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

by Henry T. Finck

Taine, in his Notes on England, thus sketches the lowest of the Englishmen: “Apoplectical and swollen faces, whereof the scarlet hue turns almost to black, worn-out, bloodshot eyes like raw lobsters; the brute brutalised. Lessen the quantity of blood and fat, while retaining the same bone and structure, and increasing the countrified look; large and wild beard and moustache, tangled hair, rolling eyes, truculent muzzle, big, knotted hands; this is the primitive Teuton issuing from his woods; after the portly animal, after the overfed animal, comes the fierce animal, the English bull.” “The lower-class women of London,” says another French writer, Mr. Max O’Rell, “are thin-faced or bloated-looking. They are horribly pale; there is no colour to be seen except on the tips of their noses.”

Personal Beauty in England diminishes in quality and frequency, not only as we go from the upper to the lower classes, but also if we leave London and go to other cities. How far sanitary and educational differences account for this state of affairs, and how much is due to a habitual and natural immigration of Beauty to a place where it is most sure of appreciation, it is not easy to say. Hawthorne thus records the impression made on his artistic eyes by an excursion party of Liverpool manufacturing people: “They were paler, smaller, less wholesome-looking, and less intelligent, and, I think, less noisy than so many Yankees would have been.... As to their persons,” the women “generally looked better developed and healthier than the men; but there was a woeful lack of beauty and grace,—not a pretty girl among them, all coarse and vulgar. Their bodies, it seems to me, are apt to be very long in proportion to their limbs—in truth, this kind of make is rather characteristic of both sexes in England.”

A French writer, quoted by Figuier, Dr. Clavel, makes a similar statement: “The level plains, which are as a rule met with in England, are not favourable to the development of the lower extremities, and it is a fact that the power of the English lies, not so much in their legs, as in the arms, shoulders, and loins.... The barely-marked nape of his neck and the oval form of his cranium indicate that Finn blood flows in his veins; his maxillary power and the size of his teeth evidence a preference for an animal diet. He has the high forehead of the thinker, but not the long eyes of the artist.... In dealing craftily with his antagonist, he is well able to guard himself against the weaknesses of feeling. His face rarely betrays his convictions, and his features are devoid of the mobility which would prove disadvantageous.”

The Englishwoman, according to the same writer, “is tall, fair, and strongly built. Her skin is of dazzling freshness; her features are small and elegantly formed; the oval of her face is marked, but it is somewhat heavy toward the lower portion; her hair is fine, silky, and charming; and her long and graceful neck imparts to the movements of her head a character of grace and pride. So far all about her is essentially feminine; but upon analysing her bust and limbs we find that the large bones, peculiar to her race, interfere with the delicacy of her form, enlarge her extremities, and lessen the elegance of her postures and the harmony of her movements.... She lacks a thousand feminine instincts, and this lack is revealed in her toilette, the posture she assumes, and in her actions and movements.”

M. Taine also was convinced of the frequent lack of taste in dress and bearing in Englishwomen. Yet it is noticeable, and cannot be too much emphasised, that he goes to Spain and not to France for a comparison: “Compared with the supple, easy, silent, serpentine undulation of the Spanish dress and bearing, the movement here (in England), is energetic, discordant, jerking, like a piece of mechanism.” Nor does Taine in other respects venture to hold up his own countrywomen as models. He repeatedly refers to the superior beauty of the English complexion: “Many ladies have their hair decked with diamonds, and their shoulders, much exposed, have the incomparable whiteness of which I have just spoken, the petals of a lily, the gloss of satin do not come near to it.” And though he thinks that ugliness is more ugly in England than in France, he confesses that “generally an Englishwoman is more thoroughly beautiful and healthy than a Frenchwoman.” “Out of every ten young girls one is admirable, and upon five or six a naturalist painter would look with pleasure.” “Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who came to see the Court of the Regent in France, severely rallied our slim, painted, affected beauties, and proudly held up as a contrast ‘the natural charms and the lively colours of the unsullied complexions’ of Englishwomen.” “The physiognomy remains youthful here much later than amongst us, especially than at Paris, where it withers so quickly; sometimes it remains open even in old age; I recall at this moment two old ladies with white hair whose cheeks were smooth and softly rosy; after an hour’s conversation I discovered that their minds were as fresh as their complexions. Even when the physiognomy and the form are commonplace, the whole satisfies the mind; a solid bony structure, and upon it healthy flesh, constitute what is essential in a living creature.”

That is it precisely. The Englishman is the finest animal in the world; and it is because other nations so often forget that one must be a fine animal before one can be a fine man, that the English have outstripped them in colonising the world, and imposing on it their special form of culture and manners. As Emerson remarks, in his Essay on Beauty, “It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in the peach-bloom complexion; health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye.” “We are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws,—as every lily and every rose is well.”

The London Times characteristically speaks of “that worst of sins in English eyes—uncleanliness”; and it is in England alone of all European countries that cleanliness is esteemed next to godliness. The Frenchman’s paradoxical exclamation, “What a dirty nation the English must be that they have to bathe so often!” is not so funny as it seems. The English, as can be seen in the uneducated classes, would be the dirtiest people in the world, thanks to their fogs and smoke, if they were not the most cleanly. It is the magic of tub and towel that has compelled M. Figuier to admit that although the Englishwomen “do not offer the noble appearance and luxurious figure of the Greek and Roman women,” yet “their skins surpass in transparency and brilliancy those of the female inhabitants of all other European countries.”

It is needless to dilate on the other hygienic habits to which the English owe their Health, notwithstanding their often depressing climate,—the passion for walking and riding, for tennis, boating, and other sports, which, moreover, have the advantage of bringing the sexes together, and enabling every Romeo to find his Juliet. One cannot help admiring the independence and common sense of the respectable London girls who go home on the top of the ’bus, enjoying the fresh air and varied sights, instead of being locked up in the foul-aired interior. They know very well, these clever girls, that their cheeks will be all the rosier, their smiles more bewitching, their eyes more sparkling after such a ride. In countries where there are fewer gentlemen such a thing would be considered as improper for a girl as it is for a man to give a girl a chance to choose her own husband. Do the French agree with the Turks that women have no souls, since, in Taine’s words, a Frenchman “would consider it indelicate to utter a single clear or vague phrase to the young girl before having spoken to her parents”? Taine imparts to his countrymen the curious information that in England men and women marry for Love, but he does not appear to realise how much of their superior Beauty—which he acknowledges—they owe to the habitual privilege of choosing their own wives for their personal charms, instead of having them selected by their parents for their money value. He does, however, realise the effect this system of courtship has on conjugal life; for in his History of English Literature he refers to the Englishwoman’s extreme “sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection,—a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially; a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing and pretending only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and for ever chosen.”

And there is another English custom the value of which Taine realises and acknowledges: “In France we believe too readily,” he says, “that if a woman ceases to be a doll she ceases to be a woman.” True, it is only a decade or two since the superstition that a higher education would “destroy all the feminine graces” has been successfully combated even in England; but there has always been a vast amount of home education, and the girls have profited immensely by the unimpeded opportunity of meeting the young men and talking with them, and by the fact that the purity of tone which pervades English literature has made all of it accessible to them. Hence the charming intellectual lines which may be traced in an English woman’s face.

What the English still need is gastronomic and æsthetic training. After a few generations of sense-refinement the lower part of the English face will become as perfect as the upper part is now. Cultivation of the fine arts and freer facial expression of the emotions are the two great cosmetics which will put the finishing touch on English Beauty.