"In the village there are several families composed of boys only.
One family has 7 boys and 2 girls.
" " " 6 " " 0 "
Two families have 5 " " 1 girl each.
" " " 4 " " 1 " "
"Of one family reckoning 6 boys (1 dead; making 7 in all) the mother has but one leg--the other having been amputated when she was fourteen.[2] _None of the mothers here (so for as I can learn) do work outside their homes_; except in odd cases, an odd day"s washing or cleaning.
"_None do regular work on farms, or otherwise._
"All the children are well-fed, clean and well clothed. Our Medical Nurse says she finds the finest babies here--of the whole of her district. For 57 years the yearly returns in School have shown a great preponderance of boys over girls."
The writer contrasts this Utopian order of things with her experience of the rickety and otherwise diseased and defective states of school-children whose mothers were employed in factories.
V
It would seem that the embryological development of the male brain and nervous system, it is which demands more of vital expenditure on the part of the mother than does that of the female brain; less elaborately differentiated as is this in respect of concrete intellection and physical adaptation.
For this reason, not only is more const.i.tutional vitality on the mother"s part required for the production of sons--and more particularly of virile sons--but the production of male offspring entails more stress, and exacts a greater toll, physical and psychical, than does the ante-natal nurture of the female embryo. Mothers who have borne female children with but little const.i.tutional strain or suffering may be greatly debilitated, even invalided, during pregnancy with male offspring. One finds women permanently weakened in const.i.tution and function, indeed, from the strain of producing a male. In such cases, the male may be exceptional of type. Or the mother may be of exceptionally low vitality.
It has been argued that defect and degeneracy, as hare-lip, cleft-palate, clubbed or webbed-foot, are more common in the male because he is normally less highly-developed than the female is. The contrary is obviously the case. In creating a difficult and a simpler thing, there will necessarily be more failures in the difficult than in the simpler product. Being nearer to Nature, the female is usually more true to the normal type of species. But the type is not so fully differentiated, or specialised in relation to environment, as is the male.
It is significant that the female _aphis_, when its vital potential is stimulated by summer heat, is able to breed without co-operation of the male, but breeds _females_ only. Supporting not only the view that the female is the rootstock of species, while the male is, so to speak, an alien grafted upon it, but indicating too, that the production of females represents less output of reproductive energy, since one s.e.x alone is able to accomplish this.
VI
Absence both of womanly emotion and of spiritual attribute disqualifies the faces of the greater number of our modern "beauties" from being truly beautiful. They lack those last exquisite touches which psychical qualities bestow; sweetness, tenderness, gaiety, pensiveness, mystery, mockery, witchery, wistfulness, surrender, resistance, maidenhood, motherhood--the celestial and the terrestrial melting into one another like the colours of the rainbow.
Since evolution is advancing in some stock, modern beauty is, no doubt, of higher calibre than has been attained in any previous epoch. But for the most part, the faces of our handsome women are pre-eminently pagan--bold, sophisticated, clever; without sweetness, softness, imagination, sensitiveness--in a word, without Soul. The outlines, howsoever fine, are hard and antipathetic in their uncompromising firmness. The eyes are cold and critical and challenging, so that their relentless gaze is sometimes rather of the nature of a blow than it is a sympathy.
Owing to that setting of the jaw which attends strong muscular action, the shaping bones of the faces of developing girls thicken and coa.r.s.en, and the naturally delicate, beautiful contours of chin and of cheek deteriorate to the crude and heavy lower jaws characteristic of a very large order of the s.e.x to-day.
The weak receding, or the sharply-pointed chin of the over-feminised type--both early-Victorian and modern--errs in the other direction. To give fine balance to the face and form--as to the mind--the Male traits must be duly represented. These broaden and strengthen the curves, and preserve them from lapsing to narrowness and feebleness; lending touches of straightness and firmness which n.o.bly enhance the graces. In excess, they mar and deface, however; as is exemplified in the strong and slovenly features, without drawing or delicacy, which characterise the new type of girl being turned out by our schools and colleges, most of which make now-a-days a speciality of sports. Similar heavy jaws and blunt, amorphous features are replacing in our working-girls, de-s.e.xed by masculine employments, the cla.s.sic, n.o.bly-modelled lineaments which made our Anglo-Saxon Race once the most beautiful, as it was the most vigorous and enterprising, of the nations. Such faces may be deplorably senseless for the sense--and lack of sensibility--in them.
The facial type of the opposite extreme is ultra-feminine--a cameo-like reversion to an earlier Victorian physiognomy, to which several generations of mothers have failed to add any new quality. But, unlike its Victorian prototype, the modern ultra-feminine face lacks blood and emotion, and shows like a faded attenuation thereof. The cold, delicate features, with the pinched nostrils which, owing to adenoid obstruction, have never expanded to a full, inspiring breath of Life, suggest further cameo-comparison; as being the daintily-carven sh.e.l.l of an extinct creature.
So devitalised and neurasthenic are many of our pretty young girls, that their flowerlike faces, topping over-tall and undeveloped bodies, suggest delicate blossoms crowning long attenuated, sapless stems.
Neither faces nor bodies are vitalised and athrill with powers rooted in healthful organs; vivified by healthful functions, and instinct with warm, iron-rich, magnetic blood. They show that making for beauty which is inherent in the Woman-traits, but which, in latter-day girls, owing to defective const.i.tutional vigour or to educational, social or industrial exhaustion, has been able to realise itself only in sickly and weed-like development.
Life manifests in these neurotics in the form of vivacities merely; not as vitalities.
Severed from their natural roots in Life and vital function, they resemble nothing more than charming cut-blossoms gracefully fading on drawing-room shelves.
The truth is that girls brought up on modern strenuous methods skip the years between 16 and 26. If young and fresh at 16, all at once we find them 26 in const.i.tution and in temperament--a little lean, a little lined, a little wan, a little shrill, a little chill, and only too often more than a little disillusioned and cynical--in a word already _pa.s.sees_. Some are, of course, an interesting and attractive 26, but the fresh, warm, vital and beautiful years from 17 to 27, the years of a natural woman"s most charming bloom of mind and body, have dropped from their lives, like petals from roses. So that our girls in their "teens require to hide the ravages of time by every sort of artifice. And at 26 in years, they are approaching the forties in const.i.tution and temperament; are even keen on politics, cards, finance--resorts, pre-eminently, of materialistic middle-age.
This blighting of young womanhood, with loss of youthful bloom and responsiveness, it is that has led to the decadent and demoralising vogue of the Flapper. Since, beyond all things, men seek vital youth and freshness in the other s.e.x, to find it now-a-days, they must seek it in children.
VII
Deplorable are the degenerative processes by way of which those n.o.ble natural characteristics of the Woman-s.e.x which Nature has achieved by ages of evolutionary advance may be observed to lapse, and are presently all but obliterated from the woman form and face.
Increasingly the curves straighten; the conflict between straight lines and curves occasioning wrinkles. The jaw squares. The lips lose womanly fullness, sweetness, and their natural colour and texture of rose-leaves; becoming thin and pale and stern. Shadows gather round them, foreshadowing, it may be, a masculine growth of hair. Hair loses l.u.s.tre and grows spa.r.s.e, particularly above the brows. The chin loses its feminine softness; rigidity and grimness being subst.i.tuted. Eyes lose fullness, tenderness, brilliance, and woman"s normal melting expression. The glance grows chill, hard, shrewd, direct. Crowsfeet mar the modelled lids. The serene, inspiring woman-brows are furrowed by the permanent frown of eye-strain or of nervous tension. The voice falls flat and metallic, or drops into gruffness and harshness; losing its delicate tuneful inflections, its sympathetic timbre, its joyous quality. The cheeks hollow; the white temples are wrecked.
In the faces of women whose systems are functioning healthfully, a number of exquisite artistries in cellular texture of skin and in tinting appear; the skin beneath the eyes differing from that of the cheeks, that of the brows differing from that of the chin, that above the mouth from that below, and so forth. In women subjected to const.i.tutional strain, all these exquisite artistic differentiations--product of incalculable evolutionary developments--are obliterated; the skin over the whole face becoming of the same grain and hue, as is normal to the male. The body becomes spare and sinewy, or set and spread; its movements heavy and abrupt. And more and more the hidden male emerges from the wreckage. The male right arm, swinging like a pendulum, suggests itself as being the motive-power of the ungraceful mechanism.
With the increasing maleness of physique, male mental proclivities develop; obsessions to wear trousers, to smoke, to stride, to kill, and otherwise to indulge the masculine bent.
It may be objected that Beauty takes too high a place in the counsels of this book. _Beauty is Normality_, however. Nature, in her every aim and handiwork, makes beyond every other thing for grace. Weed and moth, sh.e.l.l and beetle, humming-bird and dragon-fly--all are lovely in technique and artistry. Plainness and uncouthness in humans only too often belie n.o.ble mind or disposition. This results, however, from such failure of vital resources that the individual had fine material only to equip his mind, and none left over to adorn his body.
One sees the converse too, where all the available potential of beauty has been lavished on handsome exteriors.
Plainness is a mark of abnormality. The victim may be normal in other respects. But in this, he or she is abnormal. And more particularly _she_--since Woman is both medium and Creatrix of living harmony and grace. So is comeliness declining, however, that one of the specifications of a recent Baby-Compet.i.tion was that beauty would not be a necessary qualification.
Yet Beauty is the natural birthright and The Normal of all babes and children.
VIII
The Male cult is impressed now at the earliest age. Some of our hapless little girls, in consequence of having been subjected early to strain of masculine drill, hockey, cricket and other rough and strenuous exertions, are more like colts or smaller-sized bullocks in their crude conformation and ungainly movements, as also in their crude mentality and manners, than they are like charming human maids.
Few developments in life are prettier or more engaging than is a natural little girl. The s.e.x of her, with its fair Woman-attributes, reveals itself early in children of high organisation. Crowned by her curls, in her simple white frock, she is as fresh and dainty, as winsome and elusive as a fairy. Her little Woman-soul begins to make for beauty ere ever she can walk. Ere ever she can walk, she moves her limbs in rhythm of the dance. She tries to sing. She stretches out a tiny finger and reverently touches a bright colour--a blue ribbon, a gold b.u.t.ton, a pink flower on a chintz. Set her in a field, she runs to cram her hands with daisies. She fills, within the House of Life, an exquisite small niche that nothing else can fill.
Yet now they are cropping her fair curls, are exchanging her white frock for masculine knickers. They are training her soft limbs and exquisite elastic movements to the hard and rigid action of the soldiers" drill and march; are teaching her to stride her pony that once she sat as prettily and lightly as a bird; are making a hard, boisterous tom-boy of her, with l.u.s.ty, hairy limbs and uncouth manners; perverting all her natural highly-differentiated delicate attributes and graces to clumsy lower-grade form and activities.
They have robbed her of her Doll, whose helplessness and wax perfection fostered sentiments of worship, tenderness and ministry in her. They have given her a whipping-top, which--unlike the boy, who pleasures in the skill and mechanism of its handling--she lashes with contorted features and neurotic spitefulness.
With characteristic scorn of physical disability, Feminism contemns old age as disease or degeneracy--a weakness to be combated with latter-day strenuousness, cloaked by a counterfeit youthfulness, forced exertions (even games!) simulated youthful zests and gaieties.
Beyond all things, women are exhorted not to allow themselves to "grow old" as their grandmothers did, sitting, comely and tranquil and wise, at their quiet firesides.
Yet the truth is, Age is a natural beautiful phase; in its way, as natural, as healthful and as beautiful as are any of the younger seasons. Calm and stately as the snows of Nature"s winter, as Nature"s winter shows us, old age does not presage death--because there is no Death. That we call Death is but a temporary Recession from the Outer and Terrestrial to the Inner and Celestial zone of Being. And with the vital quietude and longer-sightedness of eyes, come spiritual quickening and longer-sightedness of mental view. So that both eyes and mind perceive The Outer more and more obscurely, focusing more and more on The Remote. The stream of life runs stilly for the reason that it runs more deep; centring again to that Within and Spiritual, whence it issued in Birth, and will issue again in re-Birth.
Compare such serene-faced, dignified age, cause to all of reverence and tenderness, for the mystery and pathos of its wise and tranquil resignation--Compare such with the restless, harried, malcontent old age of modern counsels!
IX
Before the advent of that admirable inst.i.tution, the Eugenics Education Society, for the establishment of a new Science of Heredity, as, too, of a new propaganda of Race-Culture, vital and illuminating data, not only of supreme scientific interest but, moreover, of the greatest practical significance, pa.s.sed, for the most part, unnoted.