England and America—which of these two countries has the most beautiful women, and which the largest number of them? Few questions of international diplomacy have been more frequently discussed than these problems in comparative Æsthetics. But as in most cases patriotism has taken the place of Æsthetic judgment in forming a verdict, few tangible results have been reached. There is too much exaggeration. Many English tourists have denied that there is any remarkable Beauty at all in the United States, and Americans have said the same of England.

If these sceptical Englishmen had only spent an hour on either side of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge at 6 P.M., they would have seen Beauty enough to bewilder all their senses; and if the American sceptics, next time they go to London, will spend a shilling in buying penny stamps at a dozen of those small post-offices so profusely scattered all over the city, they will see enough feminine Beauty in an hour to make them wish to stay in London the rest of their life,—especially if they remember that an advertisement for eleven girls to fill these postal clerkships has been answered by as many as 2000,—the majority of whom, presumably, were as good-looking as those who got the places, since postal clerks are not selected for their Beauty, but for their intelligence and efficiency.

A few specimens of the sweeping generalisations of tourists may here be cited. According to Richard Grant White, “The belief, formerly prevalent, that ‘American’ women had in their youth pretty doll faces, but at no period of life womanly beauty of figure, is passing away before a knowledge of the truth, and I have heard it scouted here by Englishmen, who, pointing to the charming evidence to the contrary before their eyes, have expressed surprise that the travelling bookwriters ... could have so misrepresented the truth.” Yet the same author indulges in the following absurdly extravagant statement: “Beauty is very much commoner among women of the English race than among those of any other with which I am acquainted; and among that race it is commoner in America than in England. I saw more beauty of face and figure at the first two receptions which I attended after my return than I had found among the hundreds of thousands of women whom I had seen in England.”

The late Dr. G. M. Beard, though an acute observer, allowed his patriotism a still more ludicrous sway over his imagination: “It is not possible,” he says, “to go to an opera in any of our large cities without seeing more of the representatives of the highest type of female beauty than can be found in months of travel in any part of Europe!”

Possibly Sir Lepel Griffin had read these lines when he was moved to pen the following counter-extravagances: “More pretty faces are to be seen in a day in London than in a month in the States. The average of beauty is far higher in Canada, and the American town in which most pretty women are noticeable is Detroit, on the Canadian border, and containing many Canadian residents. In the Western States beauty is conspicuous by its absence, and in the Eastern towns, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, it is to be chiefly found. In New York, in August, I hardly saw a face which could be called pretty.... In November New York presented a different appearance, and many pretty women were to be seen, although the number was comparatively small; and at the Metropolitan Opera House even American friends were unable to point out any lady whom they could call beautiful. A distinguished artist told me that when he first visited America he scarcely saw in the streets of New York a single face which he could select as a model, though he could find twenty such in the London street in which his studio was situated.”

Volumes might be filled with similar unscientific generalisations, but it would be a waste of space. My own general impression is that there are more pretty girls In America, and more beautiful women in England; that the average Englishwoman has a finer, healthier figure and colour, the American greater mobility and finer chiselling of the features. If English hands and feet are often somewhat large, American hands are just as often too small,—the greater blemish of the two, because it usually goes with too thin limbs. Irish girls of the best classes appear to be intermediate. Some of the finest figures and faces in the world belong to them; an Andalusian could hardly be more plump and graceful than many Irish and Irish-American girls. The Scotch, in the opinion of Hawthorne, “are a better-looking people than the English (and this is true of all classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular features. I looked for the high cheek-bones, which have been attributed, as a characteristic feature, to the Scotch, but could not find them. What most distinguishes them from the English is the regularity of the nose, which is straight, and sometimes a little curved inward; whereas the English nose has no law whatever, but disports itself in all manner of irregularity. I very soon learned to recognise the Scotch face, and when not too Scotch, it is a handsome one.”

Comparative Æsthetics is still in its infancy, and many years will doubtless elapse before it will become an exact science, in place of a collection of individual opinions based on vague impressions. The statistics which have lately been collected regarding the proportion of Blondes and Brunettes in various countries, may be regarded as the beginning of such a science. The next step should be the collection of a series of national composite portraits after the manner in which Mr. Galton has formed typical faces of criminals, etc. If in each country a number of individuals of pronounced national aspect were photographed on the same plate, the result would be a picture which would emphasise the typical national traits, and enable one to judge how far they deviate in each case from regular Beauty.

In most European countries it would be comparatively easy to obtain characteristic composite portraits of this kind. But in America the difficulties would perhaps be insurmountable. For there the mixture of nationalities is too great and too recent to have produced any national type. The women of Baltimore, New York, Boston, and San Francisco—what have they in common with one another any more than with their cousins in London? Almost one-third of the inhabitants of New York are foreign-born, including about half a million Irish and Germans. A fusion of these has been going on for generations, while others have retained their national traits; and to look, therefore, for a special type of New York Beauty would be absurd. Thanks to this large number of foreigners—not always of the most desirable classes—there is less Beauty in New York in proportion to the number of inhabitants than in most other cities of the United States. When people imagine they can tell from what American city a given woman comes, they are hardly ever influenced in their judgment by physiognomy or figure, but by peculiarities of dress, speech, or manner.

Dr. Weir Mitchell says that in America you may see “many very charming faces, the like of which the world cannot match—figures somewhat too spare of flesh, and, especially south of Rhode Island, a marvellous littleness of hand and foot. But look farther, and especially among New England young girls; you will be struck with a certain hardness of line in form and feature, which should not be seen between thirteen and eighteen at least. And if you have an eye which rejoices in the tints of health, you will miss them on a multitude of the cheeks which we are now so daringly criticising.” The notion that there is too much angularity of outline in New England faces and forms is a wide-spread one, and to some extent founded on truth; yet many of the plumpest, rosiest, and most charming American women come from Boston—as if to make amends for their antipodes, whom Mr. R. G. White describes as “certain women, too common in America, who seem to be composed in equal parts of mind and leather, the elements of body and soul being left out, so far as is compatible with existence in human form.”

Concerning the multitudinous mixture of nationalities in the United States one thing may be asserted confidently: that the finest ingredient in it is the English. Yet it has long been held that the English blood deteriorates in the United States; that the descendants of the English, like those of the Germans and other nations and their mixtures, gradually lose the sound constitution of their ancestors. Hawthorne, in his Scarlet Letter, was probably one of the first to give expression to this belief. Speaking of the New England women who two centuries ago waited for the appearance of Hester, he says: “Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for throughout that chain of ancestry every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own.... The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England.”England.”

Yet in his English Note-Books, written after the Scarlet Letter, he relates that he had a conversation with Jenny Lind: “She talked about America, and of our unwholesome modes of life, as to eating and exercise, and of the ill-health especially of our women; but I opposed this view as far as I could with any truth, insinuating my opinion that we were about as healthy as other people, and affirming for a certainty that we live longer.... This charge of ill-health is almost universally brought forward against us nowadays,—and, taking the whole country together, I do not believe the statistics will bear it out.” But why does he in another place speak of English rural people as “wholesome and well-to-do,—not specimens of hard, dry, sunburnt muscle, like our yeoman”? and on still another page: “In America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension, would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years’ experience! I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to our ill-usage of our digestive powers, partly to our want of faith in them.”

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe exclaims that “the race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls ... is daily lessening; and, in their stead, come the fragile, easy-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things.” Dr. E. H. Clarke writes in his Sex and Education, which should be read by all parents: “‘I never saw before so many pretty girls together,’ said Lady Amberley to the writer, after a visit to the public schools of Boston; and then added, ‘They all looked sick.’ Circumstances have repeatedly carried me to Europe, where I am always surprised by the red blood that fills and colours the faces of ladies and peasant girls, reminding one of the canvas of Rubens and Murillo; and I am always equally surprised on my return by crowds of pale, bloodless, female faces, that suggest consumption, scrofula, anÆmia, and neuralgia.”

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell remarks that “To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly, physically unfit for her duties as woman.” Dr. Allen, quoted by Sir Lepel Griffin, remarks that a majority of American women “have a predominance of nerve tissue, with weak muscles and digestive organs”; and Mr. William Blaikie says that “scarcely one girl in three ventures to wear a jersey, mainly because she knows too well that this tell-tale jacket only becomes a good figure.”

Dr. Clarke relates that when travelling in the East he was summoned as a physician into a harem where he had the privilege of seeing nearly a dozen Syrian girls: “As I looked upon their well-developed forms, their brown skins, rich with the blood and sun of the East, and their unintelligent sensuous faces, I thought that if it were possible to marry the Oriental care of woman’s organisation to the Western liberty and culture of her brain, there would be a new birth and loftier type of womanly grace and form.”

There is, doubtless, much truth in these assertions. It is distressing to see the thin limbs of so many American children, and the anÆmic complexions and frail, willowy forms of so many maidens. What the American girl chiefly needs is more muscle, more exercise, more fresh air. A large proportion of girls, it is true, become invalids because their employers in the shops never allow them to sit down and rest; and standing, as physiologists tell us, and as has been proved in the case of armies, is twice as fatiguing as walking. As if to restore the balance, therefore, the average well-to-do American girl never walks a hundred yards if a street car or ’bus is convenient; and the men, too, are not much better as a rule. One of the most disgusting sights to be seen in New York on a fine day is a procession of street cars going up Broadway, crowded to suffocation by young men who have plenty of time to walk home. In the case of the women, the cramping French fashions, which impede exercise, are largely to blame.

Fresh-air starvation, again, is almost as epidemic in America as in Germany. Although night air is less dreaded, draughts are quite as much; and people imagine that they owe their constant “colds” to the cold air with which they come into contact, whereas it is the excessively hot air in their rooms that makes them morbidly sensitive to a salubrious atmosphere. If young ladies knew that the hothouse air of their parlours has the same effect on them as on a bunch of flowers, making them wither prematurely, they would shun it as they would the sulphurous fumes of a volcano. Why should they deliberately hasten the conversion of the plump, smooth grape into a dull, wrinkled raisin?

It is through their morbid fondness for hothouse air and their indolence that American women so often neutralise their natural advantages: thanks to the fusion of nationalities and the unimpeded sway of Romantic Love, they are born more beautiful than the women of any other nation; but the beauty does not last.

It must be admitted, however, that a vast improvement has been effected within the last two generations. Beyond all doubt the young girls of fifteen are to-day healthier and better-looking than were their mothers at the same age. It is no longer fashionable to be pale and frail. Anglomania has done some good in introducing a love of walking, tennis, etc., as well as the habit of spending a large part of the year in the country.

Mr. Higginson, Mr. R. G. White, and many others, have insisted on this gradual improvement in the health and physique of Americans; and Dr. Beard remarks in his work on American Nervousness: “During the last two decades the well-to-do classes of America have been visibly growing stronger, fuller, healthier. We weigh more than our fathers; the women in all our great centres of population are yearly becoming more plump and more beautiful.... On all sides there is a visible reversion to the better physical appearance of our English and German ancestors.... The one need for the perfection of the beauty of the American women—increase of fat—is now supplied.” Yet the one cosmetic which 20 per cent of American women still need above all others is the ability to eat food which they scorn as “greasy,” but which is only greasy when badly prepared. It is to such food that Italian and Spanish women owe their luscious fulness of figure.

Dr. Clarke’s work on Sex and Education made a great sensation because he pointed out that the ill-health of American women is largely due to the brain-work imposed on them at school. Now the superior beauty of American women is admittedly largely due to the intelligent animation of their features, to the early training of their mental faculties. Is this advantage to be sacrificed? Dr. Clarke’s argument does not point to any such conclusion. He simply contended that the methods of female education were injurious. “The law has, or had, a maxim that a man and his wife are one, and that the one is the man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys’ schools and girls’ schools are one, and that the one is the boys’ school.” Girls need different studies from boys to fit them for their sphere in life; and above all they need careful hygienic supervision and periods of rest.—Dr. Clarke’s book affords many irrefutable arguments in favour of one of the main theses of the present treatise: that the tendency of civilisation is to differentiate the sexes, mentally and physically. It is on this differentiation that the ardour and the cosmetic power of Romantic Love depend. Hence the hopelessness of the Virago Woman’s Rights Cause, especially in America, where the women are more thoroughly feminine than elsewhere. It is said that when the first female presidential candidate announced a lecture in a western town, not a single auditor appeared on the scene. American women, evidently, are in no immediate danger of becoming masculine and ceasing to inspire Love.

Women, however, must be educated and thoroughly, for it has been abundantly shown in the preceding pages that only an educated mind can feel true Romantic Love. But their education should be feminine. They need no algebra, Greek, and chemistry. What they need is first of all a thorough knowledge of Physiology and Hygiene, so that they may be able to take care of the Health and Beauty of their children. Then they should be well versed in literature, so as to be able to shine in conversation. Their artistic eye should be trained, to enable them to teach their children to go through the world with their eyes open. Most of us are half blind; we cannot describe accurately a single person or thing we see. Music should be taught to all women, as an aid in making home pleasant and refined, and as an antidote to care. Natural history is another useful feminine study which enlarges the sympathies by showing, for example, that birds love and marry almost as we do, wherefore it is barbarous to wear their stuffed bodies on one’s hat.

Education, Intermarriage, Hygiene, and Romantic Love will ultimately remove the last traces of the ape and the savage from the human countenance and figure. Climate will perhaps always continue to modify different races sufficiently to afford the advantages of cross-fertilisation or intermarriage. The remarkable fineness of the American complexion, for instance, has been ascribed to climatic influences, and with justice it seems, for, according to Schoolcraft, the skin of the native Indians is not only smoother, but more delicate and regularly furrowed than that of Europeans. The notion, however, that the climate is tending to make the American like the Indian in feature and form is nonsensical. The typical “Yankee” owes his high cheek-bones and lankness to his indigestible food; his thin colourless lips to his Puritan ancestry and lack of Æsthetic culture.

Even if climate did possess the power to modify the forms of our features, it would not be allowed to have its own way where these modifications conflicted with the laws of Beauty. Science is daily making us more and more independent of crude and cruel Natural Selection, and of the advantages of physical conformity to our surroundings. Hence Sexual Selection has freer scope to modify the human race into harmony with Æsthetic demands. Perhaps the time will come when the average man will have as refined a taste and as deep feelings as a few favoured individuals have at present; that epoch will be known as the age of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.