Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

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.”