I.—HEALTH

Plants, Animals, Savages.—In two of the most exquisite passages, not only in his own works, but in all English literature, Mr. Ruskin has emphasised the dependence of physical beauty in plants on their healthy appearance, and the independence of this beauty on any idea of direct utility to man.

“It is a matter of easy demonstration,” he says, “that, setting the characters of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form is in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy; as in a rose-bush, setting aside all considerations of gradated flushing of colour and fair folding of line, which it shares with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find in and through all this certain signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and enjoyment in the particular individual plant itself. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be constantly exercising that function, and, as it seems, solely for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that reflection will show us that the plant is not living for itself alone, that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives as well as receives, but no sense of this whatever mingles with our perception of physical beauty in its forms. Those forms which appear to be necessary to its health, the symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant’s own happiness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they give us pleasure in our sympathising with that of the plant, and if we see a leaf withered or shrunk or worm-eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel it to be most painful, not because it hurts us, but because it seems to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and failure of life in it.”

“The bending tree, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us. The same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It serves as a bridge,—it has become useful; it lives not for itself, and its beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent on its lines and colours, not its functions. Saw it into planks, and though now adapted to become permanently useful, its whole beauty is lost for ever, or to be regained only in part when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand of Nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of life.”

In the animal world we find the same dependence of Beauty upon Health. As Mr. Wallace has shown, “colour and ornament are strictly correlated with health, vigour, and general fitness to survive.” It is the superior vitality, vigour, and vivacity of certain male animals that leads the choicest females to prefer them to others less favoured; and thus it happens that, thanks to the dependence of Beauty on Health, animals have become more and more beautiful. Moreover, it is Love in its primitive form that urges animals to prefer those that are most healthy. And thus we have the three great agents acting and reacting upon one another. Health produces Beauty, and together they inspire Love; while Love selects Health, and thus preserves and multiplies Beauty. But this whole subject has been so fully discussed in the chapter on Love among Animals that it is needless to recapitulate the facts here.

Concerning savages, there is a prevalent notion that, owing to their free and easy life in the forests, they are healthier on the average than civilised mankind. As a matter of fact, however, they are as inferior to us in Health as in Beauty. Their constant exposure and irregular feeding habits, their neglect and ignorance of every hygienic law, in conjunction with their vicious lives, their arbitrary mutilations of various parts, and their selection of inferior forms, prevent their bodies from assuming the regular and delicate proportions which we regard as essential to Beauty. They arrive at maturity at an earlier age, and lose their vitality sooner than we do. “Decrepitude,” says Dr. Topinard, “shows itself sooner in some races than in others. The Australians and Bosjesmans are old men at a period when the European is in the full enjoyment of his faculties, both physical and intellectual. The Japanese the same, according to Dr. Krishaber, physician to the Japanese embassy.”

Women everywhere pay less attention to the laws of Health than men. They have less exercise, less fresh air and sunshine than men. Hence, although the most beautiful women are more beautiful than the handsomest men, yet in probably every country of the world the average man is a more perfect specimen of masculine than the average woman of feminine Beauty. Concerning savages, Mr. Spencer says: “Very generally among the lower races the females are even more unattractive in aspect than the males. It is remarked of the Puttooahs, whose men are diminutive and whose women are still more so, that ‘the men are far from being handsome, but the palm of ugliness must be awarded to the women.’ The latter are hard-worked and apparently ill-fed.” Again, of the inhabitants of the Corea Gutzlaff says: “The females are very ugly, whilst the male sex is one of the best formed of Asia.... Women are treated like beasts of burden.” Many similar cases are cited by Dr. Ploss in Das Weib.

Concerning modern civilised nations a well-known art-critic has given his testimony to the effect that “Possibly owing to the fact that men are freer to follow their normal lives, I have found that in a majority of the countries I have visited there are more handsome men than beautiful women. This is peculiarly the case with the modern Greek, and was, if antique sculpture could be accepted as witness, with the ancient.”

Greek Beauty.—In the preceding chapters of this work an attempt has been made to show that there is a general connection between the growth of Love and the growth of Beauty throughout the world. To some readers, no doubt, the thought has suggested itself, “How, if this be true, did the loveless Greeks succeed in reaching such uncommon physical beauty—beauty which artists of all times have admired?”

It must be borne in mind, however, that we are very liable to exaggerate in our notions of Greek Beauty, because we are apt to generalise from the fine statues that have come down to us, and to imagine that they represent the common type of Greek Beauty. But it is well known that the Greeks idealised their statues according to certain physiognomic rules; and, moreover, as Winckelmann remarks, “Beauty was not a general quality even among the Greeks, and Cotta in Cicero says that, among the great numbers of young persons at Athens, there were only a few possessing true beauty.”

Besides, it has not been claimed that Love is the only cause of Beauty. Taking into consideration the other sources of Beauty, it is easy enough to account for such physical attractiveness as the Greeks did possess. The intellectual culture which the men enjoyed gave them a great advantage over the women; and equally important, if not more so, was the attention which the men (and in some cases the women too) paid to Health. Their habitual life in the open air, while the women were locked up at home, combined with their daily gymnastic exercises in making their complexion healthy, their eyes sparkling, their limbs supple, vigorous, and graceful.

Other causes that tended to keep up an average of healthy bodily development were the refusal to bring up sickly and deformed infants, and the existence of numerous slaves, who did all the drudgery for the Greeks.

It is most characteristic that the author of a very old Greek ode formulates his wishes in this order: First, health; then, beauty; thirdly, wealth honestly got; fourth, the privilege of being gay and merry with his friends.

First, Health; then, Beauty. There lies the secret, for they always go together; and in aiming at one the Greeks got the other too.

There was every reason why Greek parents should have striven eagerly to follow those laws of Health which ensure beautiful children. In ancient Greece Beauty was a possession which led to national fame. Some persons, Winckelmann informs us, were even characterised by a particular name, borrowed from some specially fine feature. Thus Demetrius Poliorketes was named, from the beauty of his eyelids, ?a??t???fa??? i.e. on whose lids the graces dwell.

“It appears, indeed,” the same writer continues, "to have been a belief that the procreation of beautiful children might be promoted by the distribution of prizes for beauty, as there is reason to infer from the contests of beauty which were instituted in the remotest ages by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, in the time of the HeraclidÆ, on the banks of the river Alpheus, in Elis; and also from the fact that at the festival of the Philesian Apollo, a prize for the most exquisite kiss was conferred on the youthful. Its assignment was subject to the decision of a judge, as was probably also the case at Megara, at the tomb of Diocles.

“At Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of Juno, and among the citizens of Parrhasia, the women contended for the prize of beauty. The regard for this quality was so strong that, as Oppian declares, the Spartan women placed in their sleeping-rooms an Apollo, or Bacchus, or Nereus, or Narcissus, or Hyacinthus, or Castor and Pollux, in order that they might bear beautiful children.”

Some hint as to what the Greeks regarded as beautiful is given by the epithets Homer bestows on Helen—"the well-rounded" “the white-armed,” “fair-haired,” “of the beautiful cheeks.”

MediÆval Ugliness.—This is a topic which might as well be introduced under any of the other Sources of Beauty, for it is difficult to say which of these sources was most completely and deliberately choked up during the Dark Ages.

It is a curious irony of language that makes asceticism almost identical with Æstheticism, of which it is the deadly enemy. As diseases are transmitted from generation to generation, so it seems that the fear of Beauty born of mediÆval asceticism has not yet died out completely; for it is related that some years ago a pious dame in Boston seriously meditated the duty of having some of her daughter’s sound teeth pulled out, so as to mitigate her sinful Beauty.

If this worthy lady had followed St. Jerome’s injunction—"I entirely forbid a young lady to bathe"; if she had taught her that it is unladylike to have a healthy appetite; if she had locked her up in a house rendered pestilential by defective drainage; allowed her mind to rot in fallow idleness; taught her that to be really saintly and virtuous she must be pale and hysterical; or imitated the lady who was praised by a bishop in the fourth century for “having brought upon herself a swarm of diseases which defied all medical skill to cure,”—if the worthy Boston lady had but followed this mediÆval system, she would have succeeded in a short time in overcoming her daughter’s sinful Beauty, and making her “ugly as a mud-fence,” as they say out West.

That Personal Beauty cannot flourish where Health is regarded as a vice and Disease as a virtue is self-evident. And one needs only to look at mediÆval pictures to note how coarse and void of refined expression are the men, how hard and masculine the women. The faces of the numerous mediÆval women in PlanchÉ’s CyclopÆdia of Costume have almost all an expression approaching imbecility, and features as if they had been chiselled by a small boy trying his hand at sculpture for the first time. Thackeray does not hesitate to speak even of “those simpering Madonnas of Rafael.” Mr. G. A. Simcox remarks that in manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (like the Harleian Gospels and Maccabees) we meet with “short, thickset figures, mostly with the long, square, horsey face, moving stiffly in small groups, in heavy dresses; and even the daughter of Herodias dances upon her head [sic] in a gown that might have stood alone. On the other hand, the faces are more set, more articulate, less flabby, though they are all mean, or almost all, and look askance out of the corners of their eyes” (Art Journal, 1874, p. 58).

There may be Oriental countries where woman is kept more closely under lock and key than she was in Europe during the Dark Ages; but nowhere else has man so well succeeded in reducing the pursuit of unhappiness to a science, in snubbing, scorning, abusing, maltreating woman. How all this must have tended to increase Personal Beauty is well brought out in the following advice given by Mr. Ruskin: “Do not think you can make a girl lovely if you do not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on a good girl’s nature—there is not one check you give to her instincts of affection or of effort—which will not be indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue.”

Modern Hygiene.—Disease is Beauty’s deadliest enemy. Yet for the sake of gratifying a silly vanity—for the sake of being distinguished from ordinary mortals—a certain pallor and blasÉ languor have long been considered in certain influential circles as more distinguÉ than ruddy cheeks and robust health. Yet even if pale cheeks were more beautiful than rosy cheeks, would it be worth while to purchase them at the cost of premature decay—of the certainty that a few years of pale cheeks will be followed by many years of sallow cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, deeply sunk into their orbits?

Though beauty is still of lamentably rare occurrence in every country, there is infinitely more of it than during the Middle Ages; and certainly not the least cause of this is the increased attention paid to Hygiene—public and personal. The difference in this respect between us and our ancestors is well brought out by the statistics regarding the average length of life. In ancient Rome, it is stated, "the average longevity among the most favoured classes was but thirty years, whereas to-day the average longevity among the corresponding class of people is fifty years. In the sixteenth century the average longevity in Geneva was 21·21 years. Between 1814 and 1833 it was 40·68, and as large a proportion now live to seventy as lived to forty-three three hundred years ago." Dr. Corfield, comparing the statistics of 1842 with those of 1884, states that the mean duration of life in London has increased from twenty-nine to thirty-eight years. “In the reign of Queen Elizabeth the death-rate of the metropolis as it then was amounted to 40 per thousand. In the reign of Queen Victoria, almost entirely by the reduction of mortality by means of improved drainage, ventilation, and water, it has often touched 15 and 14, and even fallen as low as 13 in the thousand,” while “in many of the suburban districts, and in the fashionable region about Hyde Park it ranges from 11 to 12.”

In France, according to M. Topinard, the mean duration of life, which was twenty-nine at the close of the eighteenth century, and thirty-nine from 1817 to 1831, increased to forty from 1840 to 1859, thanks to the progress of sanitary science and civilisation.

As Hygiene is receiving more and more attention every year, it is possible that in course of time Dr. W. B. Richardson’s ideal will be realised—a town ideally perfect in sanitary matters, having a death-rate of 9 per 1000, and 105 years the duration of a man’s life.

As decrepitude and premature old age means a premature loss of Beauty, personal attractiveness would be correspondingly prolonged and increased with life itself.

Even at the present time not one house in a thousand is so constructed that every room has good ventilation. Architects are, however, less to blame than the people who will persist in their absurd old superstition that draughts and night air are injurious. Professor Reclam, the distinguished hygienist, not long ago opened a crusade against the horror of night air and draughts which is especially prevalent among his countrymen. “Sleeping with open windows,” he says, “is most unjustly decried among the people, as well as night air in general. But night air is injurious only in swampy regions, whereas on dry soil, in the mountains, and everywhere in the upper stories of a house it is more salubrious than day air.... Draughts are not injurious unless we are in a glow. To healthy persons they cannot possibly do so much harm as the stagnant air in a close room. The fear of draughts is entirely groundless, though it affects most people in a manner which is simply ludicrous.”

Electricity, no doubt, will in less than a decade abolish horses from our cities, and with them the dust, foul odours, and sleep-murdering noise. The gain to Health, and through it to Beauty, from this alone, will be enormous. Doubtless one of the reasons why there is so much Beauty, so many fresh and sparkling eyes, in Venice, is because there are no horses in that city, and the inhabitants are not roused and half-roused from sleep every fifteen minutes during the night by a waggon rattling down the street.

It is not sufficiently known that street-noise may injure the Health even of those whom it does not entirely wake up. The restorative value of sleep lies in its depth and the absence of dreams. A noisy waggon interferes with the depth of sleep and starts a current of dreams, thus depriving it of half its potency.

“Beauty sleep” is an expression which rests on a real physiological truth. Sleep before midnight really is more health-giving and beautifying than after midnight, for the reason that in all towns and cities there is less noise in the early hours of the night than after four in the morning, wherefore sleep is deeper between ten and twelve than between six and eight o’clock. The reason why so many more proposals (by city folks) are made in the country than in the city is not only because there are more frequent opportunities of meeting at a summer hotel, but because the young folks retire early, and appear in the morning with an exuberance of Health, born of fresh air and sound sleep, which cannot fail to inspire Love.

Other matters of Hygiene will be discussed in connection with the organs which they specially concern.

Darwin has proved experimentally that in the vegetable kingdom “cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious. This is shown by the difference in height, weight, constitutional vigour, and fertility of the offspring from crossed and self-fertilised flowers, and in the number of seeds produced by the parent plants.” He also showed that “the benefit from cross-fertilisation depends on the plants which are crossed having been subjected during previous generations to somewhat different conditions.”

Similarly, concerning animals, we read in Topinard, that “breeders who select their subjects with a definite object to breed in and in, that is to say, between near relations, rapidly obtain excellent results. They know, however, that fertility then diminishes, and that it will cease altogether if they do not have recourse from time to time to crossing, in order to strengthen the race.”

But both in the vegetable and the animal kingdom, as we have seen, superior Health also implies superior Beauty.

The inference is natural that the human race also must be benefited by marriages of individuals of different races, or of the same race, but brought up under different conditions of life. And the facts are entirely in favour of this supposition, as are the best authorities in Anthropology. Dr. Topinard gives the following instances among many others: “Immigration into the United States, which has taken so considerable a flight during the last thirty years, has already been enormous. Every variety of cross has been going on between English, Irish, Germans, Italians, French, etc., with the greatest possible success. We may also mention numberless Spaniards from the Peninsula, among whom are found the features of the Saracen invaders of the ninth century; then that population on the Barbary coast, called Moors, and which is a medley of races of every description, the Arab and Berber blood predominating. On tracing back the yellow races, we also discover a perfect eugenesis.... De Mas speaks in the highest terms of mixed breeds of Chinese and Mongolians, and MM. MondiÈres and Morice of those of Chinese and Annamites under the name of Minuongs. Dr. Bowring describes a race in the Philippine Islands, intermediate between the Malays and Chinese, as the principal agent of civilisation in these latitudes.”

On the other hand, “it is undeniable that in Africa the Negro races do not cross to any great extent.” Nor has any one ever accused the Negroes of an excessive amount of Beauty. Whereas in Lima, which has the finest women in South America, “there are twenty-three different names to designate the varieties of mixed breeds of Spaniards, Peruvians, and Negroes.” “The number of mongrels on the face of the globe has been estimated at twelve millions, of whom no fewer than eleven millions are in South America.” South American women are already famous for their Beauty, and there is reason to believe that when the fusion of all these elements is complete the race will be one of the finest in the world. What Beauty it has now seems to be owing chiefly to the magic of Crossing; for attention to Health there is little but what comes from life in the open air; while Romantic Love is perhaps as rare as Mental Refinement, inasmuch as Courtship is not so free and easy a matter as in North America. All the more honour to the potency of Crossing.

Take a few more cases. The African Negroes, as just stated, do not mix much, and are an ugly type. Among the Polynesians, on the other hand, there are many very fine types of human beauty; and it is therefore not surprising to read that to-day in Polynesia, “mixed breeds are so numerous that it would be difficult to find among them any individuals of pure race.”

Again, concerning the Magyars or Hungarians, Schweiger-Lerchenfeld remarks that “they are a splendid race, physically and intellectually.... The girls and young women are of most piquant charm, models of health in mind and body.” But these Magyars, when they first came to Europe, were, as Waitz states, “of a repulsive ugliness in the eyes of all their neighbours.” That they have mixed with the Indo-Germanic type is shown by their appearance, as well as by peculiarities of their language. “Where they have probably remained less mixed,” Waitz continues, “and at the same time less cultivated, in some remote regions, especially in the mountains, the ugly primitive type may be found to the present day; in the plains may be found every transitional form from this to the nobler type; at Szegedin both are found face to face.”

The Magyars, in turn, have, like the Slavo-Italians, Czechs, etc., assisted the Austrians in evolving a superior type of Beauty by fusing with them. That there is very much more Beauty in Vienna than in any purely German city is an almost proverbial commonplace; and the reason why may be found in the statistics: in Germany 31·80 per cent are blond, 14·05 brunet, 54·15 mixed; in Austria 19·59 per cent are blond, 23·17 brunet, and 68·04 mixed.

The European Turks have much nobler forms of the head and features than their Asiatic relatives; and the inference seems inevitable that they owe these improvements to intermarriage with Circassian women.

A negative instance, showing the disadvantages of abstaining from Crossing, is given by the Jews. There are handsome Jews and, up to a certain age, very beautiful Jewesses. But the typical Jew is certainly not a thing of beauty. The disadvantages of Jewish separatism are shown not only in the long, thick, crooked nose, the bloated lips, almost suggesting a negro, and the heavy lower eyelid, but in the fact that the Jews “have proportionately more insane, deaf mutes, blind, and colour-blind” than other Europeans. From an intellectual and industrial point of view, the Jews are one of the finest races in the world, and their absorption by the natives of the countries in which they have settled could not but benefit both parties concerned. From this point of view there may be something said even in favour of the money-marriages, which are now so frequent between extravagant German officers and Jewish heiresses. Unfortunately, the Jews have kept apart so long from the rest of the world that they do not readily mix with non-Jews. Contrary to the general rule, mixed marriages of Jews and Christians are less fertile than pure Jewish unions.

The precise manner in which a mixture of races improves physical appearance is a question still open to debate. Professor Kollmann (Plastische Anatomie) thinks “the result of the crossing of two forms is comparable, not to a chemical, but to a mechanical mixture”; and this agrees with the view of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who endeavours to trace to this fact the frequent want of correspondence between intellectual and physical beauty. He believes, however, the time will come “when the present causes of incongruity will have worked themselves out,” and intellectual beauty emerge in harmony with physical, in all details, as it no doubt exists in general.

There is no lack of facts supporting the view that sexual fusion is a mere mechanical mixture. The “Bourbon nose” seems to defy mitigating circumstances for generations; and “M. de Quatrefages knew a great-grandson of the bailiff of Suffren who was a striking likeness of his ancestor after four generations, and who, nevertheless, bore no resemblance either to his father or his mother.” A child may resemble its father, mother, aunt, uncle, grand-parents, or several of them at once; and the resemblance may vary at different ages.

More extraordinary are the following cases cited by Topinard: “Sometimes the child possesses altogether the character of one or other parent: for example, the child of a European father and a Chinese mother, Dr. Scherzer says, is altogether a European or altogether a Chinese. A Berber with blue eyes and with the lobule of the ear absent, married to a dark Arab woman with a well-formed ear, had two children, one like himself, the other like his wife. An English officer, fair, with blue eyes and florid complexion, had several children by an Indian negress. Some were the image of the father, others exactly like the mother.... A decided negro, having had a white among his ancestors, has unexpectedly a child with a white skin by a negress.”

Yet all these are exceptional cases, which, like the winning number in a lottery, get a disproportionate amount of attention. Moreover, this “mechanical” form of assimilation seems to occur chiefly where very unrelated races are fused, and then especially in the first generation. In subsequent generations the union doubtless tends to become more and more chemical—no longer a negro character floating on a white one, like oil on water, but a mixture, as of wine and water.

Take the American quadroons, for instance, famous for their beauty of form and features. They are mongrels of the third generation, having one-eighth black, seven-eighths white blood in their veins. Surely these characters are not “mechanically” mixed in such a woman, but “chemically.” That is, you do not find her with the eyes and nose of a negro, the lips and ears of a white, one part of her skin dark the other light: but in everything there is a fusion of the ancestral elements. Her nose is not flat like that of her ancestress, nor her lips swollen, but both are intermediate between those of her white and black ancestors. Her lip is still thicker than that of the whites, and that gives her a sensuous aspect, kiss-inviting. Her eyes, again, have lost the fierce glare and opaque blackness of the negro-grandmother, and assumed a more crystalline, tender lustre; while their form and surroundings have become more refined and expressive. All this is homogeneous fusion, not “heterogeneous mixture.”

Finally, it is hardly correct to state dogmatically that a certain person resembles this or that ancestor. In nothing else do opinions vary so constantly and so ludicrously. No one who has ever been “trotted around” among his relatives in the “old country,” can have failed to be amused at the countless resemblances to this and that uncle, aunt, or grand-parent discovered in him, until he came to the conclusion that he must be a veritable epitome of the whole genealogy. A man who at home is supposed to be absolutely unlike his brother, is elsewhere mistaken for him and addressed as such; while another man finds a friend who knew his father in his youth, and declares he is exactly like him; though a second friend who knew only the mother, claims a similar hereditary influence for her. All of which tends to show that there is more of both parents in each person than is commonly supposed; and that the reason why opinions differ so, is because the fusion is chemical rather than mechanical, which makes it difficult to put the finger on distinct points of resemblance.

It is in the more closely allied races, like the English and German, or Italian and Spanish, that “chemical” fusion is most readily attained, and Beauty most rapidly evolved. Such are the unions which take place on such a large scale in the United States and Canada; and this may account for the fact that there is more Beauty in North America than in South America, where the races that intermingle are less related. There is a golden mean here as in everything else.

III.—ROMANTIC LOVE

What Crossing does on a national scale, Love continues with individuals, by fusing dissonant, but complementary, parental qualities into a harmonious progeny. How this is done is sufficiently shown in the chapter on Schopenhauer.

This, however, is only one of the ways in which Love increases the amount of Beauty in the world. There are several others.

The second is that—apart from complementary considerations—Romantic Love always urges the choice of a mate who approaches nearest to the ideal type of Beauty. As Beauty is hereditary, and as a beautiful father and mother may have six or more beautiful children, this predilection for Beauty shown by Love necessarily preserves and multiplies it—

says Shakspere, anticipating the modern theory of heredity.

On this particular topic nothing more need be said here, because all the remainder of this book will be taken up with a consideration of those features of Personal Beauty for which the Æsthetic taste which forms part of Romantic Love shows a decided preference.

The third way in which Love promotes the cause of Beauty is by the great attention it pays to Health in its choice. For though Health is not always synonymous with Beauty, it is the soil on which alone Beauty can germinate and flourish.

The fourth way is through the elimination of ugliness. Love, says Plato, is devotion to Beauty: “with“with the ugly Eros has no concern.”

From the Æsthetic point of view, ugliness is disease. Now there is a cast-iron Lykurgean law prevailing throughout Nature which eliminates the diseased and the ugly. It is a cruel agency, called Natural Selection, and has not the slightest regard for individuals, but provides only for the weal of the species, as Schopenhauer erroneously says is the case with Love. In a bed of plants, if there are more than can find sustenance, the stronger crowd out the weaker. Among animals, wherever there is competition, the best-developed, handsomest lion survives in combat, and the most fleet-footed, and consequently most graceful, deer escapes, while the clumsy, the ugly, and diseased perish miserably, inexorably. Savages leave the old and feeble to die, and weak or deformed children are either deliberately put out of the way or perish from want of proper care. Nor among the ancient civilised nations were such methods unknown. Plato and Aristotle, says Mr. Grote, agree in this point: “Both of them command that no child born crippled or deformed shall be brought up—a practice actually adopted at Sparta under the Lykurgean Institutions, and even carried further, since no child was allowed to be brought up until it had been inspected and approved by the public nurses.” The Romans, too, were legally permitted to expose deformed children.

Christianity, the religion of pity and charity, abhors such practices. Christianity is antagonistic to Natural Selection. One of its chief functions is the building of hospitals in which the cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, are gratuitously and tenderly cared for, instead of being allowed to perish, as they would under the sway of Natural Selection.

This artificial preservation of disease and deformity, in and out of hospitals, due to Christian charity, might in the long run prove injurious to the welfare of the human race, were it not for the stepping in of Modern Love as a preserver of Health and Beauty. What formerly was left to the agency of Natural Selection is now done by Love, through Sexual Selection, on a vast scale.

From a moral point of view, the substitution of Sexual for Natural Selection is a great gain, in harmony with the spirit of Christianity. For Cupid does not kill those who do not come up to his standard of Health and Beauty, but simply ignores and condemns them to a life of single-blessedness.

“After all,” says Washington Irving, speaking of Spanish women, “it is the divinity within which makes the divinity without; and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty.”

It is one of the commonest commonplaces of conversation that in moments of intellectual or emotional excitement the features of plain people assume an aspect of exquisite beauty. Love transfuses a homely girl’s countenance with a glow of angelic loveliness; and biographies are full of statements concerning the countenances of men of genius, which, ordinarily unattractive, assumed an expression of unearthly beauty while their minds were active and electrified the facial muscles.

“There is not any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon the features,” says Mr. Ruskin; and again, he speaks of “the operation of the intellectual powers upon the features, in the fine cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them of signs of sensuality and sloth, by which they are blunted and deadened, and substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy and insipidity (by which wants alone the faces of many fair women are utterly spoiled and rendered valueless); and by the keenness given to the eye and fine moulding and development to the brow, of which effects Sir Charles Bell has well noted the desirableness and opposition to brutal types.”

An English clergyman, the Rev. F. P. Lawson, diocesan inspector for Northamptonshire, issued a report not long ago concerning the results of his observations in 325 urban and rural schools during several years, regarding the effects of good education in improving the appearance of the children. “A school, thoroughly well taught, seldom failed to exhibit a considerable number of interesting little faces, and a striking absence of such faces might invariably be associated with poverty of tone and superficial instruction. Nothing struck him more forcibly in a school that has been suddenly lifted out of the mire by a firstrate teacher than the bright and thoughtful look which the children soon acquire.”

Negative evidence to the same effect might also be cited by the volume, but one case may suffice. “It is unhappily a fact,” says Mr. Galton, “that fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become established, and are one of the saddest disfigurements of modern civilisation.”

The connection between culture and a superior type of Beauty is strikingly revealed in the following remarks on the far-famed Georgian women of the Caucasus, made by a great connoisseur of feminine beauty, the poet Bodenstedt: "In Europe the notion prevails that a Georgian woman is a tall, graceful being, of luscious form, clothed in wide, rich garments, with dense black hair, long enough to enchain all masculine hearts, an open, noble forehead, and a pair of eyes which contain within their dark, mysterious, magic circle all the secrets of human delight that come through the soul or the senses. Her gait is rapture. Joy precedes, and admiration follows her.... With such notions in their heads, strangers generally arrive in Georgia, and find themselves wofully disappointed. The tourists who come with such great expectations to visit this country, invested with the atmosphere of a fairyland by history and legend, either adhere stubbornly to their preconceived notions, or else they instantly go over to the opposite extreme, and find everything dirty, ugly, disgusting, dreadful.

"The truth lies between these extremes. The Georgians are, all in all, one of the handsomest nations on the earth. But although I am a great admirer of women, I am compelled in this case to award the prize to the men instead of the women. This opinion is endorsed by all educated inhabitants of Georgia who have eyes, taste, and an impartial judgment.

“I must add that of that higher beauty where heart and intellect and soul are mirrored in the eye, I found few traces in the whole Caucasus, either among men or women. I have seen the greater number of the beauties which Georgia boasts, but not one face have I seen that satisfied me completely, though the picturesque native costume does much to heighten the charms of the women. The face entirely lacks that refined mental expression which makes a beautiful European woman such a unique enchantress. Such a woman may still inspire love and win hearts long after the time of her bloom; whereas in a Georgian everything fades with youth. The eyes, which, notwithstanding their apparent fire, never expressed anything but calm and voluptuous indolence, lose their lustre; the nose, which even in its normal relations exceeds the limits of beauty, assumes, in consequence of the premature hollowness of the cheeks, such abnormal dimensions that many people imagine that it actually continues to grow; and the bosom, which the national costume makes no effort to conceal, prematurely loses its natural firmness—all of which phenomena are observed in European women much less frequently, and in a less exaggerated form. If you add to this the habit, so prevalent among Georgians, young and old, of using white and red cosmetics, you will understand that such rude and inartistic arts of the toilet can only add to the observer’s sense of dissatisfaction.”

America affords many illustrations of the manner in which refinement of mind and manners increases Beauty in a single generation. There are in every city thousands of parents who began life as ordinary labourers, but soon got rich through industry or good luck. They bring up their children in houses where every attention is paid to sanitary rules; they send them to school and college; and when they come back you would hardly believe that those coarse-featured, clumsy-limbed, ungraceful persons could be their father and mother. The discrepancy is sometimes so great that when the young folks invite people of “their set” to their house, the old birds keep out of the way discreetly, either of their own accord or by filial dictation, which in America appears to be displacing parental authority.

But if there is such an intimate connection between culture and Beauty, how is it that we so often find plain features joined with a noble mind and fine features with a mean mind? Mr. Spencer has endeavoured to explain this apparent discrepancy by assuming that in such cases plain features are inherited severally and separately from ancestors of diverse physiognomies, which being merely mechanically mixed, not fused, fail to harmonise. There may be something in this, but a simpler explanation is at hand.

Noble minds are often the result of individual effort, and persistence in it. Many men of genius have had humble parents not specially gifted. From these parents and their ancestors they inherited their plain faces. Now individual effort, in the short period of a lifetime, is insufficient to alter the proportions of a face, which depend on its bony parts; but it does suffice to alter the expression, which depends on the movements of the soft, muscular parts. Hence every person, however plain-featured, may acquire a beautiful expression by cultivating his mind and refining his manners and temper. Whenever, therefore, we meet a man or woman whose features are less attractive at rest than when moved to expression of emotion, we may feel sure that they owe their mental refinement more to individual effort than to inherited capacity.

The children of such persons will be more beautiful than they are themselves, because they will inherit the parents’ habit of expressive muscular action of the features. And owing to the fact that all the bony parts of the body are modified in accordance with the action of the muscles attached to them, the bony parts, the proportions, of the face will also be gradually modified and moulded into nobler shapes, through the continuance of refined emotional expression.

It is in this manner that intellectual growth and emotional refinement have gradually differentiated our features from those of our savage ancestors. Our lips have become more delicate, our mouths smaller, our jaws less gigantic, ponderous, and projecting, because civilisation has taught us to use the hands in preparing food, and to cut it instead of tearing it off the bone with the teeth, as savages and other wild animals do.

Use increases, disuse diminishes the size of an organ. Hence for the same reason that our jaws have become less projecting and heavy, our forehead has lost its backward slope and become straight and noble, owing to the growth of the brain. And similarly with other peculiarities of the face, indicating the connection between mental refinement and physical beauty. “Thus is it,” says Mr. Spencer, “with depression of the bridge of the nose, which is a characteristic both of barbarians and of our babes, possessed by them in common with our higher quadrumana. Thus, also, is it with that forward opening of the nostrils, which renders them conspicuous in a front view of the face,—a trait alike of infants, savages, and apes. And the same may be said of widespread alÆ to the nose, of great width between the eyes, of long mouth, of large mouth—indeed of all those leading peculiarities of feature which are by general consent called ugly.”