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permanently useful, its whole beauty is lost for ever, or to be regained only in part when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand of Nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and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.