The Germans commonly consider the maidens along the Rhine their most favourable and abundant specimens of Beauty; but Robert Schumann, who had a fine eye for feminine Beauty, emphasized the amiability rather than the beauty of these maidens in the following passage from one of his private letters: “What characteristic faces among the lowest classes! On the west shore of the Rhine the girls have very delicate features, indicating amiability rather than intelligence; the noses are mostly Greek, the face very oval and artistically symmetrical, the hair brown. I did not see a single blonde. The complexion is soft, delicate, with more white than red; melancholy rather than sanguine. The Frankfort girls, on the other hand, have in common a sisterly trait—the character of German, manly, sad earnestness which we often find in our quondam free cities, and which toward the east gradually merges into a gentle softness. Characteristic are the faces of all the Frankfort girls: intellectual or beautiful few of them; the noses mostly Greek, often snub-noses; the dialect I did not like.”
Concerning the peasant women of Saxony, Mr. Julian Hawthorne remarks in his Saxon Studies: “Massive are their legs as the banyan root; their hips are as the bows of a three-decker. Backs have they like derricks: rough hands like pile-drivers.” And again: “Handsome and pretty women are certainly no rarity in Saxony, although few of them can lay claim to an unadulterated Saxon pedigree.” “We see lovely Austrians, and fascinating Poles and Russians, who delicately smoke cigars in the concert gardens. But it is hard for the peasant type to rise higher than comeliness; and it is distressingly apt to be coarse of feature as well as of hand, clumsy of ankle, and more or less wedded to grease and dirt. Good blood shows in the profile; and these young girls, whose faces are often pleasant and even attractive, have seldom an eloquent contour of nose and mouth. There is sometimes great softness and sweetness of eye, a clear complexion, a pretty roundness of chin and throat. Indeed, I have found scattered through half a dozen different villages all the features of the true Gretchen; and once, in an obscure hamlet whose name I have forgotten, I came unexpectedly upon what seemed a near approach to the mythic being.”
One thing must be admitted. The Germans are the most systematic and persevering nation in the world. They took music, for instance, from her Italian cradle, and reared her till she developed into the most fascinating of the modern muses. They lead the world in scientific research; and within a few years they have terrified the English monopolists by a sudden outburst of thorough-going Teutonic industrial activity and world-competition. Let but the Germans once make up their mind that they want Personal Beauty, and lo! they will have it in superabundance. The Professorships of Hygiene, which are now being established at the Universities, will doubtless bear rich fruit. If Bismarck discovered the full significance of Anglo-American Courtship, he would forthwith order an hour of it to be added to the daily academic curriculum; and if he realised the importance of racial mixture, he would order shiploads of South American and Andalusian brunettes to be distributed among his officers as wives. Nor would female education be any longer neglected, were it fully understood how essential it is to Personal Beauty and true Romantic Love, the basis of happy conjugal life.
What can be done with German stock if it is duly mixed with Brunette ingredients, is shown at Vienna, which, by the apparently unanimous consent of tourists, boasts more beautiful women than any other city in the world. Austria has about ten per cent more of the pure Brunette and fourteen per cent more of the mixed types than Germany. The dark blood of Italians, Hungarians, Czechs, flows in Viennese veins, and there is also a piquant suspicion of Oriental beauty. The Viennese woman combines Andalusian plumpness of figure and grace of movement, with American delicacy of features and purity of complexion. The bust is almost always finely developed and rarely too luxuriant; and the joints are the admiration of all tourists and natives. Speaking of England, Mr. Richard Grant White says that “Plump arms are not uncommon, but really fine arms are rare; and fine wrists are still rarer. Such wrists as the Viennese women have ... are almost unknown among women of English race in either country.” And the Countess von Bothmer thus describes the neighbours of Germany:—
"Polish, Hungarian, and Austrian women, whom we, in a general, inconclusive way, are apt to class as Germans, are ‘beautiful exceedingly’; but here we come upon another race, or rather such a fusion of other races as may help to contribute to the charming result. Polish ladies have a special, vivid, delicate, spirited, haunting loveliness, with grace, distinction, and elegance in their limbs and features that is all their own; you cannot call them fragile, but they are of so fine a fibre and so delicate a colouring that they only just escape that apprehension. Of Polish and Hungarian pur sang there is little to be found; women of the latter race are of a more robust and substantial build, with dark hair and complexion, fine flashing eyes, and pronounced type; and who that remembers the women of Linz and Vienna will refuse them a first prize? They possess a special beauty of their own, a beauty which is rare in even the loveliest Englishwomen; rare, indeed, and exceptional everywhere else; a beauty that the artist eye appreciates with a feeling of delight. They have the most delicately articulated joints of any women in the world. The juncture of the hand and wrist, of foot and ankle, of the nuque with the back and shoulders, is what our neighbours would call ‘adorable.’
“But alas that it should be so! The full gracious figures—types at once of strength and elegance—the supple, slender waists, the dainty little wrists and hands, become all too soon hopelessly fat, from the persistent idleness and luxury of the nerveless, unoccupied lives of these graceful ladies.”
ENGLISH BEAUTY
Like the Viennese, the English afford an illustration of what can be done with Teutonic stock by a judicious admixture of dark blood. Although the mysteries of English ethnology have not been completely unravelled, the original inhabitants of the British Islands appear to have been “composed of the long-headed dark races of the Mediterranean stock, possibly mingled with fragments of still more ancient races, Mongoliform or Allophylian” (Dr. Beddoe). In the later history of the race Romans, Germans, Danes, and Normans added their blood to this mixture. The Celtic-speaking people who in the time of the Roman Conquest inhabited South Britain, partook, according to Dr. Beddoe, “more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thickset, broad-headed, dark stock which Broca has called Celts.” But the true Blonde invasion of Britain did not occur till towards the beginning of the fifth century, when the Low-Dutch tribes, the Angles and Saxons, came over from the river Elbe and the coast region, and drove the Britons to the west of the island, where they were called the Welsh, which is an old German appellation for foreigners.
The inference naturally suggests itself that the predilection for Blondes shown in English literature up to a recent date (as noted in the chapter on Blondes and Brunettes) may be traced to this fact that the conquering race was fair, and that consequently dark hair and eyes stigmatised their possessor as belonging to the conquered race. This condemnation of the Brunette type (on non-æsthetic grounds, be it noted) is forcibly illustrated by the following lines of the shepherdess Phebe in As You Like It—
“I have more cause to hate him than to love him;