What is the American type? Is the typical American girl as the British novelist so often has described her—rich, noisy, wasp-waisted and slangy? Is she a “Daisy Miller” or a “Fair Barbarian”? Is she what Richard Grant White feared she too often was, “a creature composed in equal parts of mind and leather”? Is she Emerson’s “Fourth of July of Zoology,” or is she illustrating the discovery which Irving claimed to have made among certain philosophers “that all animals degenerate in America and man among the number”?
From those foreigners who make a Cook’s tour examination of us, the evidence in favor of the proposition that we grow more pretty and witty women to the acre than any other country in the world, is overwhelming. But there are obvious reasons why we must distrust this foreign comment. Too often it plainly is a propitiatory item, when it is not illustrating a flippant wish among men writers to occupy Disraeli’s position “on the side of the angels.” That traveller has a profound distaste for a country who does not find that it has pretty women.
If anything is more inevitable than this, it is that the traveller will find fault with the type preferred by the men of the country he is visiting. “What is most amazing,” says the observer in Zululand or elsewhere, “is that the prettiest women, the women without this or that hideous deformity, are not admired by the men.” The Kaffir prince on a visit to England, or the Apache chief among the palefaces in the city of the Great Father, invariably are astounded at the obtuseness of the white men. I remember once listening to a group of New York artists who were discussing preferred types of women, and it was agreed, with a hopeless and resentful unanimity, that most New Yorkers preferred fat women, since most of the good clothes and diamonds were worn by fat women. All of which goes to show, perhaps, that natural selection is an exclusive affair.
Probably even patriotism does not demand of us an admiration for the beauty of the very first American girls—the dusky darlings of our primitive tribes. These earliest American girls were not dowered with the fatal gift of beauty as we understand beauty. Indeed, it is quite generally admitted that the American Indian girl is not and never was so pretty as the girls of some of the Pacific islands, for example. Far be it from me to attack any precious traditions concerning the red man, or the red woman, either. Far be it from me to touch with impious hand the romantic panoply of Pocahontas. I am not writing a scientific treatise. I have no point to prove. It is quite possible that there is something distinctive in the personality of the Indian girl, whether she be as poetry has painted her or as she stands in the analysis of science. If I pass her by it is in no spirit of partisanship toward either view. She is an old story, and some day when she is a new story we may have occasion for surprise.
The fact is that I must content myself here with a glance at the American girl of more recent times, though she also will seem to be an old story if we permit ourselves to remember the number of things which have been said. We are not likely to forget the unction with which foreign visitors sketched the daughters of Colonial America. Indeed, we are in a measure dependent upon those sketches for a knowledge of these ancestral daughters. As in all judgments of remote appearances, we here must lean upon mere opinion. There was no camera in the days of Priscilla, nor in the days of Dolly Madison, and painted portraiture, unchallenged by the photograph, had reached heights of admirable gallantry. For purposes of pictorial reconstruction we have an enthusiastic description, the dubious confessions of a diary, a charming little miniature or a mellowing canvas in an old frame, a quaint gown, wrinkled by time; but we have no photograph. I hear the Romanticist mutter, “Thank Heaven for that!” Alas! the photograph is an expert witness, and how he can disagree! Was ever any human specialist on the witness stand so dogmatic, so insinuating, so sophistical as the photograph? Who, without an obstinately anthropological mind, shall regret that the beginnings of our national life are veiled in the Ante-Photographic era—that we may invest them with qualities we wish they might have had, as well as with those qualities of which we think we know? Who shall say that humanity, A. P., dwelling in a softening haze beyond the harshly illuminated era of Realism, is worse off than humanity thereafter? Looking at the matter practically, who shall regret that Lady Washington never had her pretty head in a vise, her face masked a ghastly white with powder to make her countenance more actinic, and her eyes instructed to glare at a fixed point for upward of sixty mortal seconds! Surely there are some compensations in being handed down like the Iliad or the masonic ritual by word of mouth rather than by agencies associated with the arrogant stare of the lens.
But, after all, we do not conduct the trial wholly with expert witnesses, and the camera has been a useful commentator—perhaps we are more willing to say that it will be than that it has been, though we never shall surpass in delicately literal perfection the image of the daguerreotype. A new confusion may arise from the fact that photography wants to be more than a science—is tired of being literal, and seeks to be an art. If it shall become an art—that is to say, an agency of personal opinion—posterity must, like ourselves, go on being influenced in its judgments of pictorial fact by the expressions of art, which the world has been doing from the beginning of time.
Certainly it would be very hard for us to think of the English girl, for example, however well we might know her personally, without feeling the influence of the English artists, of Romney, and Reynolds, and Sir John Millais, and Sir Frederick Leighton, and the multitudinous expressions of her from the pencil of the author of “Trilby.” Du Maurier’s English girl is an image, agreeable or not according to one’s taste, which we cannot get out of our minds. A number of years before he achieved a second fame by writing romances, Du Maurier made a sketch in which he undertook to indicate his idea of a pretty woman. He wrote of his ideal at that time: “She is rather tall, I admit, and a trifle stiff; but English women are tall and stiff just now; and she is rather too serious; but that is only because I find it so difficult, with a mere stroke of black ink, to indicate the enchanting little curved lines that go from the nose to the mouth corners, causing the cheeks to make a smile—and without them the smile is incomplete.” I always have been glad to hear Mr. Ruskin say of the Venus of Melos, with her “tranquil, regular and lofty features,” that she “could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.”