a crooked nose, bent on one side, eyes that are not mates, or a face several inches longer on one side than the other, owing to paralysis—as beautiful, even if, as Jeffrey would have it, Madame Nature should suddenly take it into her head to associate such abnormalities with health instead of with disease.

(b) Gradation.—On this law of Nature Mr. Ruskin again has spoken at once more scientifically and poetically than any other writer on æsthetics: "What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shades and colours.... For instances of the complete absence of gradation we must look to man’s work, or to his disease and decrepitude. Compare the gradated colours of the rainbow with the stripes of a target, and the gradual concentration of the youthful blood in the cheek with an abrupt patch of rouge, or with the sharply-drawn veining of old age.

“Gradation is so inseparable a quality of all natural shade and colour that the eye refuses in art to understand anything as either which appears without it; while, on the other hand, nearly all the gradations of nature are so subtile, and between degrees of tint so slightly separated, that no human hand can in any wise equal, or do anything more than suggest the idea of them.”

The following remarks which the same writer makes in another place concerning Gradation show at the same time how asinine it is for a savage or any other person of uncultivated taste to set himself up as a judge of Personal Beauty, as good as any one else, on the plea that it is all “a matter of taste” and de gustibus non est disputandum:—

“When the eye is quite uncultivated, it sees that a man is a man, and a face is a face, but has no idea what shadows or lights fall upon the form or features. Cultivate it to some degree of artistic power, and it will then see shadows distinctly, but only the more vigorous of them. Cultivate it still further, and it will see light within light, and shadow within shadow, and will continually refuse to rest in what it has already discovered, that it may pursue what is more removed and more subtle, until at last it comes to give its chief attention and display its chief power on gradations which to an untrained faculty are partly matters of indifference and partly imperceptible.”

The words italicised enable us to appreciate what Sokrates must have had in his mind when he distinguished between that which is beautiful and that which only appears beautiful. Æsthetic training enables us to see things as they are, instead of as they appear through inattention, through ignorance, or through clouds of national prejudice, or individual utilitarianism.

The way in which æsthetic training enables us to see gradations of beauty previously imperceptible can be most strikingly illustrated in the case of music. There are thousands of intelligent folks who cannot tell the difference between a superb Steinway Grand, just timed for a concert, and a harsh, clangy, mountain-hotel piano that has not been tuned for two years. But give these persons a thorough musical education, and they will soon be able to smile at Jeffrey’s notion that the tone of the hotel-piano was quite as beautiful as that of the Steinway, because it seemed so to them. It is not only the imagination but the senses themselves that require training. A Hottentot or any unmusical person cannot tell the difference between two consecutive tones on the piano, whereas a skilled musician can detect all the gradations from one tone to another, down to the sixty-fourth part of a semitone!

“It is all a matter of taste!” Precisely. Of good taste and bad taste.

Examples of gradation in the human form are the gradual tapering of the limbs and the fingers, the exquisite line from the female neck to the shoulders and the bosom, the blushes on the cheeks, so long as they do not assume the form of a hectic flush, and the delicate tints of the complexion in general, varying with emotional states, according as the veins and arteries are more or less filled with the vital fluid.

Is it then “entirely owing to their associations” with health or disease that we prefer the complexion of a youthful face to the hideous daubs of red which Knight refers to as the “richly fretted and variegated countenance of a pimpled drunkard”? Is it owing to such associations that we prefer the delicately gradated blushes of coloured marble to the richly bedaubed countenance of a pimpled brickbat? But it would be a waste of time to refer again to the crude anti-æsthetic notions of Messrs. Knight, Alison, and Jeffrey.

One more exquisite illustration of subtle gradation in the human form divine may be cited from Winckelmann:—

“The soul, though a simple existence, brings forth at once, and in an instant, many different ideas; so it is with the beautiful youthful outline, which appears simple, and yet at the same time has infinitely different variations, and that soft tapering which is difficult of attainment in a column, is still more so in the diverse forms of the youthful body. Among the innumerable kinds of columns in Rome some appear pre-eminently elegant on account of this very tapering; of these I have particularly noted two of granite, which I am always studying anew: just so rare is a perfect form, even in the most beautiful youth, which has a stationary point in our sex still less than in the female.”

(c) Curvature.—"That all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively of curves will," Mr. Ruskin believes, “be at once allowed; but that which there will be need more especially to prove, is the subtility and constancy of curvature in all natural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except in crystals, in certain mountain forms admitted for the sake of sublimity or contrast (as in the slope of debris), in rays of light, in the levels of calm water and alluvial land, and in some few organic developments, there are no lines or surfaces of nature without curvature, though, as we before saw in clouds, more especially in their under lines towards the horizon, and in vast and extended plains, right lines are often suggested which are not actual. Without these we should not be sensible of the value of contrasting curves; and while, therefore, for the most part, the eye is fed in natural forms with a grace of curvature which no hand nor instrument can follow, other means are provided to give beauty to those surfaces which are admitted for contrast, as in water by its reflection of the gradations which it possesses not itself.”

In a footnote to the last edition of the Modern Painters he adds regarding the apparent exceptions named: “Crystals are indeed subject to rectilinear limitations, but their real surfaces are continually curved; the level of calm water is only right lined when it is shoreless.”

On the other hand, “Generally in all ruin and disease, and interference of one order of being with another (as in the cattle line of park trees), the curves vanish, and violently opposed or broken and unmeaning lines take their place.” I feel tempted to cite another most admirable passage on curvature throughout Nature—even where it is least looked for, and the untrained eye cannot see it—in the shattered walls and crests of mountains which “seem to rise in a gloomy contrast with the soft waves of bank and wood beneath.” But it is too long to quote, and I can only advise the reader most earnestly to look it up in chapter xiv. vol. iv.

“Straight lines,” Professor Bain observes, “are rendered artistic only by associations of power, regularity, fitness, etc.” “In some situations straight lines are æsthetic.... In the human figure there underlies the curved outline a certain element of rigidity and straightness, indicating strength in the supporting limbs and spine. Whenever firmness is required, there must be a solid structure, and straightness of form is a frequent accompaniment of solidity. The straight nose and the flat brow are subsidiary to the movement and the stability of the face.”

Yet even our straight limbs follow in their motions the law of curvature. And to this fact that they move more easily and naturally in a curved than in a straight line, which requires laborious adjustment, Bain traces part of our superior pleasure in rounded lines.

What infinite subtlety and variety Curvature is capable of is vividly brought before the eyes by Winckelmann: “The forms of a beautiful body are determined by lines the centre of which is constantly changing, and which, if continued, would never describe circles. They are, consequently, more simple, but also more complex, than a circle, which, however large or small it may be, always has the same centre, and either includes others or is included in others. This diversity was sought after by the Greeks in works of all kinds; and their discernment of its beauty led them to introduce the same system even into the form of their utensils and vases, whose easy and elegant outline is drawn after the same rule, that is, by a line which must be found by means of several circles, for all these works have an elliptical figure, and herein consists their beauty. The greater unity there is in the junction of the forms, and in the flowing of one out of another, so much the greater is the beauty of the whole.”

Masculine and Feminine Beauty.—The universality of curvature as a form of beautiful objects throughout nature and art is of importance in helping us to determine the question which is the more beautiful form, a perfect man or a perfect woman—an Apollo or a Venus? A Venus, no doubt. In those qualities which are subsumed under the terms of the sublime or the characteristic—in strength, manly dignity, intellectual power, majesty—the masculine type, no doubt, is superior to the feminine. But in Beauty proper—in the roundness and delicacy of contours, in the smoothness of complexion and its subtle gradations of colour, in the symmetrical roundness and lustrous expressiveness of the eyes—the feminine type is pre-eminent.

“Woman,” says Professor Kollmann, “is smaller, more delicate, but also softer and more graceful (schwungvoller) in form, in her breasts, hips, thighs, and calves. No line on her body is short and sharply angular; they all swell, or vault themselves in a gentle curve.... The neck and the rounded shoulders are connected by gracefully curved lines, whereas a man’s neck is placed more at a right angle to the more straight and angular shoulders.... The hair is softer, the skin more tender and transparent. All the forms are more covered over with adipose tissue, and connected by those gradual transitions which produce the gently rounded outlines; whereas in a man everything—muscles, sinews, blood-vessels, bones—is more conspicuous.”

Schopenhauer, accordingly, was clearly in the wrong when he endeavoured to make out that man is vastly superior to woman in physical beauty,—a notion which Professor Huxley, too, does not appear to disapprove of very violently. At the same time it is, no doubt, true that there are more good specimens of masculine beauty in most countries than of feminine beauty; true also that man’s beauty lasts much longer than woman’s. A boy is more beautiful than a girl under sixteen, for the very reason that his form is more like that of an adult woman than a girl’s is. From eighteen to twenty-five woman is more beautiful than man; while after thirty, owing to the almost universal neglect of the laws of health—women are apt to become either too rotund, which ruins their grace and delicacy, or too angular—more angular than a man under fifty.

(d) Delicacy and Grace.—The difference between masculine and feminine beauty and the superiority of the latter is also indirectly brought out in Burke’s remarks on Delicacy, which, though open to criticism in one or two points, are on the whole admirable and exhaustive:—

"An air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty. An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it. Whoever examines the vegetable or animal creation will find this observation to be founded in nature. It is not the oak, the ash, or the elm, or any of the robust trees of the forest which we consider as beautiful; they are awful and majestic, they inspire a sort of reverence. It is the delicate myrtle, it is the orange, it is the almond, it is the jasmine, it is the vine, which we look on as vegetable beauties. It is the flowery species, so remarkable for its weakness and momentary duration, that gives us the liveliest idea of beauty and elegance. Among animals the greyhound is more beautiful than the mastiff, and the delicacy of a jennet, a barb, or an Arabian horse is much more amiable than the strength and stability of some horses of war or carriage.

“I need here say little of the fair sex, where I believe the point will be easily allowed me. The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness or delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it. I would not here be understood to say that weakness betraying very bad health has any share in beauty; but the ill effect of this is not because it is weakness, but because the ill state of health, which produces such weakness, alters the other conditions of beauty; the parts in such a case collapse, the bright colour, the lumen purpureum juventæ is gone, and the fine variation is lost in wrinkles, sudden breaks, and right lines.”

Delicacy is a quality closely related to grace, or beauty in motion and attitude. “Grace,” says Dr. J. A. Symonds, “is a striking illustration of the union of the two principles of similarity and variety. For the secret of graceful action is that the symmetry is preserved through all the varieties of position.” This is well put; but the first condition and essence of grace is that there must be an exact correspondence between the work done and the limb which does it. The attitude of an oak-trunk, with nothing on the top but a geranium bush, however symmetrical, would always be ungraceful, owing to the ludicrous disproportion between the support and the thing supported. Conversely, a weak fern-stalk, trying to support a branch of heavy cactus leaves, would be equally ungraceful; for there must be neither a waste of energy nor a sense of effort. Part of this feeling may perhaps be traced to sympathy—thus showing how various emotions enter into our æsthetic judgments, sometimes weakening, sometimes strengthening them. As Professor Bain remarks, à propos: “We love to have removed from our sight every aspect of suffering, and none more so than the suffering of toil.”

Grace is almost as powerful to inspire Love as Beauty itself. Women know this instinctively, and in order to acquire the Delicacy which leads to grace, they deprive their bodies of air and sunshine and strengthening sleep, hoping thereby to acquire artificially, through ill-health, what Nature has denied them. Fortunately such violations of the laws of health always frustrate their object. Delicacy conjoined with Health inspires Love, but delicacy born of disease inspires only pity—a feeling which may inspire in a woman what she imagines is Love, but in a man never.

(e) Smoothness is another attribute of Beauty on which Burke was the first to place proper emphasis: It is, he says, “a quality so essential to beauty that I do not recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth. In trees and flowers, smooth leaves are beautiful; smooth slopes of earth in gardens; smooth streams in the landscape; smooth coats of birds and beasts in animal beauties; in fine women, smooth skins; and in several sorts of ornamental furniture, smooth and polished surfaces.... Any ruggedness, any sudden projection, any sharp angle, is in the highest degree contrary to the idea of beauty.”

Though there are exceptions to this rule of smoothness—including such a marvel of beauty as the moss-rose, as well as various leaves covered with down, etc.—yet, on the whole, Burke is right. Certainly the smooth white hand of a delicate lady is more beautiful than the rough, horny “paws” of a bricklayer; and the inferior beauty of a man’s arm is owing as much to its rough scattered hairs as to the prominence of the muscles, in contrast to the smooth and rounded arm of woman. In animals, however, hairs on the limbs are not unbeautiful, because they are dense enough to overlap, and thus form a hairy surface admirable alike for its soft smoothness, its gloss, and its colour.

(f) Lustre and Colour.—Lustrous, sparkling eyes, glossy hair, pearly teeth,—where would human beauty be without them without the delicate tints and blushes of the skin, the brown or blue iris, the golden or chestnut locks, the ebony eyebrows and lashes?

Yet the greatest art-critics incline to the opinion that, on the whole, colour is a less essential ingredient of beauty than form. “Colour assists beauty,” says Winckelmann, but “the essence of beauty consists not in colour but in shape.” “A negro might be called handsome when the conformation of his face is handsome.” “The colour of bronze and of the black and greenish basalt does not detract from the beauty of the antique heads,” hence “we possess a knowledge of the beautiful, although in an unreal dress and of a disagreeable colour.”

Similarly Mr. Ruskin, who remarks of colour that it “is richly bestowed on the highest works of creation, and the eminent sign and seal of perfection in them; being associated with life in the human form, with light in the sky, with purity and hardness in the earth,—death, night, and pollution of all kinds being colourless. And although if form and colour be brought into complete opposition, so that it should be put to us as a stern choice whether we should have a work of art all of form, without colour (as an Albert Dürer’s engraving), or all of colour, without form (as an imitation of mother-of-pearl), form is beyond all comparison the more precious of the two ... yet if colour be introduced at all, it is necessary that, whatever else may be wrong, that should be right,” etc.

Again: “An oak is an oak, whether green with spring or red with winter; a dahlia is a dahlia, whether it be yellow or crimson; and if some monster-hunting botanist should ever frighten the flower blue, still it will be a dahlia; but let one curve of the petals—one groove of the stamens—be wanting, and the flower ceases to be the same. Let the roughness of the bark and the angles of the boughs be smoothed or diminished, and the oak ceases to be an oak; but let it retain its inward structure and outward form, and though its leaves grew white, or pink, or blue, or tricolour, it would be a white oak, or a pink oak, or a republican oak, but an oak still.”

“If we look at Nature carefully, we shall find that her colours are in a state of perpetual confusion and indistinctness, while her forms, as told by light and shade, are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones and gravel of the bank catch green reflections from the boughs above; the bushes receive grays and yellows from the ground; every hairbreadth of polished surface gives a little bit of the blue of the sky, or the gold of the sun, like a star upon the local colour; this local colour, changeful and uncertain in itself, is again disguised and modified by the hue of the light or quenched in the gray of the shadow; and the confusion and blending of tint is altogether so great that were we left to find out what objects were by their colours only, we would scarcely in place distinguish the boughs of a tree from the air beyond them or the ground beneath them. I know that people unpractised in art will not believe this at first; but if they have accurate powers of observation, they may soon ascertain it for themselves; they will find that, while they can scarcely ever determine the exact hue of anything, except when it occurs in large masses, as in a green field or the blue sky, the form, as told by light and shade, is always decided and evident, and the source of the chief character of every object.”

Professor Bain remarks on this topic that “Among the several kinds of beauty, the eye takes most delight in colour.... For this reason we find the poets borrowing more of their epithets from colours than from any other topic.”

This view seems to be confirmed by the fact that lovers in expatiating on the beauty of their Dulcineas seem to have much more to say about their brown or golden locks, their light or dark complexion, their blue or black eyes, than about the shape of their features. This, however, partly finds its explanation in the fact that colour, being a sensuous quality, is more easily and more directly appreciated than form, the perception of which is a much more complicated matter, being a translation into intellectual terms of remembered impressions of touch, associated with certain colours, lights, and shades which recall them; and partly in the greater ease with which peculiarities of colour are referred to than peculiarities of form. In the days of ancient Greece the nomenclature of colours was equally undeveloped, and is so vague in Homer that Gladstone and Geiger actually set up the theory that Homer’s colour-sense was imperfect, and that that sense has been gradually developed within historic times,—a theory which I have confuted on anatomical grounds in Macmillan’s Magazine, Dec. 1879.

That as regards human beauty colour is of less importance than form is shown, moreover, in this, that a girl with regular features and a freckled complexion will much sooner find a lover than one with the most delicately-coloured complexion, conjoined with a big mouth, irregular nose, or sunken cheeks. And a beautifully-shaped eye is sure to be admired by all, no matter whether blue, gray, or brown; whereas an eye that is too small or otherwise defective in form can never be redeemed by the most beautiful colour or brilliancy.

On the other hand, there are several things to be said in favour of colour that will mitigate our judgment on this point. In the first place, colour is more perfect in its way than form, so that it is impossible ever to improve on it by idealising, as it is often with form. As Mr. Ruskin remarks, “Form may be attained in perfection by painters, who, in their course of study, are continually altering or idealising it; but only the sternest fidelity will reach colouring. Idealise or alter in that, and you are lost. Whether you alter by debasing or exaggerating, by glare or by decline, one fate is for you—ruin.... Colour is sacred in that you must keep to facts. Hence the apparent anomaly that the only schools of colour are the schools of realism.”

Again, looking at Nature with an artist’s eye, Ruskin discovered and frequently alludes to the “apparent connection of brilliancy of colour with vigour of life,” and Mr. Wallace, looking at Nature with a naturalist’s eye, established this “apparent connection” as a scientific fact. The passage in which he sums up his views has been once already quoted; but it is of such extreme importance in enforcing the lesson that beauty is impossible without health, that it may be quoted again:—

“The colours of an animal usually fade during disease or weakness, while robust health and vigour adds to its intensity.... In all quadrupeds a ‘dull coat’ is indicative of ill-health or low condition; while a glossy coat and sparkling eye are the invariable accompaniments of health and energy. The same rule applies to the feathers of birds, whose colours are only seen in their purity during perfect health; and a similar phenomenon occurs even among insects, for the bright hues of caterpillars begin to fade as soon as they become inactive, preparatory to their undergoing transformation. Even in the Vegetable Kingdom we see the same thing; for the tints of foliage are deepest, and the colours of flowers and fruits richest, on those plants which are in the most healthy and vigorous condition.”

(g) Expression, Variety, Individuality.—Besides the circumstances that colour is more uniformly perfect in Nature than form, and that it is always associated with Health, without which Beauty is impossible, another peculiarity may be mentioned in its favour. The complexion is a kaleidoscope whose delicate blushes and constant changes of tint, from the ashen pallor of despair to the rosy flush of delight, are the fascinating signs of emotional expression. And herein lies the superior beauty of the human complexion over all other tinted objects: it reflects not only the hues of surrounding external bodies, but all the moods of the soul within.

Form without colour is form without expression. But form without expression soon ceases to fascinate, for we constantly crave novelty and variety; and form is one, while expression is infinitely varied and ever new. Herein lies the extreme importance of expression as a test of Beauty. Colour, of course, is only one phase of expression. The soul not only changes the tints of the complexion, but liquifies the facial muscles so that they can be readily moulded into forms characteristic of joy, sadness, hope, fear, adoration, hatred, anger, affection, etc.

Why is the portrait-painter so infinitely superior to the photographer? Because the photographer—paradoxical as this may seem—gives you a less realistic picture of yourself than the artist. He only gives you the fixed form, or at most a transient expression which, being fixed permanently, loses its essence, which is motion—and thus becomes a caricature—an exaggeration in duration. But the artist studies you by the hour, makes you talk, notes the habitual forms of expression most characteristic of your individuality; and, blending these into a sort of “typical portrait” of your various individual traits, makes a picture which reveals all the advantages of art over mere solar mechanism or photography.

This explains why some of the most charming persons we know never appear well in a photograph, while others much less charming do. The beauty of the latter lies in form, of the former in expression. But expression is much more potent to inspire admiration and Love than mere beauty of features; and not without reason, for beautiful features, being a lucky inheritance, may be conjoined with unamiable individual traits, whereas beautiful expression is the infallible index of a beautiful mind and character; and promises, moreover, beautiful sons and daughters, because “expression is feature in the making.” It is by such subtle signs and promises that Love is unconsciously and instinctively guided in its choice.

Formal Beauty alone is external and cold. It is those slight variations in Beauty and expression which we call individuality and character that excite emotion: so much so that Love, as we have seen, is dependent on individuality, and a man who warmly admires all beautiful women is in love with none.

Speaking of the Greeks, Sir Charles Bell says: “In high art it appears to have been the rule of the sculptor to divest the form of expression.... In the Venus, the form is exquisite and the face perfect, but there is no expression there; it has no human softness, nothing to love.” “All individuality was studiously avoided by the ancient sculptors in the representation of divinity; they maintained the beauty of form and proportion, but without expression, which, in their system, belonged exclusively to humanity.”

But inasmuch as the Greeks attributed to their deities all the various emotions which agitate man, why did they refuse them the signs of expression? One cannot but suspect that the Greeks did not sufficiently appreciate the beauty of expression. Had they valued it more they would not have allowed their women to vegetate in ignorance like flowers, one like the other, but would have educated them and given them the individuality and expression which alone can inspire Love.

Again, if the Greeks had been susceptible to the superior charms of emotional expression, is it likely that they would have been so completely absorbed in the two least expressive and emotional of the arts—architecture and sculpture?

We cannot avoid the conclusion that the Greeks were as indifferent to the charms of individual expression as to Romantic Love, which is dependent on it. In their statues, as Dr. Max Schasler remarks, a mouth or eye has no more significance as a mark of beauty than a well-shaped leg. Whereas in modern, and even sometimes in mediæval art, what a world of expression in a mouth, a pair of eyes!

Leaving individual exceptions (like Homer) aside, it may be said that the arts have been successively developed to a climax in the order of their capacity for emotional expression, viz.—Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Poetry, and Music. Poetry precedes music, because though its emotional scope is wider, it is less intense. To-day music is the most popular and universal of all the arts because it stirs most deeply our feelings. And just as the discovery of harmony, by individualising the melodies, has increased the power and variety of music a thousandfold; so the individualisation of Beauty and character through modern culture has made Romantic Love a blessing accessible to all—the most prevalent form of modern affection.

Individuality is of such extreme importance in Love that a slight blemish is not only pardoned but actually adored if it increases the individuality. Bacon evidently had this in his mind when he said that “there is no excellent beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportion.” Seneca, as well as Ovid, noted the attractiveness of slight short-comings; and the following anecdote shows that though the Persians, as a nation, have ever been strangers to Romantic Love, their greatest poet, Háfiz, understood the psychology of the subject in its subtlest details:—

“One day Timur (fourteenth century) sent for Háfiz and asked angrily: ‘Art thou he who was so bold as to offer my two great cities Samarkand and Bokhara for the black mole on thy mistress’s cheek?’ alluding to a well-known verse in one of his odes. ‘Yes, sire,’ replied Háfiz, ‘and it is by such acts of generosity that I have brought myself to such a state of destitution that I have now to solicit your bounty.’ Timur was so pleased with the ready wit displayed in this answer that he dismissed the poet with a handsome present.”

To sum up: the reason why

“The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyond the sculptured flower”

is not, as Bryant implies, the transitoriness of the rose, but the fact that the marble flower, like the wax-flower, is dead and unchangeable, while the short-lived rose beams with the expression of happy vitality after a shower, or sadly droops and hangs its head in a drouth. It has life and expression, subtle gradations of colour, and light and shade, which are the signs of its vitality and moods, varying every day, every hour. And so with all the higher forms of life, those always being most beautiful and highly prized which are most capable of expressing subtle variations of health, happiness, and mental refinement.

There is no part of the human body which does not serve as a mark of expression—

“In many’s looks the false heart’s history Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange.”

“There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks.”—SHAKSPERE.

It will not do, therefore, to neglect any part of the body. As it is the last straw which breaks the camel’s back, so Cupid’s capricious choice is often determined by some minor point of perfection, when the balance is otherwise equal. Suppose there are two sisters whose faces, figures, and mental attractions are about equal; then it is possible that one of them will die an old maid simply because the other had a smaller foot, a more graceful gait, or longer eyelashes.

But though every organ has its own beauty, there is an æsthetic scale of lower and higher which corresponds pretty accurately with the physical scale from down upwards—from the foot to the eye and forehead. It is in this order, accordingly, that we shall now proceed to consider the various parts of the human form, and those peculiarities in them which are considered most beautiful and most liable to inspire Romantic Love.

THE FEET

SIZE

There is hardly anything concerning which vain people are so sensitive as their feet. To have large feet is considered one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall a woman. Mathematically stated, the length of a woman’s skirts is directly proportional to the size of her feet; and women with large feet are always shocked at the frivolity of those who have neat ankles and coquettishly allow them to be seen on occasion; nor do they see any beauty in Sir John Suckling’s lines—

“Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out, As if they feared the light.”

Nor are men, as a rule, sufficiently free from pedal vanity to pose as satirists. Byron found a mark of aristocracy in small feet, and he was rendered almost as miserable by the morbid consciousness of his own defects as Mme. de Staël (who had very ugly feet, yet once ventured to assume the rôle, in private theatricals, of a statue) was offended by Talleyrand’s witticism, that he recognised her by the pied de Staël.

There is a ben trovato, if not true, story of a clever wife who objected to her husband’s habit of spending his evenings away from home, and who reformed him by utilising his vanity. By insisting that his boots were too large, she repeatedly induced him to buy smaller ones, which finally tortured him so much that he was only too glad to stay at home and wear his slippers.

FASHIONABLE UGLINESS

How universal is the desire to have, or appear to have, small feet is shown by the fact that everybody blackens his shoes or boots; for, owing to a peculiar optical delusion, black objects always appear smaller than white ones; which is also the reason why too slim and delicate ladies never appear to such advantage in winter as they do in summer, when they exchange their dark for light dresses.

To a certain point the admiration of small feet is in accordance with the canons of good Taste, as will be presently shown. But Taste has a disease which is called Fashion. It is a sort of microbe which has the effect of distorting and exaggerating everything it takes hold of. Fashion is not satisfied with small feet; it wants them very small, unnaturally small, at the cost of beauty, health, grace, comfort, and happiness. Hence for many generations shoemakers have been compelled to manufacture instruments of torture so ruinous to the constitution of man and woman, that an Austrian military surgeon has seriously counselled the enactment of legal fines to be imposed on the makers of noxiously-shaped shoes, similar to those imposed on food-adulterators.

Most ugly and vulgar fashions come from France; but as regards crippled feet the first prize has to be yielded to the Chinese, even by the Parisians. The normal size of the human foot varies, for men, from 9½ to 13; for women, from 5½ to 9 inches, man’s feet being longer proportionately to the greater length of his lower limbs. In China the men value the normal healthy condition of their own feet enough to have introduced certain features of elasticity in their shoes which we might copy with advantage; but the women are treated very differently. “The fashionable length for a Chinese foot,” says Dr. Jamieson, “is between 3½ and 4 inches, but comparatively few parents succeed in arresting growth so completely.” When girls are five years old their feet are tightly wrapped up in bandages, which on successive occasions are tightened more and more, till the surface ulcerates, and some of the flesh, skin, and sometimes even a toe or two come off. “During the first year,” says Professor Flower, “the pain is so intense that the sufferer can do nothing but lie and cry and moan. For about two years the foot aches continually, and is subject to a constant pain, like the pricking of sharp needles.” Finally the foot becomes reduced to a shapeless mass, void of sensibility, which “has now the appearance of the hoof of some animal rather than a human foot, and affords a very insufficient organ of support, as the peculiar tottering gait of those possessing it clearly shows.”

The difference between the Chinese belle and the Parisian is one of degree merely. The former has her torturing done once for all while a child, whereas the latter allows her tight, high-heeled shoes to torture her throughout life. The English are the only nation that have recognised the injuriousness and vulgarity of the French shoe, and substituted one made on hygienic principles; and as England has in almost everything else displaced France as the leader in modern fashion, it is reasonable to hope that ere long other nations will follow her in this reform. American girls are, as a rule, much less sensible in this matter than their English sisters; one need only ask a clerk in a shoe store to find out how most of them endeavour to squeeze their small feet into shoes too small by a number.

Fashions are always followed blindly, without deliberation. But would it not be worth while for French, American, and German women—and many men too—to ask themselves what they gain and what they lose by trying to make their feet appear smaller than they are? The disadvantages outweigh the advantages to an almost ludicrous extent.

On the one side there is absolutely nothing but the gratification of vanity derived from the fact that a few acquaintances admire one’s “pretty feet”; and even this advantage is problematical, because a person who wears too tight shoes can hardly conceal them from an observer, and is therefore apt to get pity for her vain weakness in place of admiration.

On the other hand are the following disadvantages:—

(1) The constant torture of pressure (not to mention the resulting corns and bunions), which alone must surely outweigh a hundred times the pleasure of gratified vanity at having a Chinese foot.

(2) The unconscious distortion of the features and furrowing of the forehead in the effort to endure and repress the pain,—and wrinkles, be it remembered, when once formed are ineradicable.

(3) The discouragement of walking and other exercise, involving a general lowering of vitality, sickly pallor and premature loss of the bloom of youth.

(4) The wasting of the calf of the leg to dimensions characteristic of savagedom, disease, and old age, not to speak of the numerous maladies resulting to women from the use of hard high heels of fashionable shoes, every contact of which with the ground sends a shock through the spinal column to the brain and produces obscure disorders in various parts of the organism.

(5) The mutilation of one of the most beautiful and characteristically human parts of the body. As the author of Harper’s Ugly Girl Papers remarks: “One’s foot is as proper an object of pride and complacency as a shapely hand. But where in a thousand would a sculptor find one that was a pleasure to contemplate like that of the Princess Pauline Bonaparte, whose lovely foot was modelled in marble for the delight of all the world who have seen it?”

(6) Finally, and most important of all, the loss of a graceful gait, of the poetry of motion, which is a thousand times more calculated to inspire admiration—æsthetic or erotic—than a small foot.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal; and man embraces woman. But surely in matters of fashion woman is not a reasoning being. Very large feet being properly regarded as ugly, she draws the inference that the smaller they can be made the more will they be beautiful; forgetting that Beauty is a matter of proportion, not of absolute size. A foot may, like a waist, as easily appear ugly from being too small as from being too large. A large woman with very small feet cannot but make a disagreeable impression, like a bust on an insecure pedestal or a leaning tower.

TESTS OF BEAUTY

According to Schopenhauer, the great value which all attach to small feet “depends on the fact that small feet are an essentially human characteristic, since in no animal are the tarsus and metatarsus together so small as in man, which peculiarity is connected with his erect attitude: he is a plantigrade.” But it is difficult to see any force in this reasoning, since not one person in a hundred thousand knows what the bones called tarsus and metatarsus are, nor cares whether they are larger in man or in animals; while, as regards the upright position, large feet would appear more suitable for maintaining it than small ones.

If smallness were the test of beauty in man, why should we not feel ashamed to have larger heads than animals, or envy the elephant, who, for his size, has the smallest foot of all animals?

Those who believe that human beauty consists in the degree of remoteness from animal types, will derive satisfaction from the fact that apes have feet that are larger than ours. Topinard gives these figures showing the relative sizes: man, 16·96; gorilla, 20·69; chimpanzee, 21·00; orang, 25. But why should man feel a special pride in the fact that his feet are somewhat smaller than those of his nearest relatives, whom, until recently, he did not even acknowledge as such?

It is, moreover, unscientific to compare man’s foot with the ape’s too closely, because they have different functions—being used by man for walking, by the ape for climbing—and therefore require different characteristics. It is only in those organs that have a like function—as the jaws, teeth, nose, eyes, and forehead—that a direct comparison is permissible, and a progress noted in our favour.

Again, as M. Topinard tells us, “The hand and the foot of man, although shorter than those of the anthropoid ape, do not vary among races according to their order of superiority, as we should have supposed. A long hand or foot is not a characteristic of inferiority.”

The same is true among individuals of the same race. Mme. de Staël was one of the most intelligent women the world has ever seen, yet her feet were very large; and conversely, some of our silliest girls have the smallest feet.

Since, then, there is no obvious connection between small feet and superior culture, it follows that the beauty of a foot is not to be determined by so simple a matter as its length. There are other peculiarities, of greater importance, in which the laws of Beauty manifest themselves. First, in the arched instep, which is not only attractive because it introduces the beauty-curve in place of the straight, flat line of the sole, but which is of the utmost importance in increasing the foot’s capacity for carrying its burden, just as architects build arches under bridges, etc., for the sake of the greater strength and more equable distribution of pressure thus obtained. Secondly, in the symmetrical correspondence of the toes and contours of one foot with those of its partner; in the gradation of the regularly shortened toes, from the first to the fifth; in the delicate tints of the skin which, moreover, is smooth and not (as in apes) covered with straggling hairs and deep furrows, which would have concealed the delicate veins that variegate the surface, and give it the colour of life.

Professor Carl Vogt, in his Lectures on Man, vividly illustrates the principles on which our judgment regarding beauty in feet is based, by comparing a negro’s foot with that of civilised man: “The foot of the negro, says Burmeister, produces a disagreeable impression. Everything in it is ugly; the flatness, the projecting heel, the thick, fatty cushion in the inner cavity, the spreading toes.... The character of the human foot lies mainly in its arched structure, in the predominance of the metatarsus, the shortening and equal direction of the toes, among which the great toe is remarkably long, but not, like the thumb, opposable.... The toes in standing leave no mark, but do so in progression. The whole middle part of the foot does not touch the ground. Persons with flat feet, in whom the middle of the sole touches ground, are bad pedestrians, and are rejected as recruits.... The negro is a decided flat foot ... the fat cushion on the sole not only fills up the whole cavity, but projects beyond the surface.”

Inasmuch as it is the custom among all civilised peoples to cover the foot entirely, many of its aspects of beauty are rendered invisible permanently, so that it is perhaps not to be wondered at that in their absence Fashion should have so eagerly fixed on the two visible features—size and arched instep—and endeavoured to exaggerate them by Procrustean dimensions and stilt-like high heels. Yet in this matter even modern Parisians represent a progress over the mediæval Venetian ladies, who, according to Marinello, at one time wore soles and heels over a foot in height, so that on going out they had to be accompanied by several servants to prevent them from falling. Mais que voulez vous? Fashion is fashion, and women are women.

By the ancient Greeks the feet were frequently exposed to view; hence, says Winckelmann, “in descriptions of beautiful persons, as Polyxena and Aspasia, even their beautiful feet are mentioned.” Possibly in some future age, when Health and Beauty will be more worshipped than vulgar Fashion fetishes, a clever Yankee will invent an elastic, tough, and leathery, but transparent substance that will protect the foot while fitting it like a glove and showing its outlines. This would put an end to the mutilations resorted to from vanity, guided by bad taste, and would add one more feature to Personal Beauty. And the foot, as Burmeister insists, has one advantage over every other part of the body. Beauty in all these other features depends on health and a certain muscular roundness. But the foot’s beauty is independent of such variations, as it lies mainly in its permanent bony contours and in its fat cushion, which alone of all adipose layers resists the ravages of disease and old age. Hence a beautiful foot is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, long after all other youthful charms have faded and fled.

A GRACEFUL GAIT

So long as the foot remains entirely covered, its beauty is, on the whole, of less importance than the grace of its movements. Grace, under all circumstances, is as potent a love-charm as Beauty itself—of which, in fact, it is only a phase; and if young men and women could be made to realise how much they could add to their fascinations by cultivating a graceful gait and attitudes, hygienic shoemakers, dancing-masters, and gymnasiums would enjoy as great and sudden a popularity as skating-rinks, and a much more permanent popularity too.

It is the laws of Grace that chiefly determine the most admirable characteristics of the foot. The arched instep is beautiful because of its curved outlines; but its greatest value lies in the superior elasticity and grace it imparts to the gait. The habitual carrying of heavy loads tends to make the feet flat and to ruin Grace; hence the clumsy gait of most working people, and, on the other hand, the graceful walk of the “aristocratic” classes.

The proper size of the foot, again, is most easily determined with reference to the principles of Grace. Motion is graceful when it does not involve any waste of energy, and when it is in accordance with the lines of Beauty. There must be no disproportion between the machinery and the work done—no locomotive to pull a baby-carriage. Too large feet are ugly because they appear to have been made for carrying a giant; too small ones are ugly because seemingly belonging to a dwarf. What are the exact proportions lying between “too large” and “too small” can only be determined by those who have educated their taste by the study of the laws of Beauty and Grace throughout Nature.

From this point of view Grace is synonymous with functional fitness. A monkey’s foot is less beautiful than a man’s, but in climbing it is more graceful; whereas in walking man’s is infinitely more graceful. Apes rarely assume an erect position, and when they do so they never walk on the flat sole. “When the orang-outang takes to the ground,” says Mr. E. B. Tylor, “he shambles clumsily along, generally putting down the outer edge of the foot and the bent knuckles of the hand.”

I have italicised the word “clumsily” because it touches the vital point of the question. Man owes his intellectual superiority largely to the fact that he does not need his hands for walking or climbing, but uses them as organs of delicate touch and as tools. To acquire this independence of the hands he needed feet, which enabled him to stand erect and walk along, not “clumsily,” but firmly, naturally, and therefore gracefully. Hence in course of time, through the effects of constant use, there was developed the callous cushion of the heel and toes; while, through discontinuance of the habit of climbing, the toes became reduced in size. In the ape’s foot, it is well known, the toes are almost as long as the fingers of the hand: a fact which led Blumenbach and Cuvier to classify apes as quadrumana or four-handed animals. But Professor Huxley showed that this classification was based on erroneous reasoning. The resemblance between the hands and feet of apes is merely physiological or functional—because hands and feet are used alike for climbing. But anatomically, in its bones and muscles, etc., the monkey’s apparent hind “hand” is a true foot no less than man’s. If the physiological function, i.e. the opposability of the thumb to the other fingers, were taken as a ground of classification, then birds, who have such toes, would have no feet at all but only wings and hands.

There is a limit, however, beyond which the size of man’s toe’s cannot be reduced without injuring the foot’s usefulness and the grace of gait. The front part of the foot is distinguished for its yielding or elastic character. Hence, says Professor Humphrey, “in descending from a height, as from a chair or in walking downstairs, we alight upon the balls of the toes. If we alight upon the heels—for instance, if we walk downstairs on the heels—we find it an uncomfortable and rather jarring procedure. In walking and jumping, it is true, the heels come first in contact with the ground, but the weight then falls obliquely upon them, and is not fully borne by the foot till the toes also are upon the ground.”

One of the reasons why Grace is more rare even than Beauty on this planet is that the toes are cramped or even turned out of their natural position by tight, pointed, fashionable shoes, and are thus prevented from giving elasticity to the step. Instances are not rare (and by no means only in China) where the great toe is almost at right angles to the length of the foot. In walking, says Professor Flower, “the heel is first lifted from the ground, and the weight of the body gradually transferred through the middle to the anterior end of the foot, and the final push or impulse given with the great toe. It is necessary then that all these parts should be in a straight line with one another.”

It is a mooted question whether the toes should be slightly turned outward, as dancing-masters insist, or placed in straight parallel lines, as some physiologists hold. For the reason indicated in the last paragraph, physiologists are clearly right. With parallel or almost parallel great toes, a graceful walk is more easily attained than by turning out the toes. Even in standing, Dr. T. S. Ellis argues, the parallel position is preferable: “When a body stands on four points I know of no reason why it should stand more firmly if those points be unequally disposed. The tendency to fall forwards would seem to be even increased by widening the distance between the points in front, and it is in this direction that falls most commonly occur.”

EVOLUTION OF THE GREAT TOE

Perhaps the most striking difference between the feet of men and apes lies in the relative size of the first and second toes. In the ape’s foot the second toe is longer than the first, whereas in modern civilised man’s foot the first or great toe is almost always the longer. Not so, however, with savages, who are intermediate in this as in other respects between man and ape; and there are various other facts which seem to indicate that the evolution of the great toe, like that of the other extreme of the body—the head and brain—is still in progress.

There is a notion very prevalent among artists that the second toe should be longer than the first. This idea, Professor Flower thinks, is derived from the Greek canon, which in its turn was copied from the Egyptian, and probably originally derived from the negro. It certainly does not represent what is most usual in our race and time. “Among hundreds of bare, and therefore undeformed, feet of children I lately examined in Perthshire, I was not able to find one in which the second toe was the longest. Since in all apes—in fact, in all other animals—the first toe is considerably shorter than the second, a long first toe is a specially human attribute; and instead of being despised by artists, it should be looked upon as a mark of elevation in the scale of organised beings.”

Mr. J. P. Harrison, after a careful examination of the unrestored feet of Greek and Roman statues in various museums and art galleries, wrote an article in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain (vol. xiii. 1884), in which he states that he was “led to the conviction that it was from Italy and not Greece that the long second toe affected by many English artists had been imported.” Among the Italians a longer second toe is common, as also among Alsatians; in England so rarely that its occurrence probably indicates foreign blood. Professor Flower, as we have seen, found no cases at all; Paget examined twenty-seven English males, in twenty-four of whom the great toe was the longer. “In the case of the female feet, in ten out of twenty-three subjects the first or great toe was longest, and in ten females it was shorter than the second toe. In the remaining three instances the first and second toes were of equal length.”

Bear these last sentences in mind a moment, till we have seen what is the case with savages. Says Dr. Bruner: “A slight shortening of the great toe undoubtedly exists, not merely amongst the Negro tribes, but also in ancient and modern Egyptians, and even in some of the most beautiful races of Caucasian females.” And Mr. Harrison found this to be, with a few exceptions, a general trait of savages. The great toe was shorter than the second in skeletons of Peruvians, Tahitians, New Hebrideans, Savage islanders, Ainos, New Caledonians.

Must we therefore agree with Carl Vogt when he says, “We may be sure that, whenever we perceive an approach to the animal type, the female is nearer to it than the male”?

Perhaps, however, we can find a solution of the problem somewhat less insulting to women than this statement of the ungallant German professor.

It is Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, that has thus apparently caused almost half the women to approximate the simian type of the foot; Fashion, which, by inducing women for centuries to thrust their tender feet into Spanish boots of torture, has taken from their toes the freedom of action requisite for that free development and growth which is to be noticed in almost all the men.

Considering the great difference between the left and the right foot, it appears almost incredible, but is a sober fact, that until about half a century ago “rights and lefts” were not made even for the men, who now always wear them. But even to-day “they are not, it is believed, made use of by women, except in a shape that is little efficacious,” says Mr. Harrison; and concerning the Austrians Dr. Schaffer remarks, similarly, that “the like shoe for the left and right foot is still in use in the vast majority of cases.” No wonder women are so averse to taking exercise, and therefore lose their beauty at a time when it ought to be still in full bloom. For to walk in such shoes must be a torture forbidding all unnecessary movement.

Once more be it said—it is Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, that is responsible for the inferior beauty of the average female foot, by preventing the free development and play of the toes which are absolutely necessary for a graceful walk.

To what an extent the woful rarity of a graceful gait is due to the shape of “fashionable” shoes is vividly brought out in a passage concerning the natives of Martinique, which appeared in a letter in the New York Evening Post: “Many of the quadroons are handsome, even beautiful, in their youth, and all the women of pure black and mixed blood walk with a lightness of step and a graceful freedom of motion that is very noticeable and pleasant to see. I say all the women; but I must confine this description to those who go shoeless, for when a negress crams her feet into even the best-fitting pair of shoes her gait becomes as awkward as the waddle of an Indian squaw, or of a black swan on dry land, and she minces and totters in such danger of falling forward that one feels constrained to go to her and say, ‘Mam’selle Ebène or Noirette, do, I beseech you, put your shoes where you carry everything else, namely, on the top of your well-balanced head, and do let me see you walk barefoot again, for I do assure you that neither your Chinese cousins nor your European mistresses can ever hope to imitate your goddess-like gait until they practise the art of walking with their high-heeled, tiny boots nicely balanced on their heads, as you so often are pleased to do.’”

There is another lesson to be learned from this discussion, namely, that in trying to establish the principles of Beauty, it is better to follow one’s own taste than adhere blindly to Greek canons, and what are supposed to be Greek canons. The longer second toe, as we have seen, is not a characteristic of Greek art, but due apparently to restorations made in Italy where this peculiarity prevails. The Greeks, indeed, never hesitated to idealise and improve Nature if caught napping; and there can be little doubt that if in their own feet the first toe had been shorter than the second, they would have made it longer all the same in their statues, following the laws of gradation and curvature which a longer second toe would interrupt. For it is undeniable that, as Mr. Harrison remarks, “a model foot, according to Flaxman, is one in which the toes follow each other imperceptibly in a graceful curve from the first or great toe to the fifth.”

NATIONAL DIFFERENCES

The statement made above regarding the prevalence among Italians of a longer second toe enables us also to qualify the remark made in the Westminster Review (1884), that “Even at the present day it is a fact well known to all sculptors that Italy possesses the finest models as regards the female hands and feet in any part of Europe; and that to the eye of an Italian the wrists and ankles of most English women would not serve as a study even for those revivalisms of the antique which are to be purchased in our streets for a few shillings.” Whatever may be true of wrists and ankles, the toes must be excepted, at least if a larger percentage of Italian than of English women have the second toe longer.

Although in matters where so many individual differences exist it is hazardous to generalise, the following remarks on national peculiarities in feet, made by a reviewer of Zachariae’s Diseases of the Human Foot, may be cited for what they are worth: “The French foot is meagre, narrow, and bony; the Spanish foot is small and elegantly curved, thanks to its Moorish blood.... The Arab foot is proverbial for its high arch; ‘a stream can run under his foot,’ is a description of its form. The foot of the Scotch is large and thick—that of the Irish flat and square—the English short and fleshy. The American foot is apt to be disproportionately small.”

BEAUTIFYING HYGIENE

Walking, running, and dancing are the most potent cosmetics for producing a foot beautiful in form and graceful in movement. It is possible that much walking does slightly increase the size of the foot, but not enough to become perceptible in the life of an individual; and it has been sufficiently shown that the standard of Beauty in a foot is not smallness but curved outlines, litheness, and grace of gait, these qualities being a thousand times more powerful “love-charms” than the smallest Chinese foot. Moreover, it is probable that graceful walking has no tendency to enlarge the foot as a whole, but only the great toe; and a well-developed great toe is a distinctive sign of higher evolution.

It is useless for any one to try to walk or dance gracefully in shoes which do not allow the toes to spread and act like two sets of elastic springs. One of the most curious aberrations of modern taste is the notion that the shape of the natural foot is not beautiful—that it will look better if made narrowest in front instead of widest. Even were this so, it would not pay to sacrifice all grace to a slight gain in Beauty. But it is not so. It is only habit, which blunts perception, that makes us indifferent to the ugliness of the pointed shoes in our shop-windows, or even in many cases prefer them to naturally-shaped shoes. Were we once accustomed to properly-shaped hygienic boots, in which no part of the foot is cramped, our present shoes, with their unnatural curves where there should be none, and the absence of curves where they should be (“rights and lefts”), would seem as “awful” and “horrid” as the old crinoline does to the eyes of the present generation. As Professor Flower remarks: “The fact that the excessively pointed, elongated toes of the time of Richard II., for instance, were superseded by the broad, round-toed, almost elephantine, but most comfortable shoes seen in the portraits of Henry VIII. and his contemporaries, shows that there is nothing in the former essential to the gratification of the æsthetic instincts of mankind. Each form was, doubtless, equally admired in the time of its prevalence.”

The Germans claim that it was one of their countrymen, Petrus Camper, who first called attention, about a hundred years ago, to another objectionable peculiarity of the modern shoe—its high heels—ruinous alike to comfort, grace, and health (a number of female diseases being caused by them); yet they admit that Camper’s advice was hardly heeded by the Germans, and that it therefore serves them right that quite recently the modern hygienic shoe, with low, broad heels, has been introduced in Germany as the “English form,” the English having proved themselves less obtuse and conservative in this matter.

The heel is, however, capable of still further improvement. It is not elastic like the cushion of the heel, after which it should be modelled; and Dr. Schaffer’s suggestion that an elastic mechanism should be introduced in the heel is certainly worthy of trial. Everybody knows how much more lightly, gracefully, as well as noiselessly, he can walk in rubbers than in leather shoes; and this gain is owing to the superior elasticity of the heel and the middle part of the shoe, covering the arch, which should be especially elastic. It is pleasanter to walk in a meadow than on a stone pavement; but if we wear soles that are both soft and elastic we need never walk on a hard surface; for then, as Dr. Schaffer remarks, “we have the meadow in our boots.”

As the left foot always differs considerably from the right, it is not sufficient to have one measure taken. The fact that shoemakers do take but one measure shows what clumsy bunglers most of them are. As a rule, it is easier to get a fit from a large stock of ready-made boots than at a shoemaker’s.

The stockings, as well as the shoes, often cramp and deform the foot; and Professor Flower suggests that they should never be made with pointed toes, or similar forms for both sides. Digitated stockings, however, are a nuisance, for they hamper the free and elastic action of the toes. Woollen stockings are the best both for summer and winter use. No one who has ever experienced the comfort of wearing woollen socks (and underclothes in general), will ever dream of reverting to silk, cotton, or any other material.

Soaking the feet in water in which a handful of salt has been dissolved, several times a week, is an excellent way of keeping the skin in sound condition. For perfect cleanliness it does not suffice to change the socks frequently. As the author of the Ugly Girl Papers remarks, “The time will come when we will find it as shocking to our ideas to wear out a pair of boots without putting in new lining as we think the habits of George the First’s time, when maids of honour went without washing their faces for a week, and people wore out their linen without the aid of a laundress.”

DANCING AND GRACE

Among the ancients dancing included graceful gestures and poses of all parts of the body, as well as facial expression. In Oriental dancing of the present day, likewise, graceful movements of the arms and upper part of the body play a more important rôle than the lower limbs. Modern dancing, on the contrary, is chiefly an affair of the lower extremities. It is pre-eminently an exercise of the toes; and herein lies its hygienic and beautifying value, for, as we have seen, grace of gait depends chiefly on the firm litheness and springiness of the toes, especially the great toe. By their grace of gait one can almost always distinguish persons who have enjoyed the privilege of dancing-lessons, which have strengthened their toes and, by implication, many other muscles, not forgetting those of the arm, which has to hold the partner.

There are thousands of young women who have no opportunities for prolonged and exhilarating exercise except in ballrooms. In the majority of cases, unfortunately, Fashion, the handmaid of Ugliness and Disease, frustrates the advantages which would result from dancing by prescribing for ballrooms not only the smallest shoes, but the tightest corsets and the lowest dresses, which render it impossible or imprudent to breathe fresh air, without which exercise is of no hygienic value, and may even be injurious. But what are such trifling sacrifices as Health, Beauty, and Grace compared to the glorious consciousness of being fashionable!

DANCING AND COURTSHIP

The ballroom is Cupid’s camping ground, not only because it facilitates the acquisition of that grace by which he is so easily enamoured, but because it affords such excellent opportunities for Courtship and Sexual Selection. And this applies not only to the era of modern Romantic Love, but, from its most primitive manifestations in the animal world, dancing, like song, has been connected with love and courtship.

Darwin devotes several pages to a description of the love-antics and dances of birds. Some of them, as the black African weaver, perform their love-antics on the wing, “gliding through the air with quivering wings, which make a rapid whirring sound like a child’s rattle;” others remain on the ground, like the English white-throat, which “flutters with a fitful and fantastic motion;” or the English bustard, who “throws himself into indescribably odd attitudes whilst courting the female;” and a third class, the famous Bower-birds, perform their love-antics in bowers specially constructed and adorned with leaves, shells, and feathers. These are the earliest ballrooms known in natural history; and it is quite proper to call them so, for, as Darwin remarks, they “are built on the ground for the sole purpose of courtship, for their nests are formed in trees.”

Passing on to primitive man, we again find him inferior to animals in not knowing that the sole proper function of dancing is in the service of Love, courtship, and grace. Savages have three classes of dance, two being performed by the men alone, the third by men and women. First come the war-dances, in which the grotesquely-painted warriors brandish their spears and utter unearthly howls, to excite themselves for an approaching contest. Second, the Hunter’s Dances, in which the game is impersonated by some of the men and chased about, which leads to many comic scenes; though there is a serious undercurrent of superstition, for they believe that such dances—a sort of saltatorial prayer—bring on good luck in the subsequent real chase. Third, the dance of Love, practised e.g. by the Brazilian Indians, with whom “men and women dance a rude courting dance, advancing in lines with a kind of primitive polka step” (Tylor.) That there is as little refinement and idealism in the savage’s dances as in his love-affairs in general is self-evident.

The civilised nations of antiquity, as we have seen, had no prolonged Courtship, and therefore no Romantic Love. Since young men and women were not allowed to meet freely, dancing was of course not esteemed as a high social accomplishment. It was therefore commonly relegated to a special class of women (or slaves), such as the Bayaderes of India and the Greek flute girls. Notwithstanding that even the Greek gods are sometimes represented as dancing, yet this art came to be considered a sign of effeminacy in men who indulged in it; and as for the Romans, their view is indicated in Cicero’s anathema: “No man who is sober dances, unless he is out of his mind, either when alone or in decent society, for dancing is the companion of wanton conviviality, dissoluteness, and luxury.”

In ancient Egypt, too, the upper classes were not allowed to learn dancing. And herein, as in so many things in which women are concerned, the modern Oriental is the direct descendant of the ancients. “In the eyes of the Chinese,” says M. Letourneau, “dancing is a ridiculous amusement by which a man compromises his dignity.”

Plato appears to have been the first who recognised the importance of dancing as affording opportunities for Courtship and pre-matrimonial acquaintance. But his advice remained unheeded by his countrymen. A view regarding dancing similar to Plato’s was announced by an uncommonly liberal theologian of the sixteenth century in the words, as quoted by Scherr, that “Dancing had been originally arranged and permitted with the respectable purpose of teaching manners to the young in the presence of many people, and enabling young men and maidens to form honest attachments. For in the dance it was easy to observe and note the habits and peculiarities of the young.”

Thus we see that, with the exception of the savage’s war-dances and hunting pantomimes, the art of dancing has at all times and everywhere been born of love; even the ancient religious dances having commonly been but a veil concealing other purposes, as among the Greeks. But all ceremonial dancing, like ceremonial kissing, has been from the beginning doomed to be absorbed and annihilated by the all-engrossing modern passion of Romantic Love.

True, as a miser mistakes the means for the end and loves gold for its own sake, so we sometimes see girls dance alone—possibly with a vaguely coy intention of giving the men to understand that they can get along without them. But their heart is not in it, and they never do it when there are men enough to go round. As for the men, they are too open and frank ever to veil their sentiments. They never dance except with a woman.

To-day our fashion and society papers are eternally complaining of the fact that the young men—especially the desirable young men—seem to have lost all interest in dancing. But who is to blame for this? Certainly not the men. It is Fashion again, and the mothers who sacrifice the matrimonial prospects of their daughters—as well as their Health, Beauty, and Individuality—to this hideous fetish. It is the late hours of the dance, prescribed by Fashion, that are responsible for the apparent loss of masculine interest in this art. Formerly, when aristocracy meant laziness and stupidity, the habit of turning night into day was harmless or even useful, because it helped to rid the world prematurely of a lot of fools. But to-day the leading men of the community are also the busiest. Aristocracy implies activity, intellectual and otherwise. Hence there are few men in the higher ranks who have not their regular work to do during the day. To ask them after a day’s hard labour to go to a dance beginning at midnight and ending at four or five is to ask them to commit suicide. Sensible men do not believe in slow suicide, hence they avoid dancing-parties as if such parties were held in small-pox hospitals.

Let society women throw their stupid conservatism to the winds. Let them arrange balls to begin at eight or nine and end at midnight or one, and “desirable” men will be only too eager to flock to assemblies which they now shun. The result will be a sudden and startling diminution in the number of old maids and bachelors.

It is the moral duty of mothers who have marriageable daughters to encourage this reform. Maternal love does not merely imply solicitude for the first twenty years of a daughter’s life, but careful provision for the remainder of her life, covering twice that period, by enabling her to meet and choose a husband after her own heart

EVOLUTION OF DANCE MUSIC

Did space permit, it would be interesting to study in detail the dances of various epochs and countries, coloured, like the Love which originated them, by national peculiarities—the Polish mazourka and polonaise, the Spanish fandango, the Viennese waltz, the Parisian cancan, etc. Suffice it to note the great difference between the dances of a few generations ago and those of to-day, as shown most vividly in the evolution of dance-music.

The earliest dance-tunes are vocal, and were sung by the (professional) dancers themselves, in the days when the young were not yet allowed to meet, converse, and flirt and dance. Subsequently, the transference of dance-music to instruments played by others gave the dancers opportunity to perform more complicated figures, and made it possible to converse. But even as late as the eighteenth century dancing and dance-music were characterised by a stately reserve, slowness, and pompous dignity which showed at once that they had nothing to do with Romantic Love. It was not the fiery, passionate youths who danced these solemnly stupid minuets, gavottes, sarabandes, and allemandes, but the older folks, whose perruques, and collars, and frills, and bloated clothes would not have enabled them to execute rapid movements even if the warm blood of youth had coursed in their veins.

How all this artificiality and snail-like pomp has been brushed away by triumphant Romantic Love, which has secured for modern lovers the privilege of dancing together before they are married and cease to care for it! True, we still have the monotonous soporific quadrille, as if to remind us of bygone times; but the true modern dance is the round dance, which differs from the stately mediæval dance as a jolly rural picnic does from a formal morning call.

The difference between the mediæval and the modern dance is thus indicated by F. Bremer:—

“Peculiar to modern dance-music is the round dance, especially the waltz; and it is in consequence warmer than the older dance-music, more passionate in expression, in rhythm and modulation more sharply accented. As its creator we must regard Carl Maria von Weber, who, in his Invitation to Dance, struck the keynote through which subsequently, in the music of Chopin, Lanner, Strauss, Musard, etc., utterance was given to the whole gamut of dreamy, languishing, sentimental, ardent passion. The consequence was the displacement of the stately, measured dances by impetuous, chivalrous forms; and in place of the former naïve sentimentality and childish mirth, it is the rapture of Love that constitutes the spirit of modern dance-music.”

Not to speak of more primitive dance-tunes, what a difference there is between the slow and dreary monotony of eighteenth century dances and a Viennese waltz of to-day! The vast superiority of a Strauss waltz lies in this—that it is no longer a mere rhythmic noise calculated to guide the steps, and skips, and bows, and evolutions of the dancers, but the symphonic accompaniment to the first act in the drama of Romantic Love. It recognises the fact that Courtship is the prime object of the dance. Hence, though still bound by the inevitable dance rhythm, Strauss is ever trying to break loose from it, to secure that freedom and variety of rhythm which is needed to give full utterance to passion. Note the slow, pathetic introductions; the signs in the score indicating an accelerated or retarded tempo when the waltz is played at a concert, where the uniformity of ballroom movement is not called for; note what subtle use he makes of all the other means of expressing amorous feeling—the wide melodic intervals, the piquant, stirring harmonies, the exquisitely melancholy flashes of instrumental colouring, alternating with cheerful moments, showing a subtle psychologic art of translating the Mixed Moods of Love into the language of tones.

In the waltzes, mazourkas, and polonaises of Chopin we see still more strikingly that the true function of dance-music is amorous. Even as Dante’s Love for Beatrice was too super-sensual, too ethereal for this world, so Chopin’s dance-pieces are too subtle, too full of delicate nuances of tempo and Love episodes, to be adapted to a ballroom with ordinary mortals. Graceful fairies alone could dance a Chopin waltz; mortals are too heavy, too clumsy. They can follow an amorous Chopin waltz with the imagination alone, which is the abode of Romantic Love. To a Strauss waltz a hundred couples may make love at once, hence he writes for the orchestra; but Chopin wrote for the parlour piano, because the feelings he utters are too deep to be realised by more than two at a time—one who plays and one who listens, till their souls dance together in an ecstatic embrace of Mutual Sympathy.

THE DANCE OF LOVE

It is at Vienna, which has more feminine grace and beauty to the square mile than any other city in the world, that the art of dancing is to be seen in its greatest perfection. No wonder that it is the home of the Waltz-King, Johann Strauss; and that a Viennese feuilletonist has shown the deepest insight into the psychology of the dance in an article from which the following excerpts are taken:—

"The waltz has a creative, a rejuvenating power, which no other dance possesses. The skipping polka is characterised by a certain stiffness and angularity, a rhythm rather sober and old-fashioned. The galop is a wild hurricane, which moves along rudely and threatens to blow over everything that comes in its way; it is the most brutal of all dances, an enemy of all tender and refined feelings, a bacchanalian rushing up and down....

"The waltz, therefore, remains as the only true and real dance. Waltzing is not walking, skipping, jumping, rushing, raving; it is a gentle floating and flying; from the heaviest men it seems to take away some of their materiality, to raise the most massive women from the ground into the air. True, the Viennese alone know how to dance it, as they alone know how to play it....

“The waltz insists on a personal monopoly, on being loved for its own sake, and permits no vapid side-remarks regarding the fine weather, the hot room, the toilets of the ladies; the couple glide along hardly speaking a word; except that she may beg for a pause, or he, indefatigable, insatiable, intoxicated by the music and motion, the fragrance of flowers and ladies, invites her to a new flight around the hall. And yet is this mute dance the most eloquent, the most expressive and emotional, the most sensuous that could be imagined; and if the dancer has anything to say to his partner, let him mutely confide it to her in the sweet whirl of a waltz, for then the music is his advocate, then every bar pleads for him, every note is a billet-doux, every breath a declaration of love. Jealous husbands do not allow their wives to waltz with another man. They are right, for the waltz is the Dance of Love.”

BALLET-DANCING

There is one more form of dancing which may be briefly alluded to, because it illustrates the hypocrisy of the average mortal as well as the rarity of true æsthetic taste. Solo ballet-dancing is admired not only by the bald-headed old men in the parquet, but there are critics who seriously discuss such dancing as if it were a fine art; generally lamenting the good old times of the great and graceful ballet-dancers. The truth is that ballet-dancing never can be graceful, as now practised. To secure graceful movement it is absolutely necessary to make use of the elasticity of the toes—to touch the ground at the place where the toes articulate with the middle foot, and to give the last push with the yielding great toe. Ballet-dancers, however, walk on the tips of their stiffened toes, the result of which is, as the anatomist, Professor Kollmann, remarks, that “their gait is deprived of all elasticity and becomes stiff, as in going on stilts.”

It speaks well for the growing sensibility of mankind that this form of dancing is gradually losing favour. Like the vocal tight-rope dancing of the operatic prime donne with whom ballet-dancers are associated, their art is a mere circus-trick, gaped at as a difficult tour de force, but appealing in no sense to æsthetic sentiments.

These strictures, of course, apply merely to solo-dancing on tiptoe. The spectacular ballet, which delights the eye with kaleidoscopic colours and groupings, is quite another thing, and may be made highly artistic.

THE LOWER LIMBS

MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT

The assumption by man of an erect attitude has modified and improved the appearance of his leg and thigh quite as marvellously as his feet. “In walking,” says Professor Kollmann, “the weight of the body is alternately transferred from one foot to the other. Each one is obliged in locomotion to take its turn in supporting the whole body, which explains the great size of the muscles which make up man’s calf. The ape’s calf is smaller for the reason that these animals commonly go on all fours.” Professor Carl Vogt gives these details: “No ape has such a cylindrical, gradually diminishing thigh; and we are justified in saying that man alone possesses thighs. The muscles of the leg are in man so accumulated as to form a calf, while in the ape they are more equally distributed; still, transitions are not wanting, since one of the greatest characteristics of the negro consists in his calfless leg.” And again: “Man possesses, as contrasted with the ape, a distinctive character in the strength, rotundity, and length of the lower limb; especially in the thighs, which in most animals are shortened in proportion to the leg.”

The words here italicised call attention to two of the qualities of Beauty—gradation and the curve of rotundity—which the lower limbs in their evolution are thus seen to be gradually approximating. Other improvements are seen in the greater smoothness, the more graceful and expressive gait resulting from the rounded but straight knee, etc.

The implication that savages are in the muscular development of their limbs intermediate between apes and civilised men calls for further testimony and explanation. Waitz states that “in regard to muscular power Indians are commonly inferior to Europeans”; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected much evidence of a similar nature. The Ostyaks have “thin and slender legs”; the Kamtchadales “short and slender legs”; those of the Chinooks are “small and crooked”; and the African Akka have “short and bandy legs.” The legs of Australians are “inferior in mass of muscle”; the gigantic Patagonians have limbs “neither so muscular nor so large-boned as their height and apparent bulk would induce one to suppose.” Spencer likewise calls attention to the fact that relatively-inferior legs are “a trait which, remotely simian, is also repeated by the child of the civilised man”—which thus individually passes through the several stages of development that have successively characterised its ancestors.

Numerous exceptions are of course to be found to the rule that the muscular rotundity and plumpness of the limbs increases with civilisation. The lank shins which may be seen by the hundred among the bathers at our sea-coast resorts contrast disadvantageously with many photographs of savages; and tourists in Africa and among South American Indians and elsewhere have often enough noted the occurrence of individuals and tribes who would have furnished admirable models for sculptors. But this only proves, on the one hand, that “civilised” persons who are uncivilised in their neglect of the laws of Health, inevitably lose certain traits of Beauty which exercise alone can give; while, on the other hand, those “savages” who lead an active and healthy life are in so far civilised, and therefore enjoy the superior attractions bestowed by civilisation. Moreover, as Mr. Spencer suggests, “In combat, the power exercised by arm and trunk is limited by the power of the legs to withstand the strain thrown on them. Hence, apart from advantages in locomotion, the stronger-legged nations have tended to become, other things equal, dominant races.”

“Rengger,” says Darwin, “attributes the thin legs and thick arms of the Payaguas Indians to successive generations having passed nearly their whole lives in canoes, with their lower extremities motionless. Other writers have come to a similar conclusion in analogous cases.”

Although savages have to hunt for a living and occasionally go to war, they are essentially a lazy crew, taking no more exercise than necessary; which accounts for the fact that, with the exceptions noted, their muscular development is inferior to that of higher races.

BEAUTIFYING EXERCISE

One of the most discouraging aspects of modern life is the growing tendency toward concentration of the population in large cities. Not only is the air less salubrious in cities than in the country, but the numerous cheap facilities for riding discourage the habit of walking. London is one of the healthiest cities, and the English the most vigorous race, in the world; yet it is said that it is difficult to trace a London family down through five generations. Few Paris families can, it is said, be traced even through three generations. Without constant rural accessions cities would tend to become depopulated.

The enormous importance of exercise for Health and Beauty, which are impossible without it, is vividly brought out in this statement of Kollmann’s: “Muscles which are thoroughly exercised do not only retain their strength, but increase in circumference and power, in man as in animals. The flesh is then firm, and coloured intensely red. In a paralysed arm the muscles are degenerated, and have lost a portion of one of their most important constituents—albumen. Repeated contractions strengthen a muscle, because motion accelerates the circulation of the blood and the nutrition of the tissues. What a great influence this has on the whole body may be inferred from the fact that the organs of locomotion—the skeleton and muscles—make up more than 82 per cent of the substance of the body. With this enormous proportion of bone and muscle, it is obvious that exercise is essential to bodily health.”

Exercise in a gymnasium is useful but monotonous; and too often the benefits are neutralised by the insufficient provision for fresh air, without which exercise is worse than useless. Hence the superiority of open-air games—base-ball, tennis, rowing, riding, swimming, etc., to the addiction to which the English owe so much of their superior physique. Tourists in Canada invariably notice the wonderful figures of the women, which they owe largely to their fondness for skating. “Beyond question,” says the Lancet, “skating is one of the finest sports, especially for ladies. It is graceful, healthy, stimulating to the muscles, and it develops in a very high degree the important faculty of balancing the body and preserving perfect control over the whole of the muscular system, while bringing certain muscles into action at will. Moreover, there is this about it which is of especial value: it trains by exercise the power of intentionally inducing and maintaining a continuous contraction of the muscles of the lower extremity. The joints, hip, knee, and ankle are firmly fixed or rather kept steadily under control, while the limbs are so set by their muscular apparatus that they form, as it were, part of the skate that glides over the smooth surface. To skate well and gracefully is a very high accomplishment indeed, and perhaps one of the very best exercises in which young women and girls can engage with a view to healthful development.”

For the acquisition of a graceful gait women need such exercise more even than men; and while engaged in it they should pay especial attention to exercising the left side of the body. On this point Sir Charles Bell has made the following suggestive remarks:—

“We see that opera-dancers execute their more difficult feats on the right foot, but their preparatory exercises better evince the natural weakness of the left limb; in order to avoid awkwardness in the public exhibitions, they are obliged to give double practice to the left leg; and if they neglect to do so an ungraceful preference to the right side will be remarked. In walking behind a person we seldom see an equalised motion of the body; the tread is not so firm upon the left foot, the toe is not so much turned out, and a greater push is made with the right. From the peculiar form of woman, and from the elasticity of her step, resulting from the motion of the ankle rather than of the haunches, the defect of the left foot, when it exists, is more apparent in her gait.”

Those who wish to acquire a graceful gait will find several useful hints in this extract from Professor Kollmann’s Plastische Anatomie, p. 506:—

“Human gait, it is well known, is subject to individual variations. Differences are to be noted not only in rapidity of motion, but as regards the position of the trunk and the movements of the limbs, within certain limits. For instance, the gait of very fat persons is somewhat vacillating; other persons acquire a certain dignity of gait by bending and stretching their limbs as little as possible while taking long steps; and others still bend their knees very much, which gives a slovenly character to their gait. And as regards the attitude of the trunk, a different effect is given according as it is inclined backwards or forwards, or executes superfluous movements in the same direction or to the sides. All these peculiarities make an impression on our eyes, while our ears are impressed at the same time by the differences in rapidity of movement, so that we learn to recognise our friends by the sound of their walk as we do by the quality of their voice.”

Bell states that “upwards of fifty muscles of the arm and hand may be demonstrated, which must all consent to the simplest action.” Walking is a no less complicated affair, to which the attention of men of science has been only quite recently directed. The new process of instantaneous photography has been found very useful, but much remains to be done before the mystery of a graceful gait can be considered solved. If some skilled photographer would go to Spain and take a number of instantaneous pictures of Andalusian girls, the most graceful beings in the world, in every variety of attitude and motion, he might render most valuable service to the cause of personal æsthetics.

The time will come, no doubt, when dancing masters and mistresses will consider the teaching of the waltz and the lancers only the crudest and easiest part of their work, and when they will have advanced classes who will be instructed in the refinements of movement as carefully and as intelligently as professors of music teach their pupils the proper use of the parts and muscles of the hand, to attain a delicate and varied touch. The majority of women might make much more progress in the art of gracefulness than they ever will in music; and is not the poetry of motion as noble and desirable an object of study as any other fine art?

FASHIONABLE UGLINESS

It is the essence of fashion to exaggerate everything to the point of ugliness. Instead of trying to remedy the disadvantages to their gait resulting from anatomical peculiarities (just referred to in a quotation from Bell), women frequently take pains to deliberately exaggerate them. As Alexander Walker remarks: “The largeness of the pelvis and the approximation of the knees influence the gait of woman, and render it vacillating and unsteady. Conscious of this, women, in countries where the nutritive system in general and the pelvis in particular are large, affect a greater degree of this vacillating unsteadiness. An example of this is seen in the lateral and rotatory motion which is given to the pelvis in walking by certain classes of the women in London.”

The Egyptians and Arabians consider this ludicrous rotatory motion a great fascination, and have a special name for it—Ghung.

But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, is not content with aping the bad taste of Arabians and Egyptians. It goes several steps lower than that, down to the Hottentots. The latest hideous craze of Fashion, against which not one woman in a hundred had taste or courage enough to revolt—the bustle or “dress-improver” (!)—was simply the milliner’s substitute for an anatomical peculiarity natural to some African savages.

“It is well known,” says Darwin, “that with many Hottentot women the posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner; they are steatopygous; and Sir Andrew Smith is certain that this peculiarity is greatly admired by the men. He once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind, that when seated on level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope. Some of the women in various negro tribes have the same peculiarity; and, according to Burton, the Somal men ‘are said to choose their wives by ranging them in a line, and by picking her out who projects farthest a tergo. Nothing can be more hateful to a negro than the opposite form.’”

Evidently “civilised” and savage women do not differ as regards Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness. But the men do. While the male Hottentots admire the natural steatopyga of their women, civilised men, without exception, detest the artificial imitation of it, which makes a woman look and walk like a deformed dromedary.

THE CRINOLINE CRAZE

The bustle is not only objectionable in itself as a hideous deformity and a revival of Hottentot taste, but still more as a probable forerunner of that most unutterably vulgar article of dress ever invented by Fashion—the crinoline. For we read that when, in 1856, the crinoline came in again, it was preceded by the “inelegant bustle in the upper part of the skirt”; and it is a notorious fact that cunning milliners are making strenuous efforts every year to reintroduce the crinoline.

In their abhorrence of the crinoline men do not stand alone. There are several refined women to-day who would absolutely refuse to submit to the tyranny of Fashion if it should again prescribe the crinoline. One of these is evidently Mrs. Haweis, who in The Art of Beauty remarks that “The crinoline superseded all our attention to posture; whilst our long trains, which can hardly look inelegant [?] even on clumsy persons, make small ankles or thick ones a matter of little moment. We have become inexpressibly slovenly. We no longer study how to walk, perhaps the most difficult of all actions to do gracefully. Our fashionable women stride and loll in open defiance of elegance,” etc. And again: “This gown in outline simply looks like a very ill-shaped wine-glass upside down. The wide crinoline entirely conceals every natural grace of attitude.”

Another lady, writing in the Atlantic Monthly (1859), remarks concerning the crinoline: “A woman in this rig hangs in her skirts like a clapper in a bell; and I never meet one without being tempted to take her by the neck and ring her.”

About 1710, says a writer in the Encyclopædia Britannica, “as if resolved that their figures should rival their heads in extravagance, they introduced the hooped petticoat, at first worn in such a manner as to give to the person of the wearer below her very tightly-laced waist a contour resembling the letter V inverted—ʌ. The hooped dresses, thus introduced, about 1740 attained to an enormous expansion; and being worn at their full circumference immediately below the waist, they in many ways emulated the most outrageous of the fardingales of the Elizabethan period.”

“About 1744 hoops are mentioned as so extravagant,” says Chambers’s Encyclopædia, “that a woman occupied the space of six men.” George IV. had the good taste to abolish them by royal command, but they were revived in 1856. The newspapers of two decades ago daily contained accounts of accidents due to the idiotic crinoline. “The Spectator dealt out much cutting, though playful, raillery at the hoops of his day, but apparently with little effect; and equally unavailing are the satires of Punch and other caricaturists of the present time against the hideous fashion of crinoline.... Owing to its prevalence, church-pews that formerly held seven are now let for six, and yet feel rather crowded. The hoops are sometimes made with a circumference of four or even five yards.”

It is universally admitted that the human form, in its perfection, is Nature’s chef d’œuvre—the most finished specimen of her workmanship. Yet the accounts of savage taste given by travellers and anthropologists show that the savage is never satisfied with the human outlines as God made them, but constantly mars and mutilates them by altering the shape of the head, piercing the nose, filing or colouring the teeth, enlarging the lips to enormous dimensions, favouring an adipose bustle, etc. This is precisely what modern Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, does. We have just seen how fashionable women, unable to comprehend the beauty of the human form, have for several generations endeavoured to give it the shape of “a very ill-shaped wine-glass, upside down,” “a clapper in a bell,” or “the letter V inverted.” And concerning Queen Elizabeth the Atlantic writer already quoted says very pithily: “What with stomachers and pointed waist and fardingale, and sticking in here and sticking out there, and ruffs and cuffs, and ouches and jewels and puckers, she looks like a hideous flying insect with expanded wings, seen through a microscope—not at all like a woman.”

Fortunately, for the moment, the crinoline, like the fardingale, is not “in fashion.” But, as already stated, there is considerable danger of a new invasion every year; and, should Fashion proclaim its edict, no doubt the vast majority of women would follow, as they did a decade or two ago. In the interest of good taste, as of common sense, it is therefore necessary to speak with brutal frankness on this subject. There is good evidence to show that the crinoline originated in the desire of an aristocratic dame of low moral principles to conceal the evidences of a crime. Hence the original French name for the crinoline—Cache-Bâtard. Will respectable and refined women consent once more to have the fashion set for them by a courtesan?

THE WAIST

THE BEAUTY CURVE

In a well-shaped waist, as in every other part of the body, the curved line of Beauty, with its delicate gradations, exercises a great charm. Examination of a Greek statue of the best period, male or female, or of the goddess of beauty in the Pagoda at Bangalur, India, shows a slight inward curve at the waist, whereas in early Greek and Egyptian art this curve is absent. The waist, therefore, like the feet and limbs, appears to have been gradually moulded into accordance with the line of Beauty—a notion which is also supported by the following remarks in Tylor’s Anthropology: “If fairly chosen photographs of Kaffirs be compared with a classic model such as the Apollo, it will be noticed that the trunk of the African has a somewhat wall-sided straightness, wanting in the inward slope which gives fineness to the waist, and in the expansion below, which gives breadth across the hips, these being two of the most noticeable points in the classic model which our painters recognise as an ideal of manly beauty.”

In woman, owing to the greater dimensions of her pelvis, this curvature is more pronounced than in man; yet even in woman it must be slight if the laws of Health and Beauty are to suffer no violation. “Moderation” is the one word which Mr. Buskin says he would have inscribed in golden letters over the door of every school of art. For “the least appearance of violence or extravagance, of the want of moderation and restraint, is,” as he remarks, “destructive of all beauty whatsoever in everything—colour, form, motion, language, or thought—giving rise to that which in colour we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtility and almost invisibility of natural curves and colours, and why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the religious painters,” etc.

THE WASP-WAIST MANIA

But Fashion, the handmaid of ugliness, too vulgar to appreciate the exquisite beauty of slight and subtle curvature, makes woman’s waist the most maltreated and deformed part of her body. There is not one woman in a hundred who does not deliberately destroy twenty per cent of her Personal Beauty by the way in which she reduces the natural dimensions of her waist. There is, indeed, ground to believe that the main reason why the bustle, and even the crinoline, are not looked on with abhorrence by all women is because they aid the corset in making the waist look smaller by contrast. The Wasp-waist Mania is therefore the disease which most imperatively calls for cure. But the task seems almost hopeless; for, as a female writer remarks, it is almost as difficult to cure a woman of the corset habit as a man of intemperance in drink.

“The injurious custom of tight lacing,” says Planché in his Cyclopædia of Costumes, “‘a custom fertile in disease and death,’ appears to have been introduced by the Normans as early as the twelfth century; and the romances of the Middle Ages teem with allusions to and laudations of the wasplike waists of the dames and demoiselles of the period.... Chaucer, describing the carpenter’s wife, says her body was ‘gentyll and small as a weasel’; and the depraved taste extended to Scotland. Dunbar, in The Thistle and the Rose, describing some beautiful women, observes—

“‘Their middles were as small as wands.’

And to make their middles as small as possible has been ever since an unfortunate mania with the generality of the fair sex, to the detriment of their health and the distortion of their forms.”

Ever since 1602, when Felix Plater raised his voice against the corset, physicians have written against tight lacing. But not only has it been found impossible to cure this mania, even its causes have remained a mystery to the present day. Certainly no man can understand the problem. Is it simply the average woman’s lack of taste that urges her thus to mutilate her Personal Beauty? Is it the admiration of a few vulgar “mashers” and barber’s pets—since educated men detest wasp-waists? Or is it simply the proverbial feminine craze for emulating one another and arousing envy by excelling in some extravagance of dress, no matter at what cost? This last suggestion is probably the true solution of the problem. The only satisfaction a woman can get from having a wasp-waist is the envy of other silly women. What a glorious recompense for her æsthetic suicide, her invalidism, and her humiliating confession that she considers the natural shape of God’s masterwork—the female body—inferior in beauty to the contours of the lowly wasp!

With this ignoble pleasure derived from the envy of silly women and the admiration of vulgar men, compare a few of the disadvantages resulting from tight lacing. They are of two kinds—hygienic and æsthetic.

Hygienic Disadvantages.—Surely no woman can look without a shudder at a fashionable Parisian figure placed side by side with the Venus of Milo in Professor Flower’s Fashion in Deformity, in Mrs. Haweis’s Art of Beauty, or in Behnke and Brown’s Voice, Song, and Speech; or look without horror at the skeletons showing the excessive compression of the lower ribs brought about by fashionable lacing, and the injurious displacement, in consequence, of some of the most important vital organs. Nor can any young man who does not desire to marry a foredoomed invalid, and raise sickly children, fail to be cured for ever of his love for any wasp-waisted girl if he will take the trouble to read the account of the terrible female maladies resulting from lacing, given in Dr. Gaillard Thomas’s famous treatise on the Diseases of Women, in the chapter on “Improprieties in Dress.” To cite only one sentence: Women, he says, subject their waist to a “constriction which, in autopsy, will sometimes be found to have left the impress of the ribs upon the liver, producing depressions corresponding to them.”

Says Dr. J. J. Pope: “The German physiologist, Sömmering, has enumerated no fewer than ninety-two diseases resulting from tight lacing.... ‘But I do not lace tightly,’ every lady is ready to answer. No woman ever did, if we accept her own statement. Yet stay. Why does your corset unclasp with a snap? And why do you involuntarily take a deep breath directly it is loosened?” Young ladies who imagine they do not wear too tight stays, inasmuch as they can still insert their hand, will find the fallacy and danger of this reasoning exposed in Mr. B. Roth’s Dress: its Sanitary Aspect.

The last line which I have italicised is of extreme significance. Perhaps the greatest of all evils resulting from tight lacing is that it discourages or prevents deep breathing, which is so absolutely essential to the maintenance of health and beauty. The “heaving bosom” of a maiden may be a fine poetic expression, but it indicates that the maiden wears stays and breathes at the wrong (upper) end of her lungs. “The fact of a patient breathing in this manner is noted by a physician as a grave symptom, because it indicates mischief of a vital nature in lungs, heart, or other important organ.” Healthy breathing should be chiefly costal or abdominal; but this is made impossible by the corset, which compresses the lower ribs, till, instead of being widely apart below, they meet in the middle, and thus prevent the lungs from expanding and receiving the normal share of oxygen, the only true elixir of life, youth, and beauty.

This wrong breathing, due to tight lacing, also causes “congestion of the vessels of the neck and throat ... gasping, jerking, and fatigue in inspiration, and unevenness, trembling, and undue vibration in the production and emission of vocal tone.”

Further, as the Lancet points out, “tight stays are a common cause of so-called ‘weak’ spine, due to weakness of muscles of the back.” Lacing prevents the abdominal muscles from exercising their natural functions—alternate relaxation and contraction: “A tight-laced pair of stays acts precisely as a splint to the trunk, and prevents or greatly impedes the action of the chief back muscles, which therefore become weakened. The unfortunate wearer feels her spine weaken, thinks she wants more support, so laces herself still tighter; she no doubt does get some support in this way, but at what a terrible cost!”

In regard to tight corsets, as another physician has aptly remarked, women are like the victims of the opium habit, who also daily feel the need of a larger dose of their stimulant, every increment of which adds a year to their age, and brings them a few steps nearer disease and ugly decrepitude.

Æsthetic Disadvantages.—Among the æsthetic disadvantages resulting from the Wasp-waist Mania, the following may be mentioned, besides the loss of a clear, mellow, musical voice already referred to:—

(1) A stiff, inflexible waist, with a coarsely exaggerated contour, in place of the slight and subtle curvature so becoming to woman. In other words, a violation of the first law of personal æsthetics—imposing the shape of a vulgar garment on the human form, instead of making the dress follow the outlines of the body.

(2) A sickly, sallow complexion, pale lips, a red nose, lack of buoyancy, general feebleness, lassitude, apathy, and stupidity, resulting from the fact that the compression of the waist induces an oxygen-famine. The eyes lose their sparkle and love-inspiring magic, the features are perceptibly distorted, the brow is prematurely wrinkled, and the expression and temper are soured by the constant discomfort that has to be silently endured.

(3) Ugly shoulders. A woman’s shoulders should be sloping and well rounded, like every other part of her body. Regarding the common feminine deformity of square shoulders, Drs. Brinton and Napheys remark, in their work on Personal Beauty, that “in four cases out of five it has been brought about by too close-fitting corsets, which press the shoulder-blades behind, and collar-bones in front, too far upwards, and thus ruin the appearance of the shoulders.”

(4) An ugly bust. Tight lacing “flattens and displaces the breasts.”

(5) Clumsiness. The corset is ruinous to grace. “Almost daily,” says Dr. Alice B. Stockham (Tokology), “women come to my office [in Chicago] burdened with bands and heavy clothing, every vital organ restricted by dress. It is not unusual to count from sixteen to eighteen thicknesses of cloth worn tightly about the pliable structure of the waist.” And Dr. Lennox Browne advances the following crushing argumentum ad feminam:—

“It is impossible for the stiffly-corseted girl to be other than inelegant and ungraceful in her movements. Her imprisoned waist, with its flabby muscles, has no chance of performing beautiful undulatory movements. In the ballroom the ungraceful motions of our stiff-figured ladies are bad enough; there is no possibility for poetry of motion; but nowhere is this more ludicrously and, to the thoughtful, painfully manifest than in the tennis court. Let any one watch the movements of ladies as compared with those of male players, and the absolute ugliness of the female figure, with its stiff, unyielding, deformed, round waist, will at once be seen. Ladies can only bend the body from the hip-joint. All that wonderfully contrived set of hinges, with their connected muscles, in the elastic column of the spine, is unable to act from the shoulders downwards; and their figures remind one of the old-fashioned modern Dutch doll.”

CORPULENCE AND LEANNESS

Many women consider the corset necessary as a figure-improver, especially if they suffer from excessive fatness. They will be surprised to hear that the corset is one of the principal causes of their corpulence. Says Professor M. Williams: “There is one horror which no lady can bear to contemplate, viz. fat. What is fat? It is an accumulation of unburnt body-fuse. How can we get rid of it when accumulated in excess? Simply by burning it away—this burning being done by means of the oxygen inhaled by the lungs. If, as Mr. Lennox Browne has shown, a lady with normal lung capacity of 125 cubic inches, reduces this to 78 inches by means of her stays, and attains 118 inches all at once on leaving them off, it is certain that her prospects of becoming fat and flabby as she advances towards middle age are greatly increased by tight lacing, and the consequent suppression of natural respiration.”

Thus corpulence may be put down as a sixth—or rather seventh—æsthetic disadvantage resulting from the use of corsets.

The reason why women, although inferior to men in muscular development, have softer and rounder forms, is because there is a greater natural tendency in women than in men towards the accumulation of fatty tissue under the skin. The least excess of this adipose tissue is, however, as fatal as emaciation to that admiration of Personal Beauty which constitutes the essence of Love. Leanness repels the æsthetico-amorous sense because it obliterates the round contours of beauty, exposes the sinews and bones, and thus suggests old age and disease. Corpulence repels it because it destroys all delicacy of form, all grace of movement, and in its exaggerated forms may indeed be looked upon as a real disease imperatively calling for medical treatment; as Dr. Oscar Maas shows most clearly and concisely in his pamphlet on the “Schwenninger Cure,” which should be read by all who suffer from obesity.

Although the very “father of medicine,” Hippokrates, studied the subject of corpulence, and formulated rules for curing it, doctors still disagree regarding some of the details of its treatment. Some forbid all fatty food, others prescribe it in small quantities, and Dr. Ebstein specially recommends fat viands and sauces as preventives; but the preponderance of the best medical opinion is against him. Dr. Say recommends the drinking of very large quantities of tea, while Professor Oertel urges the diminution of fluids in the body, first by drinking little, and secondly by inducing copious perspiration, either artificially (by hot air and steam baths, etc.), or, what is much better, by brisk daily exercise. Dr. Schwenninger, who secured so much fame by reducing Bismarck’s weight about 40 pounds, forbids the taking of liquids during or within an hour or two of meal-time; in other words, he counsels his patients not to eat and drink at the same time.

On the two most important points all authorities are practically agreed. They are that the patient must avoid food which contains large quantities of starch and sugar (such as cake, pastry, potatoes, bread, pudding, honey, syrup, etc.); and secondly, that he must take as much exercise as possible in the open air, because during walking the bodily fat is consumed as fuel, to keep the machine going.

The notorious Mr. Banting, who reduced his weight in a year from 202 to 150 pounds, “lived on beef, mutton, fish, bacon, dry toast and biscuit, poultry, game, tea, coffee, claret, and sherry in small quantities, and a night-cap of gin, whisky, brandy, or wine. He abstained from the following articles: pork, veal, salmon, eels, herrings, sugar, milk, and all sorts of vegetables grown underground, and nearly all fatty and farinaceous substances. He daily drank 43 ounces of liquids. On this diet he kept himself for seven years at 150 pounds. He found, what other experience confirms, that sugar was the most powerful of all fatteners” (Dr. G. M. Beard, in Eating and Drinking, a most entertaining and useful little volume).

Lean persons wishing to increase their weight need only reverse the directions here given as regards the choice or avoidance of certain articles of food. Not so, however, with regard to exercise. If you wish to reduce your corpulence, take exercise; if you wish to increase your weight, again take exercise. The apparent paradox lurking in this rule is easily explained. If you are too fat and walk a great deal, you burn up the superfluous fat and lose weight. If you are too lean and walk a great deal you increase the bulk of your muscles, and thus gain weight. Moreover, you greatly stimulate your appetite, and become able to eat larger quantities of sweet and starchy food—more than enough to counteract the wear and tear caused by the exercise.

Muscle is the plastic material of beauty. Fat should only be present in sufficient quantity to prevent the irregular outlines of the muscles from being too conspicuously indicated, at the expense of rounded smoothness. What the ancient Greeks thought on this subject is vividly shown in the following remarks by Dr. Maas: “According to the unanimous testimony of Thukydides, Plato, Xenophon, the gymnastic exercises to which the Greeks were so passionately addicted, and which constituted, as is well known, a very essential part of the public education of the young, had for their avowed object the prevention of undue corpulence, since an excessive paunch did not only offend the highly-developed æsthetic sense of this talented nation, but was justly regarded as an impediment to bodily activity. In order, therefore, to make the youths not only beautiful, but also vigorous and able to resist hardship, and thus more capable of serving their country, they were, from their childhood, and uninterruptedly, exercised daily in running, wrestling, throwing the discus, etc.; so that the prevention of corpulence was practically raised to a formal state-maxim, and as such enforced occasionally with unyielding persistence.”

The ruinous consequences of an exaggerated abdomen to the harmonious proportions of the body, and to grace of attitude and gait, are so universally known that it would be superfluous to apply any of our negative tests of Beauty—such as the facts that apes and savages are commonly characterised by protuberant bellies, and that intemperance and gluttony have the same disastrous effect on Personal Beauty. In civilised communities, indolence and beer-drinking are the chief causes predisposing to corpulence. In Bavaria, where enormous quantities of beer are consumed, almost all the men are deformed by obesity; but in other countries, as a rule, women suffer more from this anomaly than men, because they lead a less active life.

It may be stated as a general rule that girls under eighteen are too slight and women over thirty too heavy—"fat and forty." This calamity is commonly looked on as one of the inevitable dispensations of Providence, whereas it is simply a result of indolence and ignorance. With a little care in dieting, and two or three hours a day devoted to walking, rowing, tennis, swimming, dancing, etc., any young lady can add ten to fifteen pounds to her weight in one summer, or reduce it by that amount, as may be desired. But as the consumption of enormous quantities of fresh air by the unimprisoned lungs is the absolute condition of success in this beautifying process, it is useless to attempt it without laying aside the corset.

The plea that corsets are needed to hold up the heavy clothing is of no moment. Women, like men, should wear their clothing suspended from the shoulder, which is a great deal more conducive to health, comfort, and gracefulness than the clumsy fashion of attaching everything to the waist.

Still less weight can be attached to the monstrous argument that women need stays for support. What an insulting proposition to assert that civilised woman is so imperfectly constructed that she alone of all created beings needs artificial surgical support to keep her body in position! If there are any women so very corpulent or so very lean that they need a corset as a figure-improver or a support, then let them have it for heaven’s sake, and look upon themselves as subjects ripe for medical treatment. What is objected to here is that strong, healthy, well-shaped girls should deform themselves deliberately by wearing tight, unshapely corsets, rankly offensive to the æsthetic sense.

THE FASHION FETISH ANALYSED

Once more the question must be asked, “Why do women wear such hideous things as crinolines, bustles, and corsets, so universally abhorred by men?” Is it because they are inferior to men in æsthetic taste? Is Schopenhauer right when he says that “women are and remain, on the whole, the most absolute and incurable Philistines?” They are deficient in objectivity, he adds: “hence they have no real intelligence or appreciation for music or poetry, or the plastic arts; and if they make any pretences of this sort, it is only apish affectation to gratify their vanity. Hence it would be more correct to call them the unæsthetic than the beautiful sex.”

The pessimistic woman-hater no doubt exaggerates. Yet—without alluding to the paucity of women who have distinguished themselves in the fine arts—is it credible that the average woman would so readily submit to a repulsive fashion like the bustle, or a hat “adorned” with the corpse of a murdered bird, if she had even a trace of æsthetic feeling? If women had the refined æsthetic taste with which they are commonly credited, is it conceivable that they would voluntarily adopt the African bustle, because fashionable, in preference to a more becoming style? Have you ever heard that a person of acknowledged musical taste, for example, gave up his violin or piano to learn the African banjo, because that happened to be the fashionable instrument?

Yet there are, no doubt, many women whose eyes even custom cannot blind to the hideousness of most Parisian fashions. But they have not the courage to show their superior taste in their dresses, being overawed and paralysed in presence of a monstrous idol, the Fashion Fetish.

Never has a stone image, consecrated by cunning priests, exercised a more magic influence on a superstitious heathen’s mind than the invisible Fashion Fetish on the modern feminine intellect. It is both amusing and pathetic to hear a woman exclaim: “Our women are most blind and thoughtless followers of fashions still imposed upon them, Heaven knows wherefore and by whom” (Mrs. Haweis).

So great is the awe in which this Fetish is held that no one has yet dared to lay violent hands on it. Yet if we now knock it on the head, we shall find it hollow inside; and the fragments, subjected to chemical analysis, show that they consist of the following five elements:—

(1) Vulgar Display of Wealth.—A certain number of rich people, being unable to distinguish themselves from poorer mortals in any other way, make a parade of their money by constantly introducing changes in the fashion of their apparel which those who have less income are unable to adopt at once. This, and not the love of novelty, is the real cause of the minute variations in styles constantly introduced. Of course it is generally understood that to boast of your wealth is as vulgar as to boast of your wit or wisdom; but this makes no difference, for Fashion in its very essence is vulgar.

(2) Milliners’ Cunning.—Milliners grow fat on fashionable extravagance. Hence it is the one object of their life to encourage this extravagance. So they constantly invent new styles, to prevent women from wearing the same dress more than one season. And every customer is slyly flattered into the belief that nothing was ever so becoming to her as the latest style, though it probably makes her look like a fright. As a little flattery goes a great way with most women, the milliner’s hypocrisy escapes detection. “The persons who devise fashions are not artists in the best sense of the word, nor are they persons of culture or taste,” as Mr. E. L. Godkin remarks: “their business is not to provide beautiful costumes but new ones.”

It is to such scheming and unscrupulous artisans that women entrust the care of their personal appearance. And they will continue doing so until they are more generally taught the elements of the fine arts and a love of beauty in Nature.

To make sure of a rich harvest, milliners, when a new fashion has appeared, manufacture all their goods in that style, so that it is almost impossible to buy any others, all of which are declared “bad form.” And their poor victims meekly submit to this tyranny!

(3) Tyranny of the Ugly Majority.—This is another form of tyranny from which ladies suffer. Most women are ugly and ungraceful, and resent the contrast which beautiful women, naturally and becomingly attired, would present to their own persons: hence they favour the crinolette, the bustle, the corset, the long, trailing dresses, the sleeve-puffs at the shoulders, etc., because such fashionable devices make all women look equally ugly and ungraceful.

Mrs. Armytage throws light on the origin of some absurd fashions when she refers to the cases of “the patches first applied to hide an ugly wen: of cushions carried to equalise strangely-deformed hips; of long skirts to cover ugly feet; and long shoes to hide an excrescence on the toe.”

Surely it is sufficient to expose the origin of such fashions to make sensible women turn away from them in disgust. There are indeed indications that the handsome women have at last begun to find out the trick which the ugly majority have been playing on them; and many are now dressing in such a way as to show their personal beauty to advantage, undaunted by the fact that ugly women pretend to be shocked at short dresses which allow a pretty ankle to be seen, and jerseys which reveal the outlines of a beautiful bust and waist.

(4) Cowardice.—Many women adopt a fashion which they dislike simply because they do not dare to face the remark of a rival that they are not in fashion. As one of them frankly confesses: “We women dress not to be simple, genuine, and harmonious, or even to please you men, but to brave each other’s criticism.” A noble motive, truly!

One is often tempted to doubt the old saying that the first desire of women is to be considered beautiful, on observing how ready they are to sacrifice fifty per cent or more of their beauty for the sake of being in fashion. Last summer, for instance, the edict seems to have gone forth that the hair was no longer to be allowed to form a graceful fringe over the forehead, but was to be combed back tightly. So back it was combed, and beautiful faces became rarer than ever. Leigh Hunt had written in vain that the hair should be brought over large bare foreheads “as vines are trailed over a wall.” Théophile Gautier, “the most perfect poet in respect of poetical form that France has ever produced” (Saintsbury), agreed with Schopenhauer regarding woman’s æsthetic sense: “Women,” he says, “have only the sense of fashion and not that of beauty. A woman will always find beautiful the most abominable fashion if it is the genre suprême to wear that style.” He commends the women of Granada for their good taste in preferring their lovely mantillas to the hideous French hats, and hopes Spain may never be invaded by French fashions and milliners.

(5) Sheepishness.—It may seem ungallant to apply this term to the conduct of a woman who imitates the habits of a sheep; but, after all, which is the more gallant action: to applaud a woman’s self-chosen ugliness, or, at least, to ignore it for fear of offending her; or, on the other hand, to restore her beauty by boldly holding up the mirror and allowing her to see herself as others see her? It is the nature of a flock of sheep to jump into the sea without a moment’s hesitation if their leader does so. It is the nature of fashionable women to commit æsthetic suicide if their leader sets the example. Where is the difference?

It is surprising that Darwin did not refer to Fashion as furnishing a most convincing proof of his theory that men are descended from apelike ancestors. One of the ape’s most conspicuous traits is imitativeness—blind, silly, slavish imitation: hence the verb “to ape.” Blind, silly, slavish imitation is also the essence of Fashion. Imitativeness implies a low order of mind, a lack of originality. The more a man is intellectually removed from the ape, the less is he inclined to imitate blindly. Men of genius are a law unto themselves, while inferior minds can only re-echo or plagiarise. Just so the prevalent anxiety to be in fashion is a tacit confession of mental inferiority, of insufficient independence of taste and originality to choose a style suited to one’s individual requirements.

INDIVIDUALISM VERSUS FASHION

Fashion is a deadly enemy of Romantic Love, not only because it makes women sacrifice their Beauty to unhealthful garments and habits, but because it obliterates individuality, on which the ardour of Love depends. “Why don’t girls marry?” asks Mrs. Haweis. “Because the press is great, and girls are undistinguishable in the crowd. The distinguishable ones marry—those who are beautiful or magnetic in some way, whose characters have some definite colouring, and who can make their individuality felt. I would have said—who can make themselves in any way conspicuous, but that the word has been too long associated with an undesirable prominence. Yet after all, prominence is the thing needed—prominence of character, or individuality. Men, so to speak, pitch upon the girls they can see: those who are completely negative, unnoticeable, colourless, formless, invisible, are left behind.”

Women, in their eagerness to sacrifice their individuality to Fashion, forget that fashion leaders are never in fashion, i.e. that they always adopt a new style as soon as the crowd has aped them: wherefore it is doubly silly to join the apes.

Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt never allows a corset to deform her figure and mar her movements: and who has not had occasion to admire the inimitable grace of this actress? But how many women have the courage thus to sacrifice Fashion to Grace and Beauty?

Yet, notwithstanding the continuance of the corset and the bustle mania and Parisian hats, it may be asserted that women are just at present more sensibly dressed than they have been for some generations, and there is some disposition to listen to the artistic and hygienic advice of reformers. Unfortunately, the history of Fashion does not tend to confirm any optimistic hopes that may be based on this fact. There have been periods heretofore when women became comparatively sensible, only to relapse again into utter barbarism. Thus we read that “after the straight gown came the fardingale, which in turn developed into the hoop with its concomitants of patches, paint, and high-heeled shoes.” Then came the reaction: “Short waists and limp, clinging draperies came in to expose every contour; stays and corsets were for a time discredited, only to be reintroduced, and with them the whole cycle of fashions which had once already had their day.”

Experience shows that argumentation, ridicule, malicious or good-natured, and satire, are equally powerless against Fashion. Progress can only be hoped for in two ways—by instructing women in the elementary laws of beauty in nature and mankind, and by destroying the superstitious halo around the word Fashion. It has just been shown that a disposition to imitate a fashion set by others is always a sign of inferior intellect and rudimentary taste; and the time no doubt will come when this fact will be generally recognised, and when it will be considered anything but a compliment to have it said that one follows the flock of fashionable imitators.

The progress of democratic institutions and sentiments will aid in emancipating women from the slavery of Fashion. Empresses who can set the fashion for two continents are becoming scarce; and the woman of the future will no doubt open her eyes wide in astonishment on reading that in the nineteenth century most women allowed some mysterious personage to prescribe what they should wear. “Can it be possible,” she will exclaim, "that my poor dear grandmothers did not know that what is food for one person is poison for another, and that any fashion universally followed means æsthetic suicide for nine-tenths of the women who adopt it? I am my own fashion-leader, and wear only what is becoming to my individual style of beauty. What a preposterous notion to proclaim that any particular colour or cut is to be exclusively fashionable this year for all women, for blondes and brunettes, for the tall and the short, the stout and the slim alike! What could have induced those women thus to annihilate their own beauty deliberately? And not only their beauty, but their comfort as well. For I see that in New York, Fashion used to decree that women must exchange their light, comfortable summer clothes for heavier autumn fabrics exactly in the middle of September, although the last two weeks of September are often the hottest part of the year. And the women, almost without exception, obeyed this decree!

“And then those long trailing dresses! How they must have added to their ease and grace of movement in the ballroom, tucked up clumsily or held in the hand! And it seems that these trails were even worn in the dirty streets, for I see that at one time the Dresden authorities forbade women to sweep the streets with their dresses; and in one of Mr. Ruskin’s works I find this advice to girls: ‘Your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense, and even in the personal delicacy, of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets if it is the fashion to be scavengers.’”

MASCULINE FASHIONS

In his emancipation from Fashion man has made much more progress than woman. There is still a considerable number of shallow-brained young “society men” who naïvely and minutely accept the slight variations introduced every year in the cut and style of cravats, shirts, and evening-dress by cunning tailors, in order to compel men to throw away last season’s suits and order new ones. But much larger is the number of men who disregard such innovations, and laugh at the silly persons who meekly accept them, even when their taste is offended by such new fashions as the hideous collars and hats with which the market is occasionally flooded.

There was a time when men spent as much time and money on dress in a week as they now do in a year; a time when men were as strictly ruled by capricious, cunning Fashion as women are to-day. Lord March, we read, “laid a wager that he would make fashionable the most humiliating dress he could think of. Accordingly, he wore a blue coat with crimson collar and cuffs—a livery, and not a tasteful livery—but he won his bet.” After the battle of Agincourt, it is said, “the Duc de Bourbon, in order to ransom King John, sold his overcoat to a London Jew, who gave no more than its value, we may be pretty sure, but nevertheless gave 5200 crowns of gold for it. It seems to have been a mass of the most precious gems.” The Duke of Buckingham “had twenty-seven suits of clothes made, the richest that embroidery, lace, silk, velvet, silver, gold, and gems could contribute; one of which was a white uncut velvet, set all over, both suit and cloak, with diamonds valued at fourscore thousand pounds, besides a great feather stuck all over with diamonds, as were also his sword, girdle, hat, and spurs.”

Mr. Spencer cites two amusing instances of masculine subjection to fashion in Africa and mediæval Europe. Among the Darfurs in Africa, “If the sultan, being on horseback, happens to fall off, all his followers must fall off likewise; and should any one omit this formality, however great he may be, he is laid down and beaten.” “In 1461, Duke Philip of Burgundy, having had his hair cut during an illness, issued an edict that all the nobles of his states should be shorn also. More than five hundred persons sacrificed their hair.”

So far as men are still subject to the influence of ugly fashions, they differ from women in at least frankly acknowledging the ugliness of these fashions. Whereas most women admire, or pretend to admire, corsets, high-heeled boots, crinolettes, bustles, etc., there are few men who do not detest e.g. the unshapely, baggy trousers, which were so greatly abhorred by the æsthetic sense of the ancient Greeks; and most men to-day (except those who have ugly legs) would gladly wear knee-breeches, if they could do so without making themselves too conspicuous. Herein lies the greatest impediment to dress reform. To make oneself very conspicuous is justly considered a breach of good manners; and few have the courage, like Mr. Oscar Wilde, to make martyrs and butts of ridicule of themselves.

But if individuals are comparatively powerless, clubs of acknowledged standing might make themselves very useful to the cause of Personal Beauty, as affected by dress, if they would vote to adopt in a body certain reforms as regards trousers, hats, and evening-dress. Then it would no longer be said of a man rationally dressed that he is eccentric, but that he belongs to the X—— Club; and many outsiders would immediately follow suit for the coveted distinction of being taken for members of that club. Thus both the wise and the foolish would be gratified.

As showing how invariably and consistently Fashion is the handmaid of ugliness, it is curious to note that the several styles of dress worn by men are fashionable in proportion to their ugliness. For the greatest occasions the swallow-tail or evening-dress is prescribed. Next in rank is the ugly frock-coat, for morning calls. Of late, it is true, the more becoming “cut-away” has been tolerated in place of the frock-coat; but the sack-coat, which alone follows the natural outlines of the body, and neither has a caudal appendage, like the evening-dress, nor, like the frock-coat, gives the impression that a man’s waist extends down to his knees, is altogether tabooed at social gatherings, except those of the most informal kind.

Man’s evening-dress is so uniquely unæsthetic and ugly that fashionable women have of course long been eyeing it with envy and have gradually adopted some of its features. One of these is the chimney-pot hat, the cause of so much premature baldness and discomfort. But women are not quite so foolish as men in this matter; for they do not wear tall hats at evening-parties and the opera, but only when out riding, where the necessity of dodging about to keep them on against the force of the wind and the blows of overhanging boughs, compels them to go through all sorts of grotesque gymnastics with neck and head. If they wore a more rational and becoming head-dress on horseback they might easily look pretty and graceful, which would be fatal to their chances of being considered fashionable.

In comparing masculine and feminine fashions, we must note that trousers and swallow-tailed coats, though ugly, are harmless; while high-heeled shoes, corsets, chignons, etc., are as fatal to health as to Personal Beauty.

It is sometimes claimed in behalf of Fashion that, though it often favours ugliness, it establishes a rule and model for all; whereas, if everything were left to individual taste, the result might be still more disastrous. Nonsense. Rare as good taste is among women, a modicum is commonly present; and there are extremely few who, if not overawed by the Fashion Fetish, would ever invent or adopt such hideous irrepressible monstrosities as bustles, crinolines, chignons, trailing dresses, Chinese boots, bird-corpse hats, etc.

A protest must, finally, be made against the horrible figures which in our fashion papers are constantly offered as models of style and appearance. Even in the best of them, such as Harper’s Bazar, which frequently points out the injuriousness of tight lacing, female figures are printed every week with hideously narrow waists, such as no woman could possibly possess unless she were in the last stages of consumption, or some other wasting disease.

CHEST AND BOSOM

FEMININE BEAUTY

Burke, in his chapter on “Gradual Variation” as a characteristic of Beauty, begs us to “observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness, the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the greatest constituents of beauty?”

There is reason to believe that the beautifully-rounded form of the female bosom is a result of æsthetico-sexual selection; for primitive human tribes resemble in this respect the lower animals. Says the famous anatomist Hyrtl: “It is only among the white and yellow races that the breasts, in their compact virginal condition, have a hemispheric form, while those of negresses of a corresponding age and physique are more elongated, pointed, turned outwards and downwards; in a word, more like the teats of animals.” Even the Arabian poets sing of the charms of a goatlike breast. In the Soudan older women, when at work, sometimes throw their breasts over the shoulder to prevent them from being in the way; and “the women of the Basutos, a Kaffir tribe, carry their children on the back, and pass the breast to them under the arm.”

It is a very interesting and important fact that not only do we find more beauty among the higher than among the lower races of mankind, but the superior beauty of civilised races is also of a more permanent kind. This truth is admirably illustrated in the following remarks by Dr. Peschuel Lœschke: The breasts of the Loango negress, he says, “approach the conic rather than the hemispheric form; they often have a too small and insufficiently gradated basis, and in rare extreme cases have almost the appearance of teats, besides being unequally developed. Breasts of such a shape are naturally much more easily affected by the law of gravitation, and soon become changed into the pendent bags which we find so ugly, especially among Africans, although they also occur among other tribes, and are not unknown among civilised peoples. The superior form, with a broad basis, is naturally the more enduring, and remains in many cases an ornament of women of a more advanced age.”

Savages and Orientals, being deficient in æsthetic taste, admire an excessively-developed bust. Europeans, on the other hand, long ago recognised the connection between such a bust and clumsy, unhealthy corpulence, suggesting advanced age. The same appears to have been true of the most refined nations of antiquity. Says Professor Kollmann: “The ancient as well as the modern inhabitants of the Nile region appear, in the majority of cases, like those of India, to possess hemispheric breasts, for neither in the sphinxes or other superhuman beings, nor in the images of human beauties, do we come across pointed breasts.... The Romans did not consider large bosoms a mark of beauty. Among European women the Portuguese are said to have the largest busts, the Castilians the smallest. To judge by Rubens’s nude figures, the Netherland women appear to rival the Portuguese in exuberant bosoms.”

In Greek works of art, says Winckelmann, “the breast or bosom of female figures is never exuberant.” “Among ideal figures, the Amazons alone have large and fully-developed breasts.” “The form of the breasts in the figures of divinities is virginal in the extreme, since their beauty was made to consist in the moderateness of their size. A stone, found in the Island of Naxos, was smoothly polished and placed upon them for the purpose of repressing an undue development.”

Modern Fashion, for a wonder, endorses the Greek standard of beauty as regards a moderately-developed bust. But it was not always thus. It is Fashion that induces some savages whose breasts are naturally long and hanging to use bandages which make them still more hanging and elongated in form. In Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and in other parts of Europe, on the contrary, Fashion prescribed flat chests. Plates of lead were tied on the breasts of young girls with such force that sometimes the natural form was replaced by an actual depression where “love’s pillows” should have been. In some parts of South Germany and the Tyrol a similar fashion prevails to the present day among the lower classes, the result being not only a sacrifice of beauty, but a great mortality among the children, that have to be reared artificially in consequence of it.

But if modern Fashion has a correct standard of taste in this matter, it nevertheless encourages practices which lead to as disastrous results as the Spanish fashions of three centuries ago. “The horrible custom of wearing pads,” says the author of the Ugly Girl Papers “is the ruin of natural figures, by heating and pressing down the bosom.... A low, deep bosom, rather than a bold one, is a sign of grace in a full-grown woman, and a full bust is hardly admirable in an unmarried girl. Her figure should be all curves, but slender, promising a fuller beauty when maturity is reached. One is not fond of over-ripe years.... Due attention to the general laws of health always has its effect in restoring the bust to its roundness.... Weakness of any kind affects the contour of the figure, and it is useless to try to improve it in any other way than by restoring the strength where it is wanting.”

The same author, whose book is brimful of useful advice, not only to “ugly girls,” but to those who have beauty and wish to preserve it, also recommends battledore, swinging the skipping-rope over the shoulder, swinging by the hand from a rope, as well as playing ball, “bean bags,” pillow fights, and especially daily vocal exercises with corset off and lungs deeply inflated—as excellent means of improving the bust.

If women could be made to realise how rarely they succeed, even with the aid of the cleverest milliner, in counterfeiting a properly developed chest, they would, perhaps, be more willing to submit to the exercise or regimen requisite for the acquirement and preservation of Personal Beauty. Flat chests are a consequence of insufficient muscular exercise, insufficient fresh air, and insufficient food. The main reason why the majority of girls in the world are over-delicate and fragile is because they do not get enough properly-cooked food in which fat is introduced in such a way as to be palatable and digestible. The adipose layer between the skin and the muscles contributes so much to the undulating roundness of contour peculiar to feminine beauty, that Kollmann places it among the differentiating sexual characteristics.

Too exuberant busts, on the other hand, are the result of too much indulgence in fattening food, combined with lack of exercise in the open air, which would consume the fat. Maternity, with proper hygienic precautions, is never fatal to a fine bust.

That savages, like their civilised brethren and sisters, owe their deformed chests entirely to their indolence and neglect of the laws of health, is shown by the fact that there are notable exceptions—energetic tribes living healthy lives, and therefore blessed with beautiful figures. Thus Mr. A. R. Wallace tells us regarding some of the Amazon valley Indians that “their figures are generally superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human form. The development of the bust is such as I believe never exists in the best-formed European, exhibiting a splendid series of convex undulations, without a hollow in any part of it.” And what he says in another place regarding a neighbouring tribe explains the secret of this Beauty: “Though some of them were too fat, most of them had splendid figures, and many of them were very pretty. Before daylight in the morning all were astir and came to the river to wash. It is the chilliest hour of the twenty-four, and when we were wrapping our sheet or blanket more closely around us, we could hear the plunges and splashings of these early bathers. Rain or wind is all alike to them: their morning bath is never dispensed with.”

MASCULINE BEAUTY

Wincklemann remarks that, among the ancient Greeks, “a proudly-arched chest was regarded as a universal attribute of beauty in male figures. The father of the poets describes Neptune with such a chest, and Agamemnon as resembling him; and such a one Anakreon desired to see in the image of the youth whom he loved.”

“A prominent, arched chest,” says Professor Kollmann, “is an infallible sign of a vigorous, healthy skeleton; whereas a narrow, flat, and, still more, a bent thorax is a physical index of bodily weakness and inherited decrepitude. An arched chest imparts to a man’s whole figure an aspect of physical perfection, not to say sublimity, as may be seen in the ancient statues of gods, in which the chest is intentionally made more prominent than it ever can be in a man, presumably in order to weaken the impression of the chest’s more animal neighbour, the abdomen. There is a deep meaning in our phraseology which localises courage, boldness, martial valour, in a man’s vigorous breast.”

I have italicised several words in this quotation, because they tersely show how writers on art are guided both by the positive and negative tests of Beauty formulated in another part of this volume.

MAGIC EFFECT OF DEEP BREATHING

Indolence is the mother of ugliness. No one who realises the absolute necessity to Health of a sufficient supply of fresh air can wonder at the rarity of Beauty in the world, if he considers that nineteen people out of every twenty are too lazy to breathe properly.

It is estimated that there are from 75 to 100 cubic inches of air which always remain in a man’s lungs. About an equal amount of “supplemental” air remains after an ordinary expiration; and only 20 to 30 inches of what Professor Huxley calls “tidal air” passes in and out. But this “tidal air” can be largely increased in amount by the habit of breathing deeply and slowly, whereby an additional supply of oxygen is supplied to the lungs, which is a thousand times better for the health than quinine, iron pills, or any other tonic. There are few persons whose health and personal appearance would not be improved vastly if they would take several daily meals of fresh air—consisting of 20-50 deep inspirations in a park or some other place where the air is pure and bracing. Slowly inhale as much air as you can get into the lungs without discomfort (avoiding a strain), and then exhale again just as slowly. After a while the habit will be formed of constantly breathing more deeply than formerly, both awake and asleep; thus bringing into regular use a larger part of the lungs’ surface. It is the slight sense of fatigue at first accompanying deep breathing which prevents most people from enjoying its benefits; but when once this natural indolence is overcome the reward of deep breathing is analogous to the delicious exhilaration which follows a brisk walk or a cold bath.

It is important to note that all breathing, whether deep or ordinary, should be done through the nose, as thus the air is warmed before it reaches the delicate lungs, and the mucous membranes remain moist, thus preventing those disagreeable enemies of refreshing sleep—a dry mouth and snoring.

Habitual deep breathing adds to Personal Beauty not only by exercising the muscles of the chest, which thus becomes more arched and prominent relatively to the abdomen, but also by throwing back the neck and head and compelling the whole body to assume a straight, military attitude. We are all taught as children, says Professor Kollmann, to hold ourselves straight; but rarely is the information added that the best way to secure an erect, manly bearing and a dignified gait is by cultivating the habit of deep breathing. “It is worthy of notice that forcible breathing, such as results from a correct bearing, from prolonged sojourn and exercise in the open air, in hunting, gymnastic exercises, riding, etc., not only increases the chest for the moment, but permanently.... There are proofs in abundance that even with young persons of eighteen to twenty years, the whole circumference of the chest is capable of considerable widening under such circumstances.”

A medical writer, referring to the fact that children frequently become round-shouldered from sitting for hours and bending over a desk, makes these very sensible suggestions:—

“In the first place, the lungs should be fully expanded by drawing in all the air that is possible; this process will be aided by throwing the shoulders well back, and you should encourage your children to do this frequently in the open air when going to and coming from school. Children are easily bribed, and we would suggest to school teachers a simple and effective way of accomplishing this desirable end. This forcible expansion of the lungs will enlarge the chest and increase its circumference. Then let the teacher, at the beginning of the session, measure each child’s chest and record the circumference, then explain and demonstrate to them how to forcibly fill the lungs, and offer a premium at the end of the session to the child who shall have most increased the circumference of his chest; make it worth their while to expand their lungs, as much so as we now do for them to expand their minds, and the result will be wonderful.”

A MORAL QUESTION

An eminent authority on the physiology of the vocal organs, Dr. Lennox Browne, remarks (in Voice, Song, and Speech), that “respiratory exercises, and subsequently lessons in reading, reciting, and singing, are oftentimes of the greatest use in strengthening a weak chest; and, indeed, it is not too much to say, in arresting consumption.” Another excellent authority, Mr. A. B. Bach, points out (in his Musical Education and Vocal Culture, which should be consulted by all who wish to learn the art of Deep Breathing) that “very few vocalists die of consumption,” owing to the fact that they properly exercise their lungs and chests.

This brings us face to face with a moral question of enormous importance, to which writers on ethics have by no means as yet given the attention it loudly clamours for. Consumption, we read, “is a disease of great frequency and severity, which, in the civilised nations of Europe, produces from one-sixth to one-tenth of the total mortality, in ordinary times.” Now if, as we have just seen, consumption can be arrested and cured by proper exercise of the lungs and chest in pure air, does it not follow that the neglect of such exercises makes certain parties criminally responsible for the greater number of deaths from consumption? It is “proved by careful inquiries that the workshops of tailors, printers, and other businesses carried on in close, ill-ventilated apartments, by large numbers of workmen, are, in a very aggravated sense, nurseries of consumption. Cotton and linen factories have also been shown, when ill-regulated, to be largely responsible for the death of their inmates from this disease.”

Why should not the owners of factories who refuse to ventilate their buildings be held responsible for the ill-health, the early decrepitude and death of many of the workers, and the workers’ weakly, consumptive children who die young? As England alone has over three hundred thousand women engaged in cotton manufacture, the amount of ill-health, early senility, ugliness, consumption, etc., bred by criminal neglect of hygienic precautions, is appalling to the imagination. A case was mentioned in the American papers a few years ago, where the windows in a factory were nailed fast to prevent the poor, suffocating girls from opening them. And, strange to say, the owner of that factory was not immediately lynched. Surely, if ever a monster deserved to be hanged to the nearest tree, it was the man who ordered those windows to be nailed down.

But factory owners are by no means the only persons who are thus responsible for indirect manslaughter by foul-air poisoning. Thousands of loving mothers and fathers blaspheme their Creator in attributing the early death of their children to a “dispensation of Providence,” when the plain truth, brutally expressed, is that they killed them with the poisoned air, indigestible food, and insufficient exercise that brought on the fatal consumption. To say that the disease was hereditary is only to shift the hygienic crime on the shoulders of the grand-parents.

In human courts of justice ignorance of the law is not considered an excuse for the commission of crime. If the same principle holds true in some future world where human actions will be judged, what terrible indictments will be brought against some parents for crimes committed against the health and life of their children and grandchildren, for neglecting to learn the laws of health, as laid down in physiological and hygienic textbooks!

Inasmuch as Personal Beauty is the flower and symbol of perfect Health, it might be shown, by following out this argument, that ugliness is a sin, and man’s first duty the cultivation of Beauty.

NECK AND SHOULDER

Nowhere are the æsthetic laws of Gradation and gentle Curvature more beautifully illustrated than in the neck—the column of the head. Note how a lovely woman’s neck repeats on a small scale the delicate contours of the trunk—widened at the base and at the top, with a subtle inward slope towards the middle. Note, also, how imperceptibly it passes into the shoulders, which continue the gentle curve in a downward slope, unless prevented by the deforming corset.

Man’s neck is less cylindrical than woman’s, and presents four slightly flattened surfaces; while his shoulders are not sloping, but square. We not only pardon, but even admire and demand this conformation in man; because in judging masculine beauty we are guided by dynamic as much as by æsthetic considerations, while the fair sex is judged by the laws of beauty alone. A masculine neck is in good form if it shows traces of the sinews and muscles which give it strength; but in a woman’s neck the feminine adipose layer under the skin must obliterate all such traces of masculinity,—especially the bones at the junction of neck and breast, the prominence of which suggests emaciation and disease.

In the face of such considerations, how can any one maintain that man is more beautiful than woman? He may show more character, more individuality, more originality than a fine woman, but more beauty never. And the fact that in Sexual Selection women have always been chiefly guided by dynamic considerations—i.e. vigour, boldness, “manliness”—whereas men have been fascinated by beauty alone, explains why, as Schopenhauer asserts, women are the “unæsthetic sex,” and why their taste for Personal Beauty, not being exercised, like that of man, in the selection of a mate, is so lamentably callous to the deformities resulting from corsets and other instruments of torture.

The neck being the pivot on which the head executes its movements, it is evident that it requires attention from the point of view of Grace as well as of Beauty. To how many women has it ever occurred that as the feet are taught to dance lithely, the arms to execute eloquent gestures, so the neck should be trained to naturally assume graceful attitudes? Great paintings and famous actresses should be studied from this point of view. Always bear in mind that grace of movement often excels beauty of form in the power of inspiring Romantic Love. And remember that any pains you take to acquire grace will not only multiply your own charms, but will establish a habit of graceful movement in your muscles which will be inherited by your children. It is owing to this circumstance that the children of truly refined families are born with an ease, grace, and dignity of movement and mien which it is impossible for “self-made” persons to acquire in a lifetime, because they are not born with an inherited talent for graceful movement.

ARM AND HAND

EVOLUTION AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCES

One of the redeeming features of what is ironically called “full-dress” is the opportunity it gives of admiring a woman’s shapely neck, shoulders, and arms—if she has such. No healthy woman of the well-to-do classes need have an ill-favoured arm if she has a sensible mother, who compels her from her childhood to exercise her muscles. The great preponderance of leathery, angular, bony arms at ballrooms shows, therefore, how shamefully the hygienic arts of personal adornment are neglected in our best society. The stifling heat which commonly prevails at social gatherings suggests the thought that many ladies are indifferent to the display of their bony arms on the grounds given in Sydney Smith’s exclamation: “Heat, ma’am! it was so dreadful here that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.”

A meagre, skinny arm is objectionable not only because it offends against all the conditions of Beauty—plump roundness, softness, fresh colour, smoothness, gradual tapering to the wrist—but because it is associated with the aspect of old age and disease; and again, because it suggests man’s lowly origin by its approximation to the appearance of the arms in our simian country cousins.

Man’s arm has become differentiated from the ape’s not only in the matter of greater muscular rotundity and smoothness, i.e. loss of hair, but also in regard to length. An ape’s arms are much longer than a white man’s, the negro’s being intermediate. Says Mr. Tylor: “In an upright position and reaching down with the middle finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, the orang its ankle, the chimpanzee its knee, while man only reaches partly down his thigh.... Negro soldiers standing at drill bring the middle finger-tip an inch or two nearer the knee than white men can do, and some have been even known to touch the knee-pan.” Taking this in connection with the fact that the arms of sailors, who use them constantly in climbing, are longer than those of soldiers, we may safely infer that man’s arms have gradually become shorter because he has ceased to climb trees; while the greater muscular rotundity, especially of the forearm, has been acquired through the varied activity and movements of the hand and fingers: a circumstance almost self-evident on physiological principles, and furthermore corroborated by the fact that negroes, unskilled in trades which call for manipulation of the separate fingers, again occupy an intermediate position. “Even in muscular negroes the arms are less rotund,” says Professor Carl Vogt; and, according to Van der Hœven, the skin between the fingers reaches up higher in the negro, which must impede activity.

The peculiar arrangement of the hair on man’s arm has been referred to by Wallace and Darwin as one of the countless signs arguing our descent from apelike ancestors. On the arm of man, as of most anthropoid apes, the hair “tends to converge from above and below to a point at the elbow.” Now it is known that the gorilla, as well as the orang, “sits in pelting rain with his hands over his head”; and Mr. Wallace, therefore, suggests that the present inclination of the hair on man’s arms is simply a survival of the time when his arboreal ancestors used to sit in that fashion, the hair having gradually assumed the direction which would most easily allow the rain to run off.

The evolution theory that the hair on the arm, as on the body in general, was lost through Sexual Selection, is corroborated by the fact that woman’s arm has made more progress toward complete smoothness than man’s, owing to the circumstance that man is in Sexual Selection more guided by æsthetic, woman by dynamic, considerations. Yet there can be no doubt that a hairy arm and hand are always ugly, in man as in woman, not only on account of their simian suggestiveness, but because they cover the smooth skin and its delicate tints, and, moreover, especially if black, are very apt to make the arm and hand look as if they needed a good scrubbing. Hair on the hand may sometimes be permanently removed by passing the hand quickly and repeatedly through a large flame—a much less painful process than the use of pincers.

The muscular deviations from the lines of beauty are much more pardonable in a man’s arm than the hair, although it is evident that a professional athlete’s excessively muscular arm is æsthetically objectionable, however much it may be admired on other grounds. To feminine beauty, and the chances of inspiring Love, an arm which is so muscular as to obliterate the lines of beauty is absolutely fatal. Among the labouring classes there are many women whose arms are so hard and sinewy that the very bones to which they are attached have become heavy and masculine, so that it becomes difficult to tell a woman’s from a man’s skeleton, which ordinarily is very easy.

CALISTHENICS AND MASSAGE

It is, however, hardly necessary to refer to these facts as a warning to girls not to use their arms too much. The danger almost always lies the other way, and what girls need is a set of intelligent directions for securing a shapely arm. If the arm is too plump the method discussed in preceding pages for the general reduction of corpulence will also affect the arm. If too thin, which is much more frequently the case in young women, don’t be afraid that exercise will make them thinner—on the ground that hard labourers are commonly meagre. It is only excessive exercise that produces leanness, by burning away all the fat. Moderate exercise develops the muscles—the plastic material of beauty—and stimulates the appetite, so that the fat-cushion under the skin also increases in depth, covering up the angular outlines of bones, muscles, and sinews.

It is a suggestive fact that the word calisthenics—"the art of promoting the health of the body by exercise"—comes from two Greek words meaning “beautiful” and “strength.”

So many books have been written on calisthenics that it is needless to repeat here minute directions for training the muscles of the arm or any other part of the body. One bit of sensible advice may, however, be quoted from the Ugly Girl Papers: “Throwing quoits and sweeping are good exercises to develop the arms. There is nothing like three hours of housework a day for giving a woman a good figure, and if she sleep in tight cosmetic gloves, she need not fear that her hands will be spoiled. The time to form the hand is in youth, and with thimbles for the finger-tips, and close gloves lined with cold cream, every mother might secure a good hand for her daughter.”

It is an ill wind that blows no man good. The incessant piano-banging and violin-scraping of thousands of unmusical young ladies has at least one thing to be said in its favour: it helps to round and beautify the arms of these young players.

Active exercise is the surest and quickest way of securing muscular rotundity. But in cases where, owing to some infirmity, long-continued spontaneous exertion is out of the question, massage, which has been defined as “passive exercise,” may be resorted to as of calisthenic value. It should only be performed by an expert, and always centripetally, i.e. in the direction of the heart. It facilitates the flow of the venous current, which in the arms and lower limbs has to struggle upwards against the force of gravitation; and to this is partly due its refreshing effect. As Americans are the most nervous and sensitive people in the world, it seems probable that the feeling of ease following the facilitating of the venous flow has taught them instinctively to assume that peculiar position, with the feet on a chair or table, which has been so often ridiculed by Europeans.

THE “SECOND FACE”

“The beauty of a youthful hand,” says Winckelmann “consists in a moderate degree of plumpness, and a scarcely observable depression, resembling a soft shadow, over the articulations of the fingers, where, if the hand is plump, there is a dimple. The fingers taper gently towards their extremities, like finely-shaped columns; and, in art, the articulations are not expressed. The fore part of the terminating joint is not bent over, nor are the nails very long, though both are common in the works of modern sculptors.”

Balzac pointed out that “men of superior intellect almost always have beautiful hands, the perfection of which is the distinctive indication of a high destination.... The hand is the despair of sculptors and painters when they wish to express the changing labyrinth of its mysterious lineaments.”

A fine hand is, indeed, a sign of superior intelligence in a much more comprehensive sense than that which Balzac had in mind. The difference between the simian and human faces is hardly greater than the progress from an ape’s hand to a man’s in beauty of outline, smoothness of surface, grace of movement, and varied utility. The ape’s hand is hairy on the upper surface, hard and callous on the lower. Except in climbing, its movements are clumsy. The fingers have adapted themselves to the need of climbing, and have become permanently bent in front, so that when the animal goes on all fours it cannot walk on the palm, but only on the bent knuckles.

A step higher we have the negro’s hands, in which the fingers are less independent and nimble, and the palmar fat-cushions less developed and sensitive, than in our hands. These fat-cushions serve to protect the blood-vessels as well as the delicate nerves, which make the hand the principal organ of touch. The muscles of the hand are more easily and instantaneously obedient to the will than those of any other part of the body, except those of the mouth and eyes; and hence it is that the hands are almost as good an index of a man’s character, habits, and profession as his face, and have been aptly called his “second face.”

Division of labour is the index of progress in the evolution of organs. To the fact that his feet have become exclusively adapted to locomotion, leaving the hands free to serve as tools, man chiefly owes his superiority to other animals. For what would superior intellect avail him without the implements needed to carry out its schemes? Feeling, grasping, handling, writing, sewing, playing an instrument, squeezing, caressing,—these are a few of the innumerable functions of the human hand; while the ape’s is good for little but climbing. The finger language of deaf mutes shows to what subtle intellectual uses the hands can be put; and as for emotional expression, are there any facial muscles which can indicate finer shades of feeling than the infinitely varied touch with which a pianist or violinist gives utterance to every mood and phase of human passion?

No wonder that, just as the face has had its physiognomists and phrenologists, so the hand its chiromancers, who pretended, by looking at its lines, not only to read character, but even to foretell one’s fate. Books on this subject are indeed still published, which shows that the race of fools is in no immediate danger of extinction. Wrinkles in the face do bear some relation to character and experience; but surely no one needs to be told that the palmar lines are purely accidental—caused by the manner in which the skin is folded when we close the hand.

FINGER-NAILS

Our nails are modified claws—modified to their advantage. When properly cared for, they are one of the greatest personal ornaments—beginning and ending as they do with a delicate curve, rounded on the surface, suffused with a gentle blush, and smooth as ivory. They may also serve as a mode of expression and index of nationality, as seen in these remarks by Mr. E. B. Tylor: “In the Southern United States, till slavery was done away a few years ago, the traces of Negro descent were noted with the utmost nicety. Not only were the mixed breeds regularly classed as mulattos, quadroons, and down to octoroons, but even where the mixture was so slight that the untrained eye noticed nothing beyond a brunette complexion, the intruder, who had ventured to sit down at a public dinner-table, was called upon to show his hands, and the African taint detected by the dark tinge at the root of the finger-nails.”

Becker remarks that among the ancient Greeks “it was considered very unseemly to appear with nails unpared”; nor did the Greeks consider it beneath their dignity, like the Romans, to pare their own nails.

The Greeks, being an æsthetic nation, were guided in the treatment of their nails by the sense of beauty. Elsewhere, however, the idiotic notion that laziness is aristocratic led to a different treatment of the nails. Mr. Tylor, in his Anthropology, gives an illustration of the hand of a Chinese ascetic whose finger-nails are five or six times as long as his fingers. “Long finger-nails,” he remarks, “are noticed even among ourselves as showing that the owner does no manual labour, and in China and neighbouring countries they are allowed to grow to a monstrous length as a symbol of nobility, ladies wearing silver cases to protect them, or at least as a pretence that they are there.”

Useless hands, with elongated nails, reverting to a clawlike character, as “symbols of nobility!” The study of evolution throws much sarcastic light on the fashionable follies of mankind.

MANICURE SECRETS

According to the New York Analyst: “There are not nearly as many secrets in manicure as people imagine. A little ammonia or borax in the water you wash your hands with, and that water just lukewarm, will keep the skin clean and soft. A little oatmeal mixed with the water will whiten the hands. Many people use glycerine on their hands when they go to bed, wearing gloves to keep the bedding clean; but glycerine don’t agree with every one. It makes some skins harsh and red. These people should rub their hands with dry oatmeal and wear gloves in bed. The best preparation for the hands at night is white of egg, with a grain of alum dissolved in it.... The roughest and hardest hands can be made soft and white in a month’s time by doctoring them a little at bedtime, and all the tools you need are a nail-brush (avoid metal), a bottle of ammonia, a box of powdered borax, and a little fine white sand to rub the stains off, or a cut of lemon. Manicures use acids in their shops, but the lemon is quite as good, and isn’t poisonous, while the acids are.”

In the Ugly Girl Papers the following recipes are given:—

“To give a fine colour to the nails, the hands and fingers must be well lathered and washed with scented soap; then the nails must be rubbed with equal parts of cinnabar and emery, followed by oil of bitter almonds. To take white specks from the nails, melt equal parts of pitch and turpentine in a small cup; add to it vinegar and powdered sulphur. Rub this on the nails and the specks will soon disappear. Pitch and myrrh melted together may be used with the same results.”

But, after all, what is the use of beautifying one’s hands as long as ladies bow to the Fashion Fetish, which compels them to conceal them in the skins of animals? To wear gloves on going out, as a protection against rough weather and for the sake of cleanliness, is rational enough; but to wear them at social gatherings is almost as absurd as the compulsory impenetrable veils of Turkish women; for does not the hand rank next to the face as an index of character?

Another stupidity of fashion is our enforced and cultivated right-handedness. Despite the force of inherited habit, children show a natural inclination toward using both their hands equally; but they are constantly scolded and punished, until they have succeeded, like their parents, in reducing one hand to a state of imbecility, so to speak, which is constantly betrayed in awkward, ungraceful action. Practising on a musical instrument, with special attention to the left hand, has a tendency to correct this awkwardness. Indeed, is there any part of the body that music does not benefit? Dancing to a Strauss waltz gives elasticity to the limbs and grace to the gait; singing is the most useful kind of lung-gymnastics, and develops the chest; a musically-trained ear modulates the voice to sweeter expression; while equally skilled and graceful hands are acquired by practice on a musical instrument. So that the word music, though much less comprehensive than among the ancient Greeks, has lost none of the magic, beautifying power they ascribed to it.

Much of the ugliness in the world is due to the neglect of parents in properly supervising the actions of their children, to prevent the formation of bad habits, which ruin beauty irretrievably. As an instance of what can be done in this direction may be cited the following remark by a Philadelphia surgeon: “The school-girl habit of biting the nails must be broken up at once. If in children, rub a little extract of quassia on the finger-tips. This is so bitter that they are careful not to taste it twice. Not only the nails, but the whole finger and hand is often forfeited by neglect in this respect.”

By travelling from the shoulder down to the finger-tips we have apparently interrupted our steady progress from toe to tip of the body. But we shall see in a moment that the interruption is only apparent, for our subject leads naturally “from Hand to Mouth.”

JAW, CHIN, AND MOUTH

HANDS VERSUS JAWS

Just as among some male ruminants the growth of horns as a means of defence has apparently led to the disappearance of the canine teeth, so man’s erect attitude, by leaving his hands free to do much of the work which inferior animals do with their jaws and teeth, has gradually modified the appearance of his face, greatly to its advantage. “The early male forefathers of man,” says Darwin, “were probably furnished with great canine teeth; but as they gradually acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws and teeth less and less. In this case the jaws, together with the teeth, would become reduced in size, as we may feel almost sure from innumerable analogous cases.” And in another place he remarks: “As the prodigious difference between the skulls of the two sexes in the orang and gorilla stands in close relation with the development of the immense canine teeth in the males, we may infer that the reduction of the jaws and teeth in the early progenitors of man must have led to a most striking and favourable change in his appearance.”

Why a “favourable” change? No doubt a male gorilla, if it could be taught to pronounce an æsthetic judgment, would indignantly scout the notion that our weak, delicate jaw is preferable to its own massive bones; nor would a prognathous or “forward-jawed” African or Australian admit that he is less beautiful than the orthognathous or “upright-jawed” European. What right, then, have we to claim that we alone have beautiful faces? Must we not admit, with the Jeffrey Alison school, that it is all “a matter of taste,” and that in so far as a heavy, projecting jaw appears beautiful to a gorilla or a savage, it is beautiful to them?

The general answer to such questions as these has already been given in another part of this volume. We need therefore only say in brief résumé that a heavy, projecting, clumsy, brutal jaw probably appears to a gorilla or a Hottentot neither ugly nor beautiful. The æsthetic sense—as we can see among ourselves—is the last and highest product of civilisation. Monkeys are apparently excited by brilliant colours, but to beauty of form neither apes nor the lower races and classes of man appear to be susceptible.

Should a negro, however, on having his attention called to this matter, claim that his prognathous face is more beautiful than our orthognathous face, the retort simple would be that his imagination is not sufficiently educated to understand our more refined and delicate beauty; just as an Esquimaux prefers a rotten egg to a fresh one, a working man a glass of fusil oil to one of tokay—simply because their senses of taste and smell are not sufficiently refined to appreciate or even detect the delicate flavour of a fresh egg and the subtle bouquet of wine.

Of the positive tests of beauty, Delicacy is the one which most emphatically condemns the heavy, prognathous jaw and the accompanying big mouth. Massive bones and clumsy movements are everywhere the signs of excessive toil, fatal to beauty, as may be seen on comparing the angular and almost masculine skeleton of a labouring woman with the delicately-articulated joints of a “society woman”; or the heavy structure of a dray-horse with the fine contours of a race-horse; showing that Delicacy is always associated with the other elements of beauty—Curvature, Gradation, Expression, etc.

On the manner in which the beauty of the mouth is proportioned to its capability for Expression, Mr. Ruskin has made the following interesting observations: “Taking the mouth, another source of expression, we find it ugliest where it has none, as mostly in fish; or perhaps where, without gaining much in expression of any kind, it becomes a formidable destructive instrument, as again in the alligator; and then, by some increase of expression, we arrive at birds’ beaks, wherein there is much obtained by the different ways of setting on the mandibles (compare the bills of the duck and the eagle); and thence we reach the finely-developed lips of the carnivora (which nevertheless lose their beauty in the actions of snarling and biting); and from these we pass to the nobler, because gentler and more sensitive, of the horse, camel, and fawn, and so again up to man: only the principle is less traceable in the mouths of the lower animals, because they are only in slight measure capable of expression, and chiefly used as instruments, and that of low function; whereas in man the mouth is given most definitely as a means of expression, beyond and above its lower functions.... The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral or intellectual virtue expressed by it.”

Shakspere, by the way, seems to differ from Ruskin’s theory implied in this last sentence. According to Ruskin, animals “lose their beauty in the actions of snarling and biting.” But man has an action similar to snarling, namely, what Bell calls “that arching of the lips so expressive of contempt, hatred, and jealousy.” It is to this that Shakspere refers in these lines—

“O what a deal of scorn looks beautiful In the contempt and anger of his lip.”

But the word “beautiful” is here evidently taken by Shakspere in the wider sense of interesting and characteristic, and not in the special æsthetic sense of formal and emotional beauty.

Delicacy and the capacity for varied and subtle Expression—these, we may conclude, are the chief criteria of beauty in the lower part of the face. Anatomically, it may be well to state here, the word “face” does not include the forehead, but only extends from the chin to the eyebrows. The upper and posterior part is called the cranium or skull. It seems odd at first not to include the forehead in the face, but there are scientific grounds for making such a division, for a discussion of which the reader must be referred to some anatomical text-book (vide Kollmann, pp. 82-85).

To a certain extent the face and the cranium are independent of one another in development and physiognomic significance. And it should be noted that, contrary to the general impression, in estimating the degree of intelligence and refinement, the face is a safer guide than the cranium; for there are many powerful brains in low and even receding foreheads, whereas a large projecting jaw is almost invariably a sign of vulgarity or lack of delicate feeling. We do not find a dog ugly because of his receding forehead; but we do find that the most infallible way of giving a man’s picture a brutal expression is by enlarging the jaw and mouth. It is the deadliest weapon of the caricaturist.

What makes a gorilla so frightfully ugly is the prominence and massive preponderance of his face over his cranium. It is his monstrous jaws, with their “simply brutal armature” of teeth, that give him such a repulsive appearance. The gorilla’s mouth, as Professor Kollmann remarks, is a caricature even from the animal point of view. How much more delicate and refined are a dog’s or cat’s jaws and teeth in comparison! Unfortunately, while man is a savage, or when he relapses into brutal habits, it is the gorilla’s mouth and teeth that his resemble, and not the cat’s or the dog’s.

A small face being therefore a test of refined beauty, we have here another proof of the superiority of feminine over masculine beauty. For although woman has a smaller cranium than man, it is larger than man’s relatively to the face. In other words, women have smaller and less massive faces than men, both absolutely and relatively to their size. Kollmann, who is not an evolutionist, endeavours to account for this difference on the ground that men are more addicted to the pleasures of the table than women. But surely, though women eat less than men, they do not make much less use of their teeth; and for any deficiency in this respect they more than make up by the constant wagging of their jaws in small-talk. It is infinitely more probable that Darwin is right in attributing the massiveness of the masculine jaws to the accumulated, inherited effects of constant use in fighting with enemies and rivals—contests from which the passive females have as a rule been exempt.

It is the assumption by the hands of many of the former functions of the teeth that has led to the decrease in the size of the teeth, and, in consequence, of the jaw-bones to which they are attached. Some writers have even claimed that the wisdom-teeth are becoming rudimentary, and will ultimately disappear, because there will be no room for them in our gradually diminishing jaws. We may feel confident, however, that if this reduction in the size of the jaws tended to go too far, the sense of beauty and Sexual Selection, i.e. Love, would step in to arrest the process, by favouring the survival of those who gave their teeth sufficient exercise to prevent the lower part of the face from becoming too much reduced in size. Our sense of beauty demands that the distance from tip of chin to nose should be about the same as the length of the nose and the height of the forehead. Should these proportions be violated, Love will restore the balance; for no lover would ever select a face in which the chin almost touches the nose, as in infants, whose teeth and jaws are not yet developed, or as in old men and women, in whom the loss of the teeth has led to a collapse of the jaws, resulting in a loss of proportion, clumsy movements, and prognathism.

DIMPLES IN THE CHIN

An oval, well-rounded chin is one of the most important elements of formal beauty, and is a characteristic trait of humanity; for man is the only animal that has a chin. Lavater distinguishes three principal varieties of chin: the receding chin, which is peculiar to lower races and types; the chin which does not project beyond a line dropped from the lips; and the chin which does project beyond that line. Of all parts of the face the chin has the least variety of form and capability of emotional expression. Physiognomists have expended much ingenuity in attempting to trace a connection between various forms of the chin and traits of character; but their generalisations have no scientific value. It is probable that often a very small, weak chin indicates weak desires and a vacillating character, while an energetic chin, like Richard Wagner’s, indicates the iron will of a reformer. But the connection between the development of the brain and special modifications of the bones of the chin is too remote to permit a safe inference in individual cases.

In ancient Egyptian art, as Winckelmann points out, “the chin is always somewhat small and receding, whereby the oval of the face becomes imperfect.”

One of the most essential conditions of beauty in a chin, if we may judge by the descriptions of novelists, is a dimple. Yet it is doubtful whether a dimple can ever be accepted as a special mark of beauty. Temporary dimples (for the production of which there seems to be a special muscle) are interesting as a mode of transient emotional expression. But permanent dimples interrupt the regular gradation of the beauty-curve, and too often indicate that the plump roundness, so fascinating in a woman’s face, has passed the line which indicates corpulence and obliterates the delicate lines of expression.

Dimples occur not only in the chin, but also in the cheek, at the elbow-joints, on the back, and in plump female hands at the knuckles. They are caused by a dense tissue of fibres, blood-vessels, and nerves holding down the skin tightly in one place, and thus preventing such an accumulation of fat between the skin and muscles as is seen in the surrounding parts.

Tommaseo (quoted by Mantegazza) probably had in mind the connection between corpulence and mental indolence when he said that “a dimple in the chin indicates more physical than mental grace.”

“As a dimple—by the Greeks termed νύμφη—is an isolated and somewhat accidental adjunct to the chin, it was not,” says Winckelmann, “regarded by the Greek artists as an attribute of abstract and pure beauty, though it is so considered by modern writers.” With a few unimportant exceptions, it is not found in “any beautiful ideal figure which has come down to us.” And although Varro prettily calls a dimple in a statue of Bathyllus an impress from the finger of Cupid, Winckelmann thinks that when dimples do occur in Greek art works they must be attributed to a conscious deviation from the highest principles of art for the sake of personal portraiture. “In images whose beauties were of a lofty cast, the Greek artists never allowed a dimple to break the uniformity of the chin’s surface. Its beauty, indeed, consists in the rounded fulness of its arched form, to which the lower lip, when full, imparts additional size.”

REFINED LIPS

Whereas the beauty of the chin is purely physical, its neighbour, the mouth, has the emotional charm of expression besides the formal beauty of outline. When we come to speak of the ears we shall find that some animals have five times as many muscles as man, wherewith they can execute expressive movements with those organs. But in the number and delicacy of the muscles of the mouth no animal approaches man, in whom they are more numerous even than those which serve for the varied expression of the eyes. Great as is the difference between an animal’s forefoot and man’s hand, it is not so great as the difference between an animal’s and a man’s mouth. Chewing and sucking are almost the only functions of the animal’s mouth, while man moulds his lips into a thousand shapes in singing, whistling, pouting, blowing, speaking, smiling, kissing, etc. From being a mere mechanism for masticating food, it has become the most delicate instrument for intellectual and emotional expression.

Sir Charles Bell’s testimony that “the lips are, of all the features, the most susceptible of action, and the most direct index of the feelings,” has already been quoted in the chapter on Kissing. Could Rubinstein himself express a wider range of emotions, by subtle variations of pianistic touch, than our lips can express degrees and varieties of affection in the family, friendly, conjugal, and love kisses? And can we find, even in the music of Chopin and Wagner, harmonic changes more infinitely varied than the countless subtle modulations of the human lips, as revealed in the fact that deaf mutes can be taught to understand what we say to them merely by watching the movements of our lips?

“The mouth, which is the end of love” (Dante), is also the seat of Love’s smiles; “and in her smile Love’s image you may see.” We often read of smiling eyes, and the eyes do partake in the expression of smiling, by increased brightness and the wrinkling of the surrounding muscles. But that the mouth is a more important factor in this expression can be shown by painting the face of a man with a sad expression, and then pasting on a smiling mouth, which will give the man at once a happy expression, notwithstanding the unchanged eyes. In life the muscles of the mouth and eyes execute certain movements in harmony. “In all exhilarating emotions,” says Bell, “the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nostril, and the angle of the mouth are raised. In the depressing emotions it is the reverse.”

For the execution of these diverse movements, which make it the most expressive organ of the body, the mouth employs more than a dozen important groups of muscles, some of which originate in the chin, some in the cheeks, some in the lips themselves, enabling them to execute independent movements.

While surpassing the eyes in expressiveness, the mouth rivals them in beauty of form and colour. “The lips answer the purpose of displaying a more brilliant red than is to be seen elsewhere,” says Winckelmann. “The under lips should be fuller than the upper.” In Greek divinities the lips are not always closed: “and this is especially the case with Venus, in order that her countenance may express the languishing softness of desire and love.” At the same time, “very few of the figures which have been represented laughing, as some Satyrs or Fauns are, show the teeth.” This is natural enough, for the long-continued exposure of the teeth would only result in a grimace. It is only in the transient smile that the teeth may peep forth; and then what a charming contrast their ivory curve and lustrous colour presents to the full-blooded, soft, pink lips!

“Lilies married to the rose, Have made her cheek the nuptial bed; Her lips betray their virgin red, As they only blushed for this, That they one another kiss.”

Health, Beauty, and Love—everywhere we see them inseparably associated. Who could ever fall in love with a pair of thin, pallid lips that have lost their pink and plump loveliness through anæmic indolence, or disease, or tight lacing? The very teeth, though the hardest substance of the body, lose their natural colour and beauty in ill-health. Not only do they decay and become blackish, but “in bilious people they become yellow, and in consumptive patients they show occasionally an unnaturally pearly and translucent whiteness” (Brinton and Napheys).

Negroes have, normally, teeth of a dazzling whiteness, which is often regarded as a racial peculiarity, but is due, according to Waitz, to the use of chalk or vegetal fibres. But various savages are dissatisfied with the natural form and colour of their teeth, and disfigure them in various ways. “In different countries the teeth are stained black, red, blue, etc., and in the Malay Archipelago it is thought shameful to have teeth like those of a dog” (Darwin).

“In Macassar the women spend a part of the day in painting their teeth red and yellow, in such a way that a red tooth follows a yellow one, and alternately.” In Japan, Fashion compels married women to blacken their teeth, not, however, as an ornament, but to make them ugly and save them from temptation.

Some African tribes knock out two or more of their front teeth, on the ground that they do not wish to look like brutes. The Batokas “think the presence of incisors most unsightly, and on beholding some Europeans, cried out, ‘Look at the great teeth!’... In various parts of Africa, and in the Malay Archipelago, the natives file the incisors into points like those of a saw, or pierce them with holes, into which they insert studs.”

In case of the lips, primitive Fashion prescribes still more atrocious mutilations. One would think that a negro’s swollen lips were ugly enough to suit even a devotee of African Fashion; but no! Her lips being naturally large, the fashionable negro belle considers it incumbent on her to exaggerate them into additional hideousness, just as European and American fashionable women exaggerate the slight and beautiful natural curve of their waist into the atrocious hour-glass shape.

“Among the Babines, who live north of the Columbia River,” says Sir John Lubbock, “the size of the under lip is the standard of female beauty. A hole is made in the under lip of the infant, in which a small bone is inserted; from time to time the bone is replaced by a larger one, until at last a piece of wood, three inches long and an inch and a half wide, is inserted in the orifice, which makes the lip protrude to a frightful extent. The process appears to be very painful.”

“In Central Africa,” says Darwin, “the women perforate the lower lip and wear a crystal, which, from the movement of the tongue, has ‘a wriggling motion, indescribably ludicrous during conversation.’ The wife of the chief of Latooka told Sir S. Baker that Lady Baker ‘would be much improved if she would extract her four front teeth from the lower jaw, and wear the long pointed polished crystal in her under lip.’ Further south, with the Makalolo, the upper lip is perforated, and a large metal and bamboo ring, called a pelelé, is worn in the hole. This caused the lip to project in one point two inches beyond the tip of the nose; and when the lady smiled, the contraction of the muscles elevated it over the eyes. ‘Why do the women wear these things?’ the venerable chief Chinsurdi was asked. Evidently surprised at such a stupid question, he replied, ‘For beauty! They are the only beautiful things women have; men have beards, women have none. What kind of a person would she be without a pelelé? She would not be a woman at all, with a mouth like a man but no beard.’”

In New Zealand, according to Tylor, “it was considered shameful for a woman not to have her mouth tattooed, for people would say with disgust, ‘She has red lips.’”

Compare these two pictures for a moment: on the one side, the protuberant mouth-borders of the negro woman, swollen as by disease or an insect’s sting, enlarged, in smiling, to the very ears, and showing not only the teeth but the gums, the tongue and the unæsthetic œsophagus; on the other side, the full but delicate cherry lips of civilised woman, capable of an infinite variety of subtle, graceful movements, a keyboard on which the whole gamut of human feelings finds expression, and revealing, in a smile, only the tips of the pearly, undeformed teeth. Shall we say, with Alison and Jeffrey, that it is all a matter of taste, and that the negro has as much right to his taste as we have to ours? Or have we not plentiful reasons for claiming that Personal Beauty is a fine art, and that the reason why the negro prefers his coarse mouth to our refined lips is because he does not understand our highly-developed and specialised Beauty?

There are cogent scientific reasons for believing that, just as the skull has been modified and developed from the upper part of the spinal column, and the brain from its contents, so the facial muscles are all developed from the broad muscle of the neck. In the orang, according to Professor Owen, we find already all the important facial muscles which man uses to express emotions. But, as Darwin remarks, “distinct uses, independently of expression, can ... be assigned with much probability for almost all the facial muscles.”

On the other hand, the facial muscles “are, as is admitted by every one who has written on the subject, very variable in structure; and Moreau remarks that they are hardly alike in half a dozen subjects. They are also variable in function. Thus the power of uncovering the canine tooth on one side differs much in different persons. The power of raising the wings of the nostrils is also, according to Dr. Piderit, variable in a remarkable degree; and other such cases could be given.”

The facts that the facial muscles blend so much together that their number has been variously estimated at from nineteen to fifty-five, and that they vary so much in details of structure and function in individuals, are of extreme significance. For, in the first place, this variableness allows Love—or Sexual Selection—to favour the survival of those modifications of the features which are most in harmony with the laws of Beauty; and, secondly, it affords the means of further specialisation and increased accuracy in the modes of emotional expression.

When we see a friend reading a letter, we fancy his face a perfect mirror, reflecting every mood touched upon in its contents. Yet many of our expressions are vague, and there is much room for improvement in definiteness. Darwin, in the introduction to his work on the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, has remarked how difficult it often is to name the exact emotion intended to be expressed in a picture of a man, unless we regard the accessories by which the painter illustrates the situation; and how apt people are to disagree in naming the emotions expressed by a series of physiognomic portraits. With monkeys, he says, “the expression of slight pain, or of any painful emotion, such as grief, vexation, jealousy, etc., is not easily distinguished from that of moderate anger.”

Savages, as we saw in a previous chapter, are strangers to many of the tender emotions which enter into our daily life; hence it would be absurd to look for muscles specially trained to express them. And even with Europeans the refined emotions are of such recent development that, as just stated, they are capable of much further specialisation. To take only one case: it is probable that, whereas in the present stage of human evolution, it is almost impossible, without accessories, to distinguish the facial expression of feminine Romantic Love from that of maternal love, future generations will have specially modified muscles for those modes of expression. Duchenne has pointed out on the side of the nose a series of transient folds expressive of amorous desire. As Romantic Love displaces coarse passion, may not these or another set of muscles be pressed into the special service of refined Love as a sign of encouragement to lovers about to propose? Coquettes, of course, would immediately cultivate this expression, as a new wile or “wrinkle.”

Between the facial muscles that are thus utilised for the expression of emotions and other muscles of the body, there is one difference which is of the utmost importance from the point of view of Personal Beauty. The function of ordinary muscles is to move bones, whereas the muscles of expression in the face are only concerned with the movements of the skin. Hence they do not enlarge the bones of the face, which would destroy its delicacy. Their exercise gives elasticity and plump roundness to the outlines of the face; and as they are subtly subdivided in function, they cannot easily become too plump from exercise.

Individual peculiarities of expression are of course due to the frequent exercise of certain sets of muscles, leading gradually to a fixed physiognomic aspect; for form is merely crystallised expression. Hence no one can be beautiful without being good. Vice soon destroys Personal Beauty. If the muscles of anger, envy, jealousy, spite, cruelty, etc., are too frequently called into exercise, the result is a face on which the word vicious is written as legibly and in as many corners as the numerals X and 10 are printed on a United States banknote.

One of the reasons why Fashion encourages the blasé, nil admirari attitude, and the stolid suppression of emotional expression, is to hide these signs of moral and hygienic sins.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, anatomist and poet, says of Emerson that he had “that look of refinement centring about the lips which is rarely found in the male New Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied thoughts and complex emotions, as well as the sensuous and nutritive port of entry.”

Dr. Holmes need not have limited his generalisation to “male New Englanders.” Refined mouths are rare in every country, among women as well as among men. As a writer in the Victoria Magazine exclaims: “It is wonderful how far more common good foreheads and eyes are amongst us than good mouths and chins.” Yet there is a special reason for singling out the average male New Englander as a “warning example.” He inherits the thin, famished, pale, stern, forbidding lips of his Puritan ancestors, whose sins are thus visited on later generations. Sins? Yes, sins against health. Without cheerfulness there can be no sound health, and the Puritans made the systematic pursuit of unhappiness the chief object of their life. They made cruel war on all those innocent pursuits and amusements which bring the bloom of health and beauty to the youthful cheek, and exercise the lips in the expression of refined æsthetic emotion. Even music, the most innocent of the arts, was included in their fanatic ostracism, to which historians also trace the rarity of musical taste of the highest order in England.

There is reason to believe that it is especially æsthetic culture which betrays itself in the refined contours and expression of the lips. Men of genius, though their cast of features is not always handsome, commonly have finely-cut mouths. Among German women addicted to music and love of nature, though beauty is comparatively rare—owing to causes which will be considered in a later chapter—good mouths are more common than in some other countries which boast a higher general average of Personal Beauty. Among Americans in general, all the features are apt to be finely cut, hence the lips also partake of this advantage.

But it is among Spanish maidens that perhaps the most inviting, full-blooded yet delicate, soft, and refined lips are to be sought. True, the Spanish maiden seems to lack refined feelings when she goes, as commonly supposed, to be thrilled by a bull fight. Yet it is well known that the upper classes of women in Spain do not commonly attend these spectacles; and if they did, would they be more cruel than our fashionable women? Which is the more glaring evidence of callous emotions, to voluntarily witness the slaughter of an infuriated, dangerous beast, or to wear on one’s hat the painted corpses of innocent song-birds?

The following passage in one of Washington Irving’s works shows that the Spanish have genuine æsthetic feeling and taste:—

“‘How near the Sierra looks this evening!’ said Mateo; ‘it seems as if you could touch it with your hand, and yet it is many leagues off.’ While he was speaking a star appeared over the snowy summit of the mountain, the only one yet visible in the heavens, and so pure, so large, so bright and beautiful as to call forth ejaculations of delight from honest Mateo.

”‘Que lucero hermoso!—que clara y limpio es!—no pueda ser lucero mas brillante.’ (What a beautiful star! how clear and lucid!—no star could be more brilliant!)

“I have often remarked this sensibility of the common people of Spain to the charms of natural objects. The lustre of a star—the beauty or fragrance of a flower—the crystal purity of a fountain, will inspire them with a kind of poetical delight—and then what euphonious words their magnificent language affords with which to give utterance to their transports!”

Possibly the constant pronouncing of these “euphonious words” is one of the causes of the beauty of Spanish lips. But one need not go into such subtle details for an explanation of the phenomenon. Sexual Selection accounts for it sufficiently. The admiration of Beauty is the strongest factor in Romantic Love. The Spaniard’s sense of Beauty is refined through his love of Beauty in natural objects. Hence in Sexual Selection he is guided by a taste which abhors equally the coarse, protuberant lips suggestive of mere animality, and the leathery, lifeless lips indicating neglect of the laws of health and a lack of lusty vitality. For true labial refinement consists not in ascetic elimination of sensuous fulness, but in æsthetic harmony between sense and intellect. The lips, like all other parts of the body, are naturally plump and full-blooded in Southern nations, saturated with sunshine and fresh air; and when this plumpness is checked by mental refinement and the exigencies of varied expression, then it is that lips become ideally beautiful.

It is with the lips as with Love, of which they are the perch. Neither Zola nor Dante are the true painters of the romantic passion, but Shakspere, who pays respect to flesh and blood as well as to emotion and intellect.

COSMETIC HINTS

Although the size and shape of the lips afford an index of coarse or refined ancestry, the mouth is commonly the most self-made feature in the countenance, because it is such an important seat of individual expression. Herein lies a soothing balm to those who, owing to the stupidly irregular and incalculable laws of heredity, have inherited an ugly mouth from a grandfather or a more remote ancestor.

A pleasing impression, oft repeated, leaves its traces on the facial muscles. Kant gives this advice to parents: “Children, especially girls, must be accustomed early to smile in a frank, unconstrained manner; for the cheerfulness and animation of the features gradually leave an impression on the mind itself, and thus create a disposition towards gaiety, amiableness, and sociability, which lay an early foundation for the virtue of benevolence.”

So Kant evidently believed that we can beautify the soul by beautifying the body. And the reverse is equally true. As Mr. Ruskin remarks: “There is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon the features.... On the gentleness and decision of just feeling there follows a grace of action which by no discipline may be taught or obtained.”

If educators and parents would thoroughly impress on the minds of the young the great truth that good moral behaviour and the industry which leads to intellectual pre-eminence are magic sources of youthful and permanent Personal Beauty, they would find it the most potent of all civilising agencies, especially with women.

Drs. Brinton and Napheys, in their work on Personal Beauty (1870), which is especially valuable from the point of view of medical and surgical cosmetics, but which is unfortunately out of print, offer the following suggestions as to how the shape and expression of the mouth may be improved:—

"For cosmetic reasons, immoderate laughter is objectionable. It keeps the muscles on the stretch, destroys the contour of the features, and produces wrinkles. It is better to cultivate a ‘classic repose.’

"Still more decidedly should the habit of ‘making mouths’ be condemned, whether it occur in conversing in private or to express emotions. It never adds to the emphasis of the discourse, never improves the looks, and leads to actual malformations.

"Children sometimes learn to suck and bite their lips. This distorts these organs, and unless they are persuaded to give it up betimes, a permanent deformity will arise.

“When the lips have once assumed a given form, it is difficult to change them. Those that are too thin can occasionally be increased by adopting the plan of sucking them. This forces a large quantity of blood to the part, and consequently a greater amount of nutriment. When too large, compresses can sometimes, but not always, be used to effect. We have employed silver plates connected by a wire spring, or a mould of stiff leather. Either may be worn at night, or in the house during the day.”

It is astonishing to note how many persons are utterly unconcerned regarding the appearance of their mouths in talking, smiling, and laughing, sometimes revealing the whole of the teeth and even the gums, like savages, or as if they were walking tooth-powder advertisements. Self-observation before a mirror is the best antidote against such grimaces.

Chapped lips sometimes call for constitutional treatment, but ordinarily they can be easily cured by obtaining a lip-salve of some reputable chemist. Glycerine is almost always adulterated and injurious, and should only be used on any part of the skin when chemically pure.

Pale lips are commonly an indication of ill-health, and therefore call for exercise, tonics, or other medical treatment. And the colour of the lips is an index of emotion as well as of health—

“Whispering, with white lips, ‘The foe! They come! They come!’”—BYRON.

That sound teeth, though they should never be seen except in glimpses, are an extremely important element in facial beauty, may be seen by the fact that the loss of a few front teeth makes a person look ten years older at once. The art of dentistry has reached such marvellous perfection that there is no excuse for having unsightly teeth. They may be easily preserved to a good age, if properly exercised on solid food—bread crusts, etc. Very hot and very cold food and drink is injurious, especially if cold and hot things are taken in immediate succession. The teeth should be cleaned twice a day, on rising and before retiring. The brush should not be too hard, and a harmless powder, wash, or soap should be obtained of a trustworthy chemist for the threefold purpose of whitening the teeth by removing tartar, of killing the numerous microbes in the mouth, and purifying the breath. An offensive breath is shockingly common, probably owing to the fact that many brush only the outside surface of their teeth. They should be brushed inside as well, and on the top, and the tooth wash or soap should be brought into contact with every corner and crevasse of the mouth and teeth. An offensive breath ought to be good cause for divorce, and certainly it is a deadly enemy of Romantic Love.

THE CHEEKS

HIGH CHEEK-BONES

When we look at a Mongolian, the flat nose and oblique eyes at once attract our attention, but hardly to such a degree as his high and prominent cheek-bones. The North American Indians, who are probably the descendants of Mongolians, resemble them in their prominent cheek-bones; and the Esquimaux likewise possess these in a most exaggerated form. “The Siamese,” says Darwin, “have small noses with divergent nostrils, a wide mouth, rather thick lips, a remarkably large face, with very high and broad cheek-bones. It is therefore not wonderful that ‘beauty, according to our notion, is a stranger to them. Yet they consider their own females to be much more beautiful than those of Europe.’”

Here is another “matter of taste,” which is decided in our favour by the general laws of Beauty, positive and negative.

High, prominent cheek-bones are ugly, in the first place, because they interfere with the regularly gradated oval of the face. Secondly, because, like projecting bones and angles in any other part of the body, they interrupt the regular curve of Beauty. Thirdly, because they are coarse and inelegant, offending the sense of delicacy and grace, like big, clumsy ankles and wrists. Fourthly, because they suggest the decrepitude of old age and disease. In the healthy cheek of youth and beauty there is a large amount of adipose tissue, both under the skin and between the subjacent muscles. When age or disease makes fatal inroads on the body, this fat disappears and leaves the impression of starvation. “Famine is in thy cheeks,” exclaims Shakspere; and again—

“Meagre were his looks, Sharp misery had worn him to the bones.”

When the malar bones are too high, the fleshy cheeks, instead of including them in a plump curve, are made by contrast to appear hollow, thus simulating and suggesting the appearance of disease to those whose imagination is sufficiently awake to notice such suggestions. And besides emaciation, hollow cheeks suggest another sign of age and decrepitude—the loss of the teeth, which on the sides of the jaws help to give youthful cheeks their plump outlines.

Finally, prominent cheek-bones are objectionable because they are concomitants of the large, clumsy, brutal jaws which characterise savages and apes. To the cheek-bones the upper jaw-bone is directly attached; hence the larger the teeth are, and the more vigorously they are exercised in fighting and picking bones, the more massive must be the cheek-bones, to prevent the upper jaw from being pushed out of position. Moreover, there is attached to the cheek-bones a powerful muscle which connects it with the lower jaw, and by its contraction brings the two jaws together; and this is a second way in which violent exercise of the jaws tends to enlarge the cheek-bones, for all bones become enlarged if the muscles attached to them are much exercised.

At a recent meeting of the British Association, Sir George Campbell advanced the theory that the Aryan race, to which we belong, originally had prominent cheek-bones, like those of lower races. On general evolutionary grounds this is indeed a foregone conclusion; as is the corollary that our cheek-bones have become smaller, for the same reason that our jaws have become more delicate; viz. because we no longer use them to fight and tear our food like wild beasts, but to masticate soft cooked food, to talk, etc. Thus does the progress of civilisation enhance our Personal Beauty.

An excessive diminution in the size of the cheek-bones, as of the jaws, will be prevented by Romantic Love (Sexual Selection), which ever aims at establishing and preserving those proportions and outlines of the features which are most in harmony with the general laws of beauty.

Among the lower animals cruel Natural Selection eliminates those individuals who are ugly, i.e. unnatural, unhealthy, clumsy. With mankind charity and pity have checked the operation of this cruel though beneficial law, and progress in the direction of refinement and Beauty would therefore be fatally impeded were it not that Sexual Selection, or Love guided by the sense of Beauty, steps in to eliminate the ill-favoured, who bear in their countenance too conspicuously the marks of their savage and animal ancestry. Perhaps Mr. Wallace had some such thought in his mind when he anticipated the time when man’s selection shall have supplanted natural selection.

Yet there are thousands of good people who still profess to believe that “beauty is only skin deep,” and that Romantic Love and æsthetic culture are of no practical importance, but mere gaudy soap-bubbles to delight our vision for a transient moment!

In future ages, when æsthetic refinement will be more common, and Romantic Love, its offspring, less impeded by those considerations of rank and money and imaginary “prudence” which lead parents to sacrifice the physique and wellbeing of their grand-children to the illusive comfort of their sons and daughters (in “marriages of reason”)—what an impetus will then be given to the development of Personal Beauty! Refined mouths and noses, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, plump and graceful healthy figures, now so lamentably rare, will then become as plentiful as blackberries in the autumn.

COLOUR AND BLUSHES

Although the heart’s warm blood is not carried to the cheeks in so dense a network of arteries, nor so near the surface as in the lips, yet the cheeks come next to the lips in delicate sensibility—a fact which Love has discovered instinctively; for a kiss on the cheeks is still a kiss of love, whereas a kiss on the forehead or eyelids indicates less ecstatic forms of affection or esteem.

What makes the cheeks so sensitive is the great delicacy of their transparent skin, which readily allows the colour of the blood to be seen as through a veil, not only in blushing, but in the natural rosy aspect of youth and health.

Though the cheeks may not vie with the lips and teeth, the hair and the eyes, in lustrous depth of colour, they have an advantage in their chamæleonic variety and changes of tint, and their delicious gradations. Even the delicate blushes on an apple or a peach, caused by the warm and loving glances of the sun,—what are they compared to the luscious, mellow tints on a maiden’s ripe cheeks? Nor is it possible to find in the leaves of an autumnal American forest more endless individual nuances and shades of red and rose and pink than in the cheeks of lovely girls—unless indolence or other sins against health have painted them with ghastly repulsive pallor, or the hideous Hottentot habit of bedaubing them with brutal paint has ruined their translucent delicacy.

Says the author of the Ugly Girl Papers: “Some cheeks have a winelike, purplish glow, others a transparent saffron tinge, like yellowish-pink porcelain; others still have clear, pale carmine; and the rarest of all, that suffused tint like apple-blossoms.”

At summer resorts where girls drink in daily draughts of the elixir of youth and beauty, commonly known as fresh air, one of their greatest love-charms is these colour-symphonies on their cheeks, changing their melody with every pulse-beat. These charms they might possess all the year round did not their parents commonly convert their dwelling-houses into hothouses, reeking with stagnant, enervating air.

If, therefore, we read that Africans prefer the opaque, inky, immutable ebony of their complexion to the translucent, ever-changing tints, eloquent of health and varied emotions, in a white maiden’s face, we—well, we simply smile, on recalling the fact that even among ourselves a cheap, gaudy chromo is preferred by the great multitude to the work of a great master which they do not understand. The slow growth of æsthetic refinement is illustrated by the fact that it is only a few years since Fashion has set its face against the use of vulgar paints and powders, which ensure a most questionable temporary advantage at the expense of future permanent defacement.

The colours of the cheeks, so far under consideration, are to a certain extent subject to our will and skill; for no one who cultivates the complexion and has plenty of pure air need be without these blooming buccal roses. But the “thousand blushing apparitions” that start into our faces are, as Shakspere’s well-chosen words imply, as independent of our will and control as any other apparitions.

Are blushes ornamental or useful? That is, were they developed through Sexual or through Natural Selection? Such Shaksperian expressions as “Bid the cheek be ready with a blush, modest as morning;” “Thy cheeks blush for pure shame to counterfeit our roses;” and “To blush and beautify the cheek again,” suggest the notion that the great poet regarded blushes as beautiful; while the following permit a different interpretation: “Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty;” “Blushing cheeks by faults are bred, and fears by pale white shown;” “You virtuous ass, you bashful fool, must you be blushing?” “His treasons will sit blushing in his face.”

Let us see if any light is thrown on the problem by going back to the beginning, and tracing the development of the habit of blushing. That blushing is a comparatively recent human acquisition is made apparent from the facts that it is not seen in animals, nor in very young children, nor in idiots, as a rule; while among savages the faculty of blushing seems to be dependent on the presence of a sense of shame, which is almost, if not entirely, unknown to the lowest tribes.

That animals never blush, Darwin thinks, is almost certain. “Blushing,” he says, “is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush.” Concerning children he says: “The young blush much more freely than the old, but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion. I have received authentic accounts of two little girls blushing at the ages of between two and three years; and of another sensitive child, a year older, blushing when reproved for a fault.”

“In the dark-brown Peruvian,” says Mr. Tylor, “or the yet blacker African, though a hand or a thermometer put to the cheek will detect the blush by its heat, the somewhat increased depth of colour is hardly perceptible to the eye.” Dr. Burgess repeatedly had occasion to observe that a scar in the face of a negress “invariably became red whenever she was abruptly spoken to, or charged with any trivial offence.” And Darwin was assured by several trustworthy observers “that they have seen on the faces of negroes an appearance resembling a blush, under circumstances which would have excited one in us, though their skins were of an ebony-black tint. Some describe it as a blushing brown, but most say that the blackness becomes more intense.”

Now evidence has already been quoted in a previous chapter showing that negroes admire a black skin more than a white one (vide Descent of Man, 1885, p. 579). Is it likely, therefore, that the blush was admired by negroes, and became a ground of selection, because it intensified the blackness of the skin. It hardly seems probable that the coarse negro can be influenced in his amorous choice by any such subtle, almost imperceptible difference; and even the great originator of the theory of Sexual Selection does not believe that it accounts for the origin of blushes: “No doubt a slight blush adds to the beauty of a maiden’s face; and the Circassian women who are capable of blushing invariably fetch a higher price in the seraglio of the Sultan than less susceptible women. But the firmest believer in the efficacy of sexual selection will hardly suppose that blushing was acquired as a sexual ornament. This view would also be opposed to what has just been said about the dark-coloured races blushing in an invisible manner.”

On the other hand, it seems equally difficult to account for the origin of blushing on utilitarian grounds. No one likes to be caught blushing; on the contrary, every one tries to conceal such a state by lowering or averting the face. How could such an unwelcome, embarrassing habit prove of advantage to us? Sir Charles Bell’s remarks on the subject may serve as a clue to the answer. That blushing “is a provision for expression may be inferred,” he says, “from the colour extending only to the surface of the face, neck, and breast—the parts most exposed.... The colour caused by blushing gives brilliancy and interest to the expression of the face. In this we perceive an advantage possessed by the fair family of mankind, and which must be lost to the dark; for I can hardly believe that a blush may be seen in the negro.... Blushing assorts well with youthful and with effeminate features, while nothing is more hateful than a dog-face that exhibits no token of sensibility in the variations of colour.”

The poet Young tells us that “the man that blushes is not quite a brute;” and Darwin quotes from Humboldt a sneer of the Spaniard, “How can those be trusted who know not how to blush?” Darwin’s remark that some idiots, “if not utterly degraded, are capable of blushing,” also accords with Bell’s notion that blushing is a provision for expression. Bell’s assertion that it is “indicative of excitement” is, however, not sufficiently definite. What is it that a blush expresses? Evidently nervous sensibility, a moral sense, modesty, innocence. The Circassian who can blush is more highly valued than another, because the blush is eloquent of maiden modesty and heart untainted. The fact that there is also a blush of violated modesty, a blush of shame, and of guilt, does not argue against this view, any more than the fact that we blush if, though innocent, we are accused of guilt. It is the association of ideas and of emotions that evokes the blush in such cases.

We may therefore conclude that a blush is useful on account of its moral beauty, i.e. its expressiveness of presumptive innocence, or at least of a desire to be considered innocent; whereas the unblushing front and cheek indicate a brutal, callous indifference to virtue. We admire a blush as “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.” And we admire it also, to some extent, on purely æsthetic grounds, if not exaggerated. A slight blush has a rosy charm of its own, and it is only when it becomes a too diffused and deep facial Aurora borealis that it loses its charm, because suggestive of the hectic or fever flush, or the redness caused by anger, heat, violent exertion, etc., which has a physiological origin distinct from that of blushing.

According to Bell, “the colour which attends exertion or the violent passions, as of rage, arises from general vascular excitement, and differs from blushing. Blushing is too sudden and too partial to be traced to the heart’s action.” Darwin endeavours to find the explanation of blushing in the intimate sympathy which exists between the capillary circulation of the surface of the head and face, and that of the brain, which would account for the mental confusion of shyness, modesty, etc., being so immediately photographed on the face. He sums up his theory in these words:—

“I conclude that blushing—whether due to shyness—to shame for a real crime—to shame from a breach of the laws of etiquette—to modesty from humility—to modesty from an indelicacy—depends in all cases on the same principle; this principle being a sensitive regard for the opinion, more particularly for the depreciation of others, primarily in relation to our personal appearance, especially of our faces; and secondarily, through the force of association and habit, in relation to the opinion of others on our conduct.”

He gives various illustrations showing how by directing our attention to certain parts of the body we can increase their sensitivity and activity in a manner analogous to that postulated by the theory of blushing. But for these the reader must be referred to his essay on this subject in the Expression of Emotions—a masterpiece of physiological and psychological analysis. One more passage, however, may be cited, as it helps to justify this long discussion of blushing by showing its special relations to Romantic Love and Personal Beauty:—

“It is plain to every one that young men and women are highly sensitive to the opinion of each other with reference to their personal appearance; and they blush incomparably more in presence of the opposite sex than in that of their own. A young man, not very liable to blush, will blush intensely at any slight ridicule of his appearance from a girl whose judgment on any important subject he would disregard. No happy pair of young lovers, valuing each other’s admiration and love more than anything else in the world, probably ever courted each other without many a blush. Even the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, according to Mr. Bridges, blush ‘chiefly in regard to women, but certainly also at their own personal appearance.’”

THE EARS

A USELESS ORNAMENT

The shell of the ear appears to be the only part of man’s visible body which has ceased to be useful and become purely ornamental “Persons whose ears have been cut off hear just as well as before,” says Professor Haeckel. Dr. J. Toynbee, F.R.S., “after collecting all the evidence on this head, concludes that the external shell is of no distinct use;” and Darwin was informed by Professor Preyer that after experimenting on the functions of the shell of the ear he had come to nearly the same conclusion.

To infer from this that our external ears have been developed, through Sexual Selection, for purely ornamental purposes, would not be in accord with scientific analogies. For, often as existing organs (horns, feathers, etc.) are modified for ornamental purposes, there are no known instances of any that have been specially developed for that purpose; even the facial muscles of expression being, as we have seen, in this predicament. Hence we are led to conclude that man has inherited the shell of his ear from a remote apelike ancestor, to whom it was of use in catching faint sounds, and who consequently had the power, common to other animals, not only of directing the ears as a whole to different points of the compass, but of temporarily altering its shape. Indeed, one of the strongest proofs of our descent from lower animals lies in the fact that man still possesses, in a rudimentary form, the muscles needed to move the ears. Some savage tribes have considerable control over these muscles. The famous physiologist, Johannes Müller, after long and patient efforts, succeeded in recovering the power of moving his ears; and Darwin writes: “I have seen one man who could draw the whole ear forwards; other men can draw it upwards; another who could draw it backwards; and from what one of these persons told me, it is probable that most of us, by often touching our ears, and thus directing our attention towards them, could recover some power of movement by repeated trials.”

Ordinary monkeys still possess the power to move their ears; but the manlike or anthropoid apes resemble us in the rudimentary condition of their ear-muscles; and Darwin was assured by the keepers in the London Zoological Gardens that these animals never move or erect their ears. He suggests two theories to account for the loss of this power: first, that, owing to their arboreal habits and great strength, these apes were not exposed to much danger, and thus gradually, through disuse, lost control over these organs, just as birds on oceanic islands where they are not subject to attacks have lost the use of their wings; secondly, that the freedom with which they can move the head in a horizontal plane enabled them to dispense with mobile ears.

The remarkable variability of the ears—greater, by the way, in men than in women—is another reason for regarding them as rudimentary organs, inherited from remote semi-human ancestors, to whom they were useful; for great variability is a characteristic of all rudimentary organs. Haeckel facetiously suggests that “at large assemblies, where our interest is not sufficiently enchained, nothing is more instructive and entertaining than a comparative study of the countless variations in the form of the ears.” The ancient Greek artists were aware of this variability, for Wincklemann speaks of “the infinite variety of forms of the ear on heads modelled from life.” “It was customary with the ancient artists to elaborate no portion of the head more diligently than the ears.” “In portrait figures, when the countenance is so much injured as not to be recognised, we can occasionally make a correct conjecture as to the person intended, if it is one of whom we have any knowledge, merely by the form of the ear; thus we infer a head of Marcus Aurelius from an ear with an unusually large inner opening.”

If we compare a man’s ears with those of a dog or horse, differences of shape appear no less conspicuous than differences in mobility. Two points are especially characteristic of man—the folded upper margin and the lobule. Our cousins, the anthropoid apes, are the only other animals which have the margin of the ear thus folded inwards, the lower monkeys having them simple and pointed, like other animals. The sculptor, Mr. Woolner, called Darwin’s attention to “a little blunt point, projecting from the inwardly-folded margin or helix.” Darwin, on investigating the matter, came to the conclusion that these points “are vestiges of the tips of former erect and pointed ears”; being led to think so “from the frequency of their occurrence, and from the general correspondence in position with that of the tip of a pointed ear.”

The lobule is still more peculiar to man than the folded margin, since he does not even share it with the anthropoid apes, although, according to Professor Mivart, “a rudiment of it is found in the gorilla.” An intermediate stage between man and ape is occupied by some savage tribes in whom the lobule is scantily developed or even absent.

COSMETICS AND FASHION

The lobule of the human ear has been presumably developed through the agency of Sexual Selection, as it is an ornament the absence of which is at once felt. And there are other ways in which this organ has been gradually brought into harmony with the laws of beauty. Thus the loss of the hair (of which rudiments are still occasionally present) made visible the soft skin and the delicate tint of the ear, which, like that of the cheeks, may be momentarily heightened by a blush, and thus become an index of emotional expression. A permanently heightened colour of the ear, however, caused by exposure to extreme cold or by rough treatment, is almost as great a blemish as a red nose or pallid lips. If boxers are anxious to deform their ears, no one has a right to object; but children have a right to ask of their parents and teachers not to redden their ears permanently by pulling or boxing them. That a delicate and important sense-organ like the ear should be so frequently chosen as a place to inflict punishment, shows the necessity of a general diffusion of hygienic knowledge. It may not be superfluous to add a caution to lovers, that the ears should never be taken as an osculatory substitute for the lips or cheeks, as cases are known in medical practice where the tympanum, and consequently the hearing, has been destroyed by a vigorous kiss implanted by a foolish lover on his sweetheart’s ears.

An ear to be beautiful should be about twice as long as broad. It should be attached to the head almost straight, or slightly inclined backwards, and should almost touch the head with the back of its upper point. Many poor girls are deformed for life through the ignorance of their mothers, who allow them to wear their hair or bonnets in such a way as to make the ears stand out obliquely. As the ears contain no bones, but consist entirely of cartilages and skin, they can be, more readily even than the nose, moulded into a fine shape at an early age. As Drs. Brinton and Napheys remark, “Even when the ear is in part or altogether absent, the case is not desperate. An ‘artificial ear’ can be made of vulcanised rubber, or other material, tinted the colour of the flesh, and attached to the side of the head with such deftness that its character will escape every ordinary eye.” There is therefore no excuse for having badly-shaped or wrongly-inclined ears in these days of cosmetic surgery.

In the most beautiful ears the lobe is free, and not attached to the head in its lower part. Heavy earrings, which have a tendency to unduly enlarge the lobules, are now tabooed by Fashion; but very small jewels in the ear may be looked on, like small finger-rings, necklaces, and bracelets, as unobjectionable from an æsthetic point of view, though real beauty unadorned is adorned the most.

Formerly Fashion maltreated the poor ears quite as badly as it still does the waist and the feet. Lubbock remarks that the East Islanders enlarge their ears till they come down to the shoulders; and Darwin, after referring to liberties taken with the nose, says that “the ears are everywhere pierced and similarly ornamented, and with the Botocudos and Lenguas of South America the hole is gradually so much enlarged that the lower edge touches the shoulder.”

Among the Greeks, as Becker remarks, "it was considered a dishonour, or a token of foreign manners, for men to have their ears bored.... Women and girls, however, not only used earrings, ἐνώτια, ἐλλόβια, ἑλικτῆρες which are seen perpetually in vases, but also wore numerous articles of jewellery about the neck, the arms, and on the leg above the ankle."

The ancients, too, had heard of the malformed ears of primitive peoples. “It is possible,” says Tylor, “that there may be some truth in the favourite wonder-tale of the old geographers, about the tribes whose great ears reached down to their shoulders, though the story had to be stretched a good deal when it was declared they lay down on one ear and covered themselves with the other for a blanket.”

Such blanket-ears would be the æsthetic equivalent of modern bustles, crinolettes, and wasp-waists.

PHYSIOGNOMIC VAGARIES

Ever since the days of ancient Greek philosophy ingenious attempts have been made to find a special meaning for this or that particular form of the ear. According to Aristotle, a long ear indicates a good memory, whereas modern physiognomists incline to the opinion that a long ear shows a man’s mental relationship to a certain unjustly-maligned animal. Small ears, Lavater thinks, are a sign of an active mind, while a deep shell indicates a thirst for knowledge.

As a matter of fact, the ears have no connection whatever with intellectual or emotional expression, except that a well-shaped ear indicates in a general way that its possessor comes off a stock in which the laws of cosmetic hygiene have been observed during many generations. To many of the lower animals the ears are a means of emotional expression. What, for instance, could be more expressive and droll than the way a dog expresses mild surprise or expectation by pricking up his ears? Or what a more certain sign of viciousness in a horse than the drawing back of the ears?—a movement of which Darwin has found the reason in the fact that all animals that fight with their teeth retract their ears to protect them; whence, through habit and association, it comes that they draw them back whenever a fighting mood comes over them. Man, on the other hand, never uses his ears for emotional expression, because they are the least mobile part of the body. Now form is merely crystallised expression: and the absence of special movements for emotional expression necessarily prevents individual alterations indicative of character. Hence the absurdity of trying to use the ears as a basis for physiognomic distinctions.

NOISE AND CIVILISATION

What is the cause of the folding of the margin of the human ear, which distinguishes it from that of all other animals? Darwin remarks that it “appears to be in some manner connected with the whole external ear being permanently pressed backwards;” but this does not explain the mysterious phenomenon. After many hours of profound meditation on this subject I have come to the conclusion that this slight folding of the ear’s margin is the beginning of a new phase of human evolution. In course of time—this cannot be disproved—the fold of the margin will become larger and larger, until finally the shells of the ear will have been transformed into mobile lids for shutting out at will disagreeable noises, even as the eyelids have been developed to shut out glaring light. This would account for the providential preservation of the rudimentary ear-muscles referred to above. When this process of evolution is completed men coming home late will no longer have to listen to curtain-lectures. The innovation will tend to make them polite, for instead of telling the lecturer to “shut up,” they will shut up themselves.

Seriously speaking, such movable ear-lids are very much needed in this transition stage of civilisation. The present age of steam will by future historians be classified as the age of noise. It is almost impossible to find a place within ten miles of a city where one can rest without having one’s sleep constantly disturbed, or at least deprived of its refreshing depth, by the blowing of railway and factory whistles. Both are unnecessary, inasmuch as railway signals would be quite as effective if not so murderously loud and prolonged, while factory whistles are either blown at the moment when the operatives go to work, when a simple bell would do as well, or they are blown an hour earlier to wake up the workmen,—a most outrageous proceeding, as everybody else sleeping within a radius of a mile or more is thus waked up at six o’clock.

The fact that these nuisances have so long been tolerated shows how primitive is as yet the æsthetic development of the average human ear. Some people even smile at you for being so “nervous,” and boast of their indifference to such hideous, brain-racking noises. The Esquimaux and Chinese would doubtless assume a similar attitude regarding their indifference to noisome stenches. In mediæval times, Europeans in general were quite as indifferent to the emanations from their gutters as they still are to the hideous noises in the streets. It has often been noted with surprise that the death-rate in London and the general aspect of health should be so much more favourable than that of continental cities, which are free from the depressing London fogs. The reason, doubtless, lies chiefly in the facts that there are no vile sewer odours in London to poison the atmosphere, and that the pavement of the streets is of such a nature that one can sleep soundly at night, provided there are no steam whistles near. London, too, does not tolerate the brutal whip-cracking which transforms French, German, and Swiss towns and cities into Bedlams of noise. In this respect New York resembles London; but here the comparison ends. New York pavements are the noisiest, roughest, and dirtiest in the world. I have known of invalids who were advised to drive in the Central Park, but could not do so because they could not bear on their way to drive even up Fifth Avenue,—a street lined with the houses of millionaires. And to walk on Broadway for twenty minutes, talking to a friend, makes one as hoarse as delivering a two-hour lecture.

There can be no doubt that a horror of useless noise grows with the general refinement of the senses and the mind. Goethe’s aversion to noise, especially at night, is well known. It led him to poison dogs that disturbed him. The delicate hearing of Franz, the great song composer, was ruined by the whistle of a locomotive. And Schopenhauer has put the whole matter into a nutshell in these admirable words: “Intellectual persons, and all in general who have much esprit, cannot endure noise. Astounding, on the other hand, is the insensibility of ordinary people to noise. The quantity of noise which any one can endure without annoyance is really related inversely to his mental endowments, and may be regarded as a pretty accurate measure of them.”

A MUSICAL VOICE

It is self-evident that indifference to ear-splitting noises implies a lack of appreciation for the exquisite clang-tints of music; for whenever the acoustic nerve is sufficiently refined to appreciate such subtle tints, it is affected as painfully by harsh sounds as the artistic eye is by glaring colours and flickering light. And an ear which is indifferent to the sweetness of musical sounds is of course indifferent also to the musical charm of the speaking voice. But a sweetly modulated voice is one of the most conspicuous attributes of Personal Beauty—for Beauty refers to sounds as well as to sights—

“Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.”—SHAKSPERE.

There is as much variety in voices as in faces; and in estimating a person’s general refinement, the voice is perhaps a safer guide than the face; because the quality of the voice is largely a matter of individual training, whereas in reading faces the judgment is warped by the presence of inherited features speaking of traits which have not been modified by individual effort and culture.

Many young men and women live in absolute indifference to the quality of their speaking voice, till one day Cupid arouses them from their unæsthetic slumber with his golden arrows, and makes them eager not only to brush up their hats and improve their personal appearance, but also to modulate their voices into sweet, expressive accents. But the vocal cords, like a violin, can only be made to yield mellow sounds after long practice; hence the usual result of a sudden effort to speak in love’s sweet accents is a ridiculous lover’s falsetto.

THE NOSE

SHAPE AND SIZE

“The fate of innumerable girls has been decided by a slight upward or downward curvature of the nose,” says Schopenhauer; and Pascal points out that if Cleopatra’s nose had been but a trifle larger, the whole political geography of this planet might have been different. Owing to the fact that the nose occupies the most prominent part of the face, Professor Kollmann remarks that “the partial or complete loss of the nose causes a greater disfigurement than a much greater fault of conformation in any other part of the face.” And Winckelmann thus bears witness to the importance of the nose as an element of Personal Beauty: “The proof, easy to be understood, of the superiority of shape of the Greeks and the present inhabitants of the Levant lies in the fact that we find among them no flattened noses, which are the greatest disfigurement of the face.”

Yet here again we find that “tastes differ.” Thus we read in Darwin “that the ancient Huns during the age of Attila were accustomed to flatten the noses of their infants with bandages, ‘for the sake of exaggerating a natural conformation’” [note the stamp of Fashion]; that, “with the Tahitians, to be called long-nose is considered as an insult, and they compress the noses and foreheads of their children for the sake of beauty;” and that “the same holds true with the Malays of Sumatra, the Hottentots, certain Negroes, and the natives of Brazil.” But the ne-plus-ultra of nasal ugliness is found among the Tartars and Esquimaux. “European travellers in Tartary in the Middle Ages,” says Tylor, “described its flat-nosed inhabitants as having no noses at all, but breathing through holes in the face.” And among the Esquimaux, as Mantegazza remarks, a rule can be placed on both the cheeks at once without touching the nose. Flat noses, says Topinard, “are either depressed as a whole, as among Chinese, or only in the lower half, as among Malays. Negroes have both forms.”

The yellow and black races, who naturally have flat noses, consider it fashionable to have them very flat. The same is true with our modern Fashion regarding wasp-waists and feet. But in regard to the face the white races—including even the women—have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fashionable exaggeration. Hence, though we admire prominent noses, we do not admire them more and more in proportion to their size. On the contrary, every one looks upon the very large Jewish nose as ugly. The reason is that in judging of the face Fashion has been displaced by æsthetic Taste, whose motto is Moderation, and which is based on a knowledge of the cosmic laws of beauty. Savages have Fashion but no Taste. We have both; but Taste is gradually demolishing Fashion, like other relics of barbarism.

Sometimes our estimate of the nose, as of other features, may be influenced by non-æsthetic considerations—by prejudices of race, aristocracy, etc. “In Italy,” says Mantegazza, “we call a long nose aristocratic (especially if it is aquiline) perhaps because conquerors with long noses, Greeks and Romans, have subjected the indigenous small-nosed inhabitants.” But the Italians are not the only people who, if asked to choose between a nose too large or one too small, would ask for the former. And the cause of this preference is suggested very forcibly in these remarks of Grose: “Convex faces, prominent features, and large aquiline noses, though differing much from beauty, still give an air of dignity to their owners; whereas concave faces, flat, snub, or broken noses, always stamp a meanness and vulgarity. The one seems to have passed through the limits of beauty, the other never to have arrived at them.”

EVOLUTION OF THE NOSE

The flat, irregular nose of savages and semi-civilised peoples, with its visible nostrils and imperfectly developed bridge, being intermediate between the ape’s nose and our own, we are naturally led to infer that the nose has been gradually developed into the shape now regarded as most perfect by good judges of Beauty. To what are we indebted for this favourable change—to Natural or to Sexual Selection? In other words, is the present perfected shape of the nose of any use to us, or is it purely ornamental?

It appears that both these laws have acted in subtle combination to improve our nasal organ. The nose is a sort of funnel for warming the air on its way to the sensitive lungs. In cold latitudes a long nose would therefore be an advantage favoured by Natural Selection; and it is noteworthy that in general the flat-nosed peoples live in warm climes. There are exceptions, however, notably the Esquimaux, showing that this hypothesis does not entirely cover the facts.

Let us examine, therefore, the second function of the nasal organ. The external nose is a sort of filter for keeping organic impurities out of the lungs. At the entrance of the nostrils there are a number of fine hairs which serve to keep out the dust. If any particles manage to get beyond this first fortress, they are liable to be arrested by the rows of more minute, microscopic hairs, or cilia, which line the mucous membrane and keep up a constant downward movement, by means of which dusty intruders are expelled and the air filtered. Esquimaux living in snowfields, and savages in the forests and grass-carpeted meadows, do not need these filters so much as we do in our dusty cities and along dusty country roads; hence their noses have remained more like those of the arboreal apes, while ours have grown larger, so as to yield a larger surface of sifting hairs and cilia. When we think of the dusty American prairies and the African and Asian deserts, can we wonder, accordingly, that the American Indians, as well as the nomadic Arabs and Jews, have such immense noses? The theory seems fanciful, if not grotesque; but perhaps there is more in it than appears at first sight.

Even if both these hypotheses should prove untenable, there is a third consideration which alone suffices to account for the development of the European nose. The nose has a most important musico-philological function. The language of savages often consists of only a few hundred words, while ours is so complicated that it requires the co-operation of the vocal cords, and the cavities of the mouth and the nose to produce the countless modifications of speech and song which make us listen with so much pleasure to an eloquent speaker or a great singer. The subject is far too complicated with anatomical details to be fully explained here, and the reader must be referred to a full discussion (not from the evolutionary point of view, however) to Professor Georg Hermann von Meyer’s elaborate treatise on The Organs of Speech, chap. iii.

A few points, however, must be noted here. The nasal air-passage, “with its two narrow openings and intermediate greater width, possesses the general form of a resonator, and there can be no doubt but that it has a corresponding influence, and that the tones with which the air passing through it vibrates are strengthened by its resonance. The larger the nasal cavity the more powerful the resonance, and, consequently, the reinforcement experienced by the tone.... In consequence of the peculiarity of the walls of the nasal cavity, it appears that sounds uttered with the nasal resonance, particularly the nasal vowels, are fuller and more ample than the same sounds when strengthened by the resonance of the cavity of the mouth. The general impression of fulness and richness conveyed by the French language arises from its wealth in nasal vowels; and it is for this reason that second-rate tragic actors like to give a nasal resonance to all the vowels in the pathetic speeches of their heroic parts.”

Further, it is of great importance to bear in mind “that the resonance of the nasal cavity also plays a part in the formation of non-nasal articulate sounds,” appearing here as a mere reinforcement of the resonance of the cavity of the mouth, and free from the nasal twang. Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, an infallible way to make our speech sound “nasal” is to keep the air out of the nose by clasping it tightly; whereas if the nasal passage remains open the nasal twang is replaced by an agreeable resonance. What could more forcibly illustrate the importance of a well-developed nose?

Now there are several groups of muscles attached to the lower cartilages of the nose,—parts which are imperfectly developed in apes and negroes. The constant exercise of these, during many generations, in the service of speech, in expressing several emotions, and in heavy breathing, suffice to account, on accepted physiological principles, for the gradual enlargement of the resonant tube which we call the nose.

So much for Natural or Utilitarian Selection. But Sexual Selection or Romantic Love plays also a most important rôle in the development of the nose. The quotations from Pascal and Schopenhauer made at the beginning of this chapter show that the efficacy of Sexual Selection was recognised long before Darwin had coined the term. As soon as a refined æsthetic taste appears, it rejects ugly forms of the nose. It rejects, for instance, open, visible nostrils, because they are a scavenging apparatus, unæsthetic to behold, though the savage, having no taste, is not thus offended. It gives the preference, in the second place, to the long nose, on musical grounds, because its owner has a more sonorous speech. It scorns the snub-nose because of its simian suggestiveness, and dislikes the excessively large and aquiline nose because it is an exaggerated form, which has passed beyond the delicate dimensions and subtle curves of beauty.

GREEK AND HEBREW NOSES

This checking of excessive development in the direction at first prescribed by the cosmic laws of beauty is indeed one of the main functions of Sexual Selection, without which our mouths would gradually become too small, our eyes and noses too large, our foreheads too high, our hair too scant, etc.

Why, for instance, have the Jews such large noses compared with the Greeks? Evidently because Taste—which, though commonly associated with Romantic Love, may, in a highly æsthetic nation, act independently of it—did not restrain the excessive development of the Jewish nose. The ancient Hebrews were not an æsthetic nation, like the Greeks. The finest works of sculpture ever created were made by the Greeks, while the Hebrews practically had no sculpture at all—not even such works as were produced by Assyrians and Egyptians. And if any further proof were needed of the statement that the ancient Hebrews had little taste for beauty it might be found in the fact that Solomon, esteemed a great judge of feminine charms, compares his love’s nose to “the tower of Lebanon, which looketh toward Damascus.”

The admission which I have just made that there may be a sort of æsthetic selection independent of real Romantic Love, does not militate against the general thesis of this book: that Love is the cause of Beauty, as Beauty is the cause of Love. For though the Greek artists knew what the shape and size of a beautiful nose should be, there are cogent reasons for believing that “Greek noses” were rare even among the ancient Greeks, thanks to their habit of sacrificing Romantic Love to the dragon chaperon. Hear what Ruskin has to say, in his Aratra Pentelici, about the Greek features in general: “Will you look again at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art which I have just set before you? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very beautiful? Certainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren and Arethusa have well-formed and regular features; but I am quite sure that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither reaches even the average standard of pretty English girls. The Venus Urania suggests at first the idea of a very charming person, but you will find there is no real depth nor sweetness in the contours, looked at closely. And remember, these are chosen examples; the best I can find of art current in Greece at the great time; and even if I were to take the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not one of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already asserted in The Queen of the Air, has nothing notable in feature except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the best time to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, in popular art, not only unattained, but unattempted; and finally—and this you may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness to the most subtle beauty—there is little evidence, even in their literature, and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any beauty in infancy or early childhood.”

Nevertheless, it was to the contours of childhood that the Greek artists apparently went for their ideal of the divine nose. Greek beauty was youthful masculine beauty; and the “Greek nose” is one which not only is straight in itself, but forms a straight line with the forehead. In other words, there is no hollow at the root of the nose, where it meets the forehead. Now the absence of this cavity is characteristic of youth, and is owing to the imperfect development of the brain cavities. Later in life these cavities bulge forwards and produce the hollow, which, therefore, is an indication of superior cranial development and higher intellectual powers. Hence, as Professor Kollmann suggests, the object of the Greek artists in making the nose of their deities form a straight line with the forehead, was probably to give them the stamp of eternal youth; which would thus appear to have been considered a more important attribute even than the expression of superior masculine intellectual power, which we associate with the hollow at the junction of nose and forehead, and for which reason we do not admire it in women if too pronounced. Nevertheless, even in women the cosmic laws of Beauty call for a gentle curve instead of a perfectly straight line; but the more subtle the curve the greater is its beauty; whereas the nose itself may be perfectly straight on its upper edge, because it forms a dividing line of the face into two symmetric halves, and by its contrasting straightness heightens the beauty of the surrounding facial curves.

To sum up: the Greeks admiration of such features as are naturally associated with youthful masculine beauty no doubt led him, in choosing a wife, to give the preference to similar features, including the “Greek” nose. Yet in the absence of opportunities for courtship, Sexual Selection could not operate very extensively; hence it is probable that ungainly noses, though not so extravagant as among the Semitic races, were common enough in Greece as in Rome. In the Dark Ages hideous noses must have prevailed everywhere, as might be inferred from the facts that Romantic Love was unknown, and physical beauty looked on as a sinful possession, even if the painted and sculptured portraits did not prove it to our eyes in most instances.

Regarding modern noses it may be said that the nose is such a prominent feature that more has been done for its improvement, through the agency of Love or Sexual Selection, than for the mouth or any other feature, excepting the eye. The average Englishman’s nose of to-day, for example, is a tolerably shapely organ, and yet his ancestors were not exactly distinguished for nasal beauty, according to a close observer and student of portraiture, Mr. G. A. Simcox, who remarks that “sometimes both Danes and Saxons had their fair proportions of snub-noses and pug-noses, but when they escaped that catastrophe the Danish nose tended to be a beak (rather a hawk’s beak than an eagle’s), while the Saxon nose tends to be a proboscis.”

Yet even at this date perfect noses are rare, and it is easy to see why. In the first place, it takes many generations to wipe out entirely the ugliness inherited from our unæsthetic ancestors; secondly, Romantic Love, based on æsthetic admiration, is still very commonly ignored in the marriage market in favour of considerations of rank and wealth; and thirdly, a lover, infatuated by his sweetheart’s fascinating eyes, is apt to overlook her large nose or mouth—till after the honeymoon.

FASHION AND COSMETIC SURGERY

Inasmuch as the civilised races of Europe have so long been indifferent to their ugly noses, we can hardly wonder that barbarians should not only disregard their nasal caricatures, but even exaggerate their grotesqueness deliberately. We have already seen how certain tribes habitually flatten their already flat noses. Moreover, “in all quarters of the world the septum, and more rarely the wings, of the nose are pierced; rings, sticks, feathers, and other ornaments being inserted into the holes.” “In Persia one still finds the nose-ring through one side of a woman’s nostril;” and Professor Flower states that such rings are often worn by female servants who accompany English families returning from India.

Captain Cook, in the account of his first voyage, says of the east-coast Australians: “Their principal ornament is the bone which they thrust through the cartilage which divides the nostrils from each other.... As this bone is as thick as a man’s finger, and between five and six inches long, it reaches quite across the face, and so effectually stops up both the nostrils that they are forced to keep their mouths wide open for breath, and snuffle so when they attempt to speak that they are scarcely intelligible even to each other.”

This last sentence bears out our assertion regarding the philological or conversational importance of the nose. And there is another lesson to be learned from these barbarian mutilations of the nose. If Huns, Tahitians, and Hottentots are able to make their noses as delightfully ugly as they please, why should not we utilise the plastic character of the nasal cartilages for beautifying ourselves? Says a specialist: “Much can be done by an ingenious surgeon in restoration and improvement. A nose that is too flat can be raised, one with unequal apertures can be modified, one too thin can be expanded. Cosmetic surgery is rich in devices here, all of which are very available in children and young persons, less so when years have hardened and stiffened the cartilages and bones.”

Thus may Cupid employ a medical artist as an assistant in his efforts at improving the physical beauty of mankind. Needless to add that only a first-class surgeon should ever be allowed to meddle with the features.

Cosmetic surgery has already reached such perfection that it can even make “a good, living, fleshly nose. It will transplant you one from the arm or the forehead, Roman or Grecian, à volonté; it will graft it adroitly into the middle of the face, with two regular nostrils and a handsome bridge; and it will almost challenge Nature herself to improve on the model” (Brinton and Napheys).

Medical men are daily complaining in a more clamorous chorus that their profession is overcrowded. Why don’t some of them in every city and town make a specialty of cosmetic surgery and hygienic advice? Why leave this remunerative field entirely in the hands of dangerous quacks who alone have enterprise and sense enough to advertise?

As illustrations of what may be done in this direction, two points may be noted. A French surgeon, Dr. Cid, noticed that persons who wear eyeglasses are apt to have long and thin noses. The thought occurred to him that this might be due to the compression of the arteries which carry blood to the nose, by the springs of the glasses; so he constructed a special apparatus for compressing these arteries, and by attaching it to a young girl’s large and fleshy nose, succeeded in reducing its size. Why should people worry themselves and frighten others with ugly noses when they can be so easily improved?

The second point is still more simple. It is important that the nose should occupy exactly the middle of the face, so as to secure bilateral symmetry. Yet Welcker, who made a number of accurate observations on skulls, plaster casts of the dead, as well as on the living countenance, noted that perfect symmetry is very rarely found. The obliqueness is sometimes at the root, sometimes at the tip of the nose, and the cause of the deviation from a straight line is attributed to the habit most persons have of sleeping exclusively on one side,—a practice which is also objectionable on other grounds. Mantegazza, however, suggests that, as he has found the deviation almost always toward the right side, it may be due to our habit of always taking our handkerchief in the right hand; and the same view is held by Drs. Brinton and Napheys. So that we have here an additional argument in favour of ambidexterity.

The New York Medical and Surgical Reporter for November 1, 1884, prints a lecture by Dr. J. B. Roberts on “The Cure of Crooked Noses by a New Method,” which, as it is not conspicuous and hardly leaves a scar, may be commended to the attention of those afflicted with nasal deformities. The pin method, he says, is applicable “even to those slight deformities whose chief annoyance is an æsthetic and cosmetic one. I leave the pins in position for about two weeks.”

Red noses, if due to exposure, can be readily whitened by one of the methods to be discussed in the chapter on the complexion. If due to disease, they call for medical treatment; if to intemperance or tight lacing, moral and æsthetic reform is the only possible cure.

NOSE-BREATHING AND HEALTH

Owing to its tendency toward unsightly redness and malformation, the nose is very apt to be looked at from a comic point of view. Wits and caricaturists fix on it habitually for their nefarious purposes, as if it were a sort of facial clown. Indeed, ninety-nine persons in a hundred, if questioned regarding the functions of the nose, would know no answer but this: that it is sometimes ornamental, and is remotely connected with the “almost useless” sense of smell.

We have seen, however, that besides being ornamental per se, the nose plays a most important æsthetic—as well as utilitarian—rôle in giving sonority and variety to human speech; and that it is, further, of great use as an apparatus for warming, moistening, and filtering the air before it enters the lungs. Hence the importance of nose-breathing. Professor Reclam states that city people at the age of thirty usually have a whole gramme of calcareous dust in their lungs, which they can never again get rid of, and which may at any time engender dangerous disease. This is one of the bad results of mouth-breathing, but by no means the only one. “The continued irritation from dry, cold, and unfiltered air upon the mucous membrane of the upper air tract soon results,” says Dr. T. R. French, “in the establishment of catarrhal inflammation, the parts most affected being the tongue, pharynx, and larynx.... The habit of breathing through the mouth interferes with general nutrition. The subjects of this habit are usually anæmic, spare, and dyspeptic.”

That mouth-breathing at night leaves a disagreeable taste in the mouth and leads to snoring, thus interfering with refreshing sleep, has already been stated. It also injures the teeth and gums by exposing them all night to the dry air. And in the daytime it compels one to keep the mouth wide open, which imparts a rustic if not semi-idiotic expression to the face. Moreover, think of the filthy dust you swallow in walking along the street with your mouth open. However, it is useless to advise people on such matters. An attempt is made for a day or two to reform, and then—the whole matter is forgotten. These points are therefore noted here not with any missionary intentions, but merely for their scientific interest.

COSMETIC VALUE OF ODOURS

We come now to the fourth important function of the nose—the sense of smell. What has this to do with Personal Beauty? A great deal. In the first place, is not the flower-like fragrance of a lovely maiden a personal charm that has been sung of by a thousand poets, of all times? “The fragrant bosom of Andromache and of Aphrodite finds a place in Homer’s poetry,” as Professor Bain remarks; and an eccentric German professor, Dr. Jäger of Stuttgart, even wrote a book a few years ago on the Discovery of the Soul, in which he endeavoured to prove that the whole mystery of Love lies in the intoxicating personal perfumes.

It is not with such fancies, however, that we are concerned here. It can be shown on purely scientific grounds that the cause of Personal Beauty would gain an immense advantage if people would train and refine their olfactory nerves systematically, as they do their eyes and ears. Unfortunately, Kant’s absurd notion, expressed a century ago, that it is not worth while to cultivate the sense of smell, has been countenanced to the present day by the erroneous views held by the leading men of science, including Darwin, who wrote that “the sense of smell is of extremely slight service” to man.

In an article on the “Gastronomic Value of Odours,” which appeared in the Contemporary Review for November 1886, I pointed out that this under-valuation of the sense of smell is explained by the fact that the sense of taste has hitherto been credited with all the countless flavours inherent in food, whereas, in fact, taste includes only four sensations of gastronomic value—sweet, sour, bitter, and saline, all other “flavours” being in reality odours; as is proved by the fact that by clasping the nose we cannot distinguish between a lime and a lemon, different kinds of confectionery, of cheese, of nuts, of meat, etc.

Now it is well known that most people show a most amazing tolerance to insipid, badly-cooked food, gulping it down as rapidly as possible; and why? Simply because they do not know that in order to enjoy our meals we must eat slowly, and, while masticating, continually exhale the aroma-laden air through the nose (mind, not inhale but exhale). This is what epicures do unconsciously; and look at the results! No dyspepsia, no anæmia and sickly pallor, no walking skeletons;—and surely a slight embonpoint is preferable to leanness from the point of view of Personal Beauty.

If this gastronomic secret were generally known, people would insist on having better cooked food; dyspepsia, and leanness, and a thousand infirmities hostile to Beauty would disappear, and in course of time everybody would be as sleek and handsome and rosy-cheeked as a professional epicure.

Nor is this the only way in which refinement of the sense of smell would benefit Personal Beauty. In consequence of the criminally superstitious dread of night air, the atmosphere in most bedrooms is as foul, compared to fresh air, as a street puddle after a shower compared to a mountain brook. I have seen well-dressed persons in America and Italy take into their mouths the shamefully filthy and disease-soaked banknotes current in those countries; and I have seen others shudder at this sight who, if their smell were as refined as their sight, would have shuddered equally at the foul air in their bedrooms, which diminishes their vital energy and working power by one-half. Architects, of course, will make no provision for proper ventilation as long as they are not compelled to do so. Why should they? They don’t even care, in building a theatre, how many hundreds of people will some day be burnt in it, in consequence of their neglect of the simplest precautions for exit.

One more important consideration. When you leave the city for a few weeks everybody will exclaim on your return, “Why, how well you look! where have you been?” But wherein lies this cosmetic magic of country air? Not in its oxygen, for it has been proved, by accurate chemical tests, that in regard to the quantity of oxygen there is not the slightest difference between city and country air. What, then, is the secret?

I am convinced, from numerous experiments, that the value of country air lies partly in its tonic fragrance, partly in the absence of depressing, foul odours. The great cosmetic and hygienic value of deep-breathing has been proved in the chapter on the Chest. Now the tonic value of fragrant meadow or forest air lies in this—that it causes us involuntarily to breathe deeply, in order to drink in as many mouthfuls of this luscious aerial Tokay as possible: whereas in the city the air is—well, say unfragrant and uninviting; and the constant fear of gulping down a pint of deadly sewer gas discourages deep breathing. The general pallor and nervousness of New York people have often been noted. The cause is obvious. New York has the dirtiest streets of any city in the world, except Constantinople and Canton; and, moreover, it is surrounded by oil-refineries, which sometimes for days poison the whole city with the stifling fumes of petroleum, so that one hardly dares to breathe at all. No wonder that, by universal consent, there is more Fashion than Beauty in New York. And no wonder that it is becoming more and more customary, for all who can afford it, to spend six to eight months of the year in the country.

THE FOREHEAD

BEAUTY AND BRAIN

It has been stated already that, anatomically considered, the forehead is not a part of the face but of the cranium. From an artistic and popular point of view, however, the forehead is a part of the face, and a most important one. Modern taste fully endorses the ancient law of facial proportion, which makes the height of the forehead equal to the length of the nose, and to the distance from the tip of the nose to the tip of the chin. “Foreheads villainous low” are objectionable, because associated with a vulgar unintellectual type of man, and too vividly suggestive of our simian ancestors. Foreheads abnormally high, though preferable to the other extreme, displease, because they violate the law of facial proportion. We excuse them in men, because they are commonly expressive of intellectual power. But in women a high forehead is always objectionable, because it gives them a masculine appearance. Hence Romantic Love, which cannot exist without sexual contrasts, and which aims at making woman a perfect embodiment of the laws of Beauty, eliminates girls with too high foreheads. Yet at the command of Fashion thousands of maidens deliberately prevent men from falling in love with them by combing back their hair and giving their foreheads a masculine appearance, instead of coyly hiding it under a fringe or “bang.”

The fact that the feminine forehead, though more perpendicular than the masculine at the lower part, slants backward in its upper part in a more pronounced angle, is another reason why women should cover up this part of their forehead, which Sexual Selection has not yet succeeded in moulding into perfect shape. For the receding forehead is universally recognised as a sign of inferior culture. Everybody knows what is meant by Camper’s facial angle, which is formed by a horizontal line drawn from the opening of the ear to the nasal spine, and a perpendicular line touching the most prominent parts of the forehead and front teeth. In adult Europeans Camper’s angle rarely exceeds 85 degrees. The average in the Caucasian race is 80°; in the yellow races 75°; in the negro 60° to 70°; in the gorilla 31°. In antique Greek heads the angle is sometimes over 90°. Says Camper: “If I cause the facial line to fall in front, I have an antique head; if I incline it backwards, I have the head of a negro; if I cause it to incline still further, I have the head of a monkey; inclined still more, I have that of a dog, and, lastly, that of a goose.”

It appears, however, that this angle has more value as a test of beauty than as an absolute gauge of intellect. Generally speaking, there is no doubt a correlation between a bulging forehead and a superior intellect; but individual exceptions to this rule are not infrequent. Nor is it at all difficult to account for them. For intellectual power does not depend so much on the size and shape of the skull as on the convoluted structure of the brain.

Our brain consists of two kinds of matter—the white, which is inside, and the gray, which covers it. The white substance is a complicated telegraphic network for conveying messages which are sent from the external gray cells. It has been proved, by comparing the brains of man and various animals, that the amount of intelligence depends not so much on the absolute size of the brain, as on the abundance of this gray matter. And, what is of extreme importance from a cosmetic point of view, the gray cells are increased in number, not by an addition to the absolute size or circumference of the brain, but by a system of furrows and convolutions which increase the surface lining of the brain without enlarging its visible mass. For the benefit of those who have never seen a human brain, it may be very roughly compared to the convoluted kernel of an English walnut.

Wherein lies the æsthetic significance of this mode of cerebral evolution? It prevents our head from becoming too large. Have you ever considered why infants appear so ugly to every one but their mothers? One of the principal reasons is that their heads are twice as large in proportion to the rest of the body as those of adults. A child’s stature is equal to four times the height of its head, an adult’s to eight heads. If our heads continued to grow larger as our minds expanded, from generation to generation, all the proportions of human stature would ultimately be violated. But thanks to the peculiar mode of cerebral evolution just described, Romantic Love may continue to “select” in accordance with our present standards of beauty, without thereby favouring the survival of lower intellectual types.

This view of the question also solves a difficulty which has staggered even such a leading evolutionist as Mr. Wallace, viz., the fact that the oldest prehistoric skulls that have been found “surpass the average of modern European skulls in capacity.” But if it is the easiest thing in the world to find an ordinary stupid man in our streets with a larger skull than that of many a clever brain-worker, why should we attach so much importance to those prehistoric skulls? Had their brains been examined, they would doubtless have been found as scantily furrowed as those of a big-headed modern anarchist.

FASHIONABLE DEFORMITY

That the intellectual powers are to a large extent independent of the particular conformation of the skull is shown further by the circumstance that so many savage tribes have for centuries followed the fashion of artificially shaping their heads, without any apparent effect on their minds. Man’s brain incites him, as Topinard remarks, “to the noblest deeds, as well as to the most ridiculous practices, such as cutting off the little finger, scorching the soles of the feet, extracting the front teeth, or deforming the head because others have done so before him.” But of all silly Fashions hostile to Beauty, that of deforming the head has found the largest number of followers—always excepting, of course, the modern Wasp-Waist Mania.

Deformed skulls have been found in the Caucasus, the Crimea, Hungary, Silesia, France, Belgium, Switzerland, in Polynesia, in different parts of Asia, etc. “But the classic country in which these deformations are found is America,” says Topinard. “M. Gosse has described sixteen species of artificial deformation, ten of which were in American skulls.” “Sometimes the infant was fastened on a plank or a sort of cradle with leather straps; or they applied pieces of clay, pressing them down with small boards on the forehead, the vertex, and the occiput.... Sometimes the head was kneaded with the hands or knees, or, the infant being laid on the back, the elbow was pressed on the forehead. Circular bands were sometimes employed to support the sides of the head.”

“Many American Indians,” says Darwin, “are known to admire a head so extremely flattened as to appear to us idiotic. The natives of the north-western coast compress the head into a pointed cone;” while the inhabitants of Arakhan “admire a broad, smooth forehead, and in order to produce it, they fasten a plate of lead on the head of the new-born children.”

“The genuine Turkish skull is of the broad Tartar form,” says Mr. Tylor, “while the nations of Greece and Asia Minor have oval skulls, which gives the reason why at Constantinople it became the fashion to mould the babies’ skulls round, so that they grew up with the broad head of the conquering race. Relics of such barbarism linger on in the midst of civilisation, and not long ago a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children’s heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap, while in Brittany they preferred to press it round. No doubt they are doing so to this day.”

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