It would seem that the embryological development of the male brain and nervous system, it is which demands more of vital expenditure on the part of the mother than does that of the female brain; less elaborately differentiated as is this in respect of concrete intellection and physical adaptation.
For this reason, not only is more constitutional vitality on the mother's part required for the production of sons—and more particularly of virile sons—but the production of male offspring entails more stress, and exacts a greater toll, physical and psychical, than does the ante-natal nurture of the female embryo. Mothers who have borne female children with but little constitutional strain or suffering may be greatly debilitated, even invalided, during pregnancy with male offspring. One finds women permanently weakened in constitution and function, indeed, from the strain of producing a male. In such cases, the male may be exceptional of type. Or the mother may be of exceptionally low vitality.
It has been argued that defect and degeneracy, as hare-lip, cleft-palate, clubbed or webbed-foot, are more common in the male because he is normally less highly-developed than the female is. The contrary is obviously the case. In creating a difficult and a simpler thing, there will necessarily be more failures in the difficult than in the simpler product. Being nearer to Nature, the female is usually more true to the normal type of species. But the type is not so fully differentiated, or specialised in relation to environment, as is the male.
It is significant that the female aphis, when its vital potential is stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the male, but breeds females only. Supporting not only the view that the female is the rootstock of species, while the male is, so to speak, an alien grafted upon it, but indicating too, that the production of females represents less output of reproductive energy, since one sex alone is able to accomplish this.
VI
Absence both of womanly emotion and of spiritual attribute disqualifies the faces of the greater number of our modern "beauties" from being truly beautiful. They lack those last exquisite touches which psychical qualities bestow; sweetness, tenderness, gaiety, pensiveness, mystery, mockery, witchery, wistfulness, surrender, resistance, maidenhood, motherhood—the celestial and the terrestrial melting into one another like the colours of the rainbow.
Since evolution is advancing in some stock, modern beauty is, no doubt, of higher calibre than has been attained in any previous epoch. But for the most part, the faces of our handsome women are pre-eminently pagan—bold, sophisticated, clever; without sweetness, softness, imagination, sensitiveness—in a word, without Soul. The outlines, howsoever fine, are hard and antipathetic in their uncompromising firmness. The eyes are cold and critical and challenging, so that their relentless gaze is sometimes rather of the nature of a blow than it is a sympathy.
Owing to that setting of the jaw which attends strong muscular action, the shaping bones of the faces of developing girls thicken and coarsen, and the naturally delicate, beautiful contours of chin and of cheek deteriorate to the crude and heavy lower jaws characteristic of a very large order of the sex to-day.
The weak receding, or the sharply-pointed chin of the over-feminised type—both early-Victorian and modern—errs in the other direction. To give fine balance to the face and form—as to the mind—the Male traits must be duly represented. These broaden and strengthen the curves, and preserve them from lapsing to narrowness and feebleness; lending touches of straightness and firmness which nobly enhance the graces. In excess, they mar and deface, however; as is exemplified in the strong and slovenly features, without drawing or delicacy, which characterise the new type of girl being turned out by our schools and colleges, most of which make now-a-days a speciality of sports. Similar heavy jaws and blunt, amorphous features are replacing in our working-girls, de-sexed by masculine employments, the classic, nobly-modelled lineaments which made our Anglo-Saxon Race once the most beautiful, as it was the most vigorous and enterprising, of the nations. Such faces may be deplorably senseless for the sense—and lack of sensibility—in them.
The facial type of the opposite extreme is ultra-feminine—a cameo-like reversion to an earlier Victorian physiognomy, to which several generations of mothers have failed to add any new quality. But, unlike its Victorian prototype, the modern ultra-feminine face lacks blood and emotion, and shows like a faded attenuation thereof. The cold, delicate features, with the pinched nostrils which, owing to adenoid obstruction, have never expanded to a full, inspiring breath of Life, suggest further cameo-comparison; as being the daintily-carven shell of an extinct creature.