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

by Henry T. Finck

Yet there have been French writers who felt the shortcomings of their nation in regard to Personal Beauty. One of them says that you find in the Frenchman “the love of the graceful rather than the beautiful”; and in the following characterisation of his countrywomen, by M. Figuier, it is easy to see that he lays much more emphasis on their grace and the expressiveness of their features than on their Beauty proper: “There is in her face much that is most pleasing, although we can assign her physiognomy to no determinate type. Her features, frequently irregular, seem to be borrowed from different races; they do not possess that unity which springs from calm and majesty, but are in the highest degree expressive, and marvellously contrived for conveying every shade of feeling. In them we see a smile though it be shaded by tears; a caress though they threaten us; and an appeal when yet they command. Amid the irregularity of this physiognomy the soul displays its workings. As a rule the Frenchwoman is short of stature, but in every proportion of her form combines grace and delicacy. Her extremities and joints are fine and elegant, of perfect model and distinct form, without a suspicion of coarseness. With her, moreover, art is brought wonderfully to assist nature” (The Races of Man).

It appears, indeed, as if Frenchwomen, who are naturally bright and quickwitted, endeavoured to make up in grace what they lack in beauty. Hence nothing is more common than Frenchwomen who are so fascinating with their graceful little ways and movements that one almost or quite forgets their homeliness. No French girl ever needs to be taught how to use her eyes to best advantage; and, as a clever newspaper writer has remarked, French girls “can say more with their shoulders than most girls can with their eyes; and when they talk with eyes, hands, shoulders, and tongue at once, it takes a man of talent to keep up.”

Of course it would be absurd to say that no specimens of supreme Beauty are to be found in France; but they are scarce as strawberries in December. The general tendency of women to become either too stout or too lean after they have got out of their teens, is apparently more pronounced in France than elsewhere in Europe. And as for the men, they can be recognised anywhere, either by their almost simian hairiness or their puny appearance. What a difference in stature and general manly aspect between a regiment of French and one of English or German soldiers! And the superiority of the English soldiers to the French in vigour and beauty is more than “skin-deep”; it appears to extend to the very chemical composition of their tissues; for Professor Topinard remarks in his Anthropologie that he enunciated more than twenty years ago “a fact which was more or less confirmed by others, namely, that the mortality after capital operations in English hospitals was less by one-half than in the French. We attributed it to a better diet, to their better sanitary arrangements, and to their superior management. There was but one serious objection offered to our statement. M. Velapeau, with his wonderful acumen, made reply, at the Academy of Medicine, that the flesh of the English and of the French differed; in other words, that the reaction after operations was not the same in both races. It is, in effect, an anthropological character.”

Thus the “wonderful acumen” of two French scientists has established the fact that French deterioration is shown not only in a surprisingly low birth-rate, but in the general inferiority of the French constitution: for the ability to resist the effects of wounds or illness is evidence of a sound constitution.

That the chief cause of French ugliness, degeneration, and infertility lies in their contemptuous treatment of Romantic Love, must be apparent to any one after reading the preceding chapter on French Love. French parents may point triumphantly to cases of genuine Conjugal attachment in their sons and daughters, whose marriages were based on social or pecuniary considerations. But they forget the grandchildren. It is they who suffer from these ill-assorted, fortuitous unions. Only the children of Love are beautiful and destined to multiply.

French indifference to the claims of Love also explains why another leading source of Beauty—the mixture of races—is inoperative in their country. The French are a very mixed nation. In the North, says Dr. Topinard, “we find the descendants of the Belgæ, the Walloons, and other Kymri; in the East, those of Germans and Burgundians; in the West, Normans; in the centre, Celts, who at the same epoch at which their name took its origin consisted of foreigners of various origins and of the aborigines; in the South, ancient Aquitanians and Basques; without mentioning a host of settlers like the Saracens, who are found here and there, Tectosages, who have left at Toulouse the custom of cranial deformities, and the traders who passed through the Phocæan town of Marseilles.” But the advantages which might result to Personal Beauty from such a mixture of peoples are neutralised through the universality of money-marriages, notwithstanding that these must in some cases bring together the descendants of different races. For a mixture of races is not necessarily and always an advantage, but only when it enables a lover to profit by the greater physiognomic variety in finding a mate whose qualities will blend harmoniously with his own.

In the case of a third primal source of Beauty—Mental Culture—we find again that its action is impeded through the anomalous position of Love in France. Inasmuch as adulterous love-making is the only kind of Love-making sanctioned by French custom and described in French literature, it is necessary to withhold most books and periodicals from the young of both sexes, who are thus compelled to grow up in ignorance. “The burden of ignorance presses sorely upon her,” says M. Figuier of the Frenchwoman: “It is a rare thing for a woman of the people to read, as only those of the higher classes have leisure, during their girlhood, to cultivate their minds. And yet even they must not give themselves up too much to study, nor aspire to honour or distinction. The epithet bas bleu (‘blue-stocking’) would soon bring them back to the common crowd—an ignorant and frivolous feminine mass.”

Note that this is the confession of a patriotic Frenchman. The fact that there have been a few brilliant Frenchwomen, famous for their salons, has created the impression that most Frenchwomen are brilliant, whereas the majority appear to be utterly without intellectual interests or ambition. Nor could this possibly be otherwise, considering the extremely superficial education which even the most favoured receive in the nuns’ schools. And not a few of them bring home from these schools something worse than ignorance, viz. the constitution and habits of an invalid. Not only the girls, even the boys in French schools are never allowed to play without supervision. Healthy romping is considered undignified in young girls, and when they get a little older the high-heeled, pointed shoes prescribed by Fashion take away any desire they may feel to indulge in beautifying exercise. Uncomfortable shoes and clothing, combined with the necessity of having a chaperon, even to simply cross the street, prevent French girls from indulging in those long walks to which English girls owe their fine physique. Nor do the French show such a devotion to the bath-tub and other details of Personal Hygiene as their neighbours across the channel.

Thus we see that the French, thanks to their conservative, Oriental customs, are placed at a disadvantage as regards every one of the four main sources of Beauty—Romantic Love, Mixture of Races, Mental Culture, and Hygiene. And it is not only Personal Beauty that suffers. A writer in La Réforme Sociale complains that “family feeling is dying out, the moral sense is growing weaker ... the country is falling into a state of anæmia.” And another writer in the same periodical, after noting the alarming fact that although France has gained eight million inhabitants since 1805, the number of births is no larger than it was then, calls upon those interested in these symptoms of national decay to investigate the local causes of it.

But it is needless to look for “local causes.” The disease is a national one, and calls for constitutional treatment. Let the French, in the first place, instead of locking up their girls till they are ready to be sold to a rich roué, initiate them into the arts of Anglo-American Courtship, and then allow Romantic Love to take the place of money as a matchmaker. That the effect of such a change would be miraculous may be inferred from the fact that the products of a few generations of American love-making—French girls in Canada and the United States—are vastly superior in Beauty and Health to their transatlantic cousins.