Attention must finally be called to one feature of Andalusian Beauty which all tourists emphasise, namely, the small stature of the women, to which they largely owe their exceptional grace of gait. And there are reasons for believing that the perfected woman of the millennium will resemble the Andalusian Brunette, not only in complexion, hair, eyes, gait, and tapering plumpness of figure, but also in stature. In other words, it seems that Sexual Selection is evolving the petite Brunette as the ideal of womanhood.
Among the ancient Greeks who were not swayed by Romantic Love, Amazons were greatly admired, as previously noted; and Mr. Gladstone remarks that “stature was a great element of beauty in the view of the ancients, for women as well as for men; and their admiration of tallness, even in women, is hardly restrained by a limit.”
From this Greek predilection modern æsthetico-amorous Taste differs, for several weighty reasons. The first is that a very tall and bulky woman, though she may be stately and majestic, cannot be very graceful; and Grace, as we know, is as potent a source of Love as formal Beauty. Again, there is something incongruous and almost comic in the thought of a very large woman submitting to Love’s caresses; and le ridicule tue. Thirdly, great stature is rarely associated with delicate joints and extremities. But the principal reason why the modern lover disapproves of Amazonian women, mental and physical, is because they are quasi-masculine. Romantic Love tends to differentiate the sexes in stature as in everything else. True, Mr. Galton, after making observations on 205 married couples, came to the conclusion that “marriage selection takes little or no account of shortness and tallness. There are undoubtedly sexual preferences for moderate contrasts in height; but the marriage choice appears to be guided by so many and more important considerations that questions of stature exert no perceptible influence upon it.... Men and women of contrasted heights, short and tall or tall and short, married just about as frequently as men and women of similar heights, both tall or both short; there were 32 cases of one to 27 of the other.”
But Mr. Galton’s argument is rather weak. He admits that “there are undoubtedly sexual preferences for moderate contrast in height”; and his own figures show 32 to 27 in favour of mixed-stature marriages, in most of which the women must have been shorter, owing to the prevalent feminine inferiority in size. And in course of time the elimination of non-amorous motives of marriage will assist the law of sexual differentiation in suppressing Amazons.
The modern masculine preference for petite female stature is, furthermore, attested by an irrefutable philological argument which will be found in the following citation from Crabb’s English Synonymes: “Prettiness is always coupled with simplicity; it is incompatible with that which is large; a tall woman with masculine features cannot be pretty. Beauty is peculiarly a female perfection; in the male sex it is rather a defect; a man can scarcely be beautiful without losing his manly characteristics, boldness and energy of mind, strength and robustness of limb; but though a man may not be beautiful or pretty, he may be fine or handsome.” “A woman[“A woman] is fine who with a striking figure unites shape and symmetry; a woman is handsome who has good features, and pretty if with symmetry of feature be united delicacy.”
Burke believed that it is possible to fall in love with a very small person, but not with a giant. There is, indeed, a natural prejudice in the modern mind against very tall statue even in men. Thus, we read in Fuller’s Andronicus: “Often the cockloft is empty in those whom Nature hath built many stories high”; and Bacon is reported to have said that “Nature[“Nature] did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.” An apparent scientific confirmation of this belief is found in Professor Hermann’s Nervensystem (ii. 195), where we read that “when the body becomes abnormally large, the brain begins to decrease again, relatively, as Langer found in measuring giant skeletons.” And, another sign of regression is found in the fact that tall men are apt to have relatively too have jaws.
GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN BEAUTY
Although the Germans of to-day are by no means a pure and distinct race, they are less thoroughly and variously mixed than most other European nations; and this is one of the main reasons why Personal Beauty is comparatively rare in the Fatherland. It is rarest in the northern and central regions, where the original Blonde type is best preserved, and becomes more frequent the nearer we approach the Brunette neighbours of Germany—Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Poland—whose women have been aptly called “the Spaniards of the north.” France forms an exception. There, thanks to the imprisonment of Cupid, ugliness is so rampant that intermarriage only intensifies the natural homeliness,—a fact of which any one may convince himself by spending a few days in the borderland between France and Germany.
Partly owing to this lack of variety in the national composition of the Germans, partly to the custom of chaperonage, Romantic Love has not as wide a scope of selective action as elsewhere; and as if these impediments to the increase of Beauty were not sufficient, they are augmented in a wholesale fashion by the parental illusion that the Love-instinct is a less trustworthy guide to a happy marriage than “Reason,” i.e. the consideration that the bride has a few thousand marks and belongs to the same social clique as the bridegroom. Like their French neighbours, the Germans in these cases forget the claims of the grandchildren to Health and Beauty—i.e. the harmonious fusion of the complementary parental qualities by which Love is inspired.
But in regard to the third source of Beauty—Mental Culture—the Germans surely are pre-eminent among nations, it will be claimed. In one sense, no doubt, they are. Almost all Germans can read and write, and no race equals them in special erudition. But erudition is not culture. The German system of education is exceedingly defective, because it cultivates too largely the lowest of the mental faculties—the Memory. The number of scientific, historic, and philological facts a German schoolboy knows by heart is simply astounding; but he has not digested them, and cannot apply them practically. No attempt is made to cultivate his higher faculties—his imagination, originality, or the gift of expressing a thought in elegant language. Were a candidate to show the wit and brilliancy of a Heine or a Shakspere, it would not add one grain to the weight his pedantic professors attach to his work. They will not favour the growth of qualities in which they themselves are so conspicuously deficient. Note, for example, the vast contempt with which the pedants of the University of Berlin look down on “the German Darwin,” Professor Haeckel, because he dares not only to be original, but to write his books in a language clear as crystal, and adorned with wit, satire, and literary polish.