For what had he to do to chide at me?
He said mine eyes were black and my hair black,
And, now I am remember’d, scorned at me.”
But when this temporary aristocratic ground of preferring the Blond type was neutralised through the lapse of time, and Romantic Love, that potent awakener of the æsthetic sense, appeared on the scene and opened men’s eyes to the inferior beauty of that type, then began the reaction in favour of Brunettes, which has been going on ever since. This view is strikingly confirmed by the following remarks of Mr. Charles Roberts in Nature, January 7, 1885:—
“American statistics show that the blonde type is more subject to all the diseases, except one (chronic rheumatism), which disqualify men for military service, and this must obviously place blondes at a great disadvantage in the battle of life, while the popular saying, ‘A pair of black eyes is the delight of a pair of blue ones,’ shows that sexual selection does not allow them to escape from it. It is more than probable, therefore, from all these considerations, that the darker portion of our population is gaining on the blond, and this surmise is borne out by Dr. Beddoe’s remark that the proportion of English and Scotch blood in Ireland is probably not less than a third, and that the Gaelic and Iberian races of the West, mostly dark-haired, are tending to swamp the blond Teutonic of England by a reflex migration.”
Obviously, the ideal Englishwoman of the future will be a Brunette. Thackeray had a prophetic vision of her when he described Beatrix Esmond: “She was a brown beauty: that is, her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes were dark; her hair curling with rich undulations, and waving over her shoulders” [note that]; “but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson ... a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the sweetest love-song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace,—agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen—now melting; now imperious, now sarcastic—there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels young again and remembers a paragon.”
Sexual Selection, however, has not limited its efforts to the improvement of the colour of the hair, eyes, and complexion; the form of the features and figure has also been gradually altered and refined. An examination of the portraits in the National Gallery showed to Mr. Galton “what appear to be indisputable signs of one predominant type of face supplanting another. For instance, the features of the men painted by and about the time of Holbein have unusually high cheek-bones, long upper lips, thin eyebrows, and lank dark [?] hair. It would be impossible, I think, for the majority of modern Englishmen so to dress themselves, and clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the majority of these portraits.” And again: “If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness and obesity of many English men and women in the earlier years of this century must have been prodigious. It testifies to the grosser conditions of life in those days, and makes it improbable that the types best adapted to prevail then would be the best adapted to prevail now.”
Yet this improvement in the British figure and physiognomy is far from universal. The English are beyond all dispute the finest race in the world, physically and mentally; but the favourable action of the four Sources of Beauty, to which they owe this supremacy, does not extend to all classes. The lowest-class Englishman or Irishman is the most hideous and brutal ruffian in the world. Of Mental or Moral Culture not a trace; and whereas “the Spaniard, however ignorant, has naturally the manners and the refined feelings of a gentleman” (Macmillan’s Magazine, 1874), as well as a love of the beautiful forms and colours of nature; the Englishman of the corresponding class has nerves and senses so coarse that he is absolutely impervious to any impressions which do not come under the head of mere brutal excitement. In this class there is no Mixture of Races, but a worse than barbarian promiscuity; Romantic Love is of course miles beyond the conception of imaginations so filthy and sluggish; and Hygienic neglect here finds its most hideous examples in the Western World.
In his English Note-Books Hawthorne speaks as follows of “a countless multitude of little girls” taken from the workhouses and educated at a charity school at Liverpool: “I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them. All America could not show the like.”
“Climate,” he says in another place, “no doubt has most to do with diffusing a slender elegance over American young women; but something, perhaps, is also due to the circumstance of classes not being kept apart there as they are here: they interfuse amid the continual ups and downs of our social life; and so, in the lowest stations of life, you may see the refining influence of gentle blood.”