The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1890-09-03
WHAT is THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY
Will the Human Race Become Hideous
as 1t Advances2
Ffonl the London Spectator.

as IL tAOVdnCo5T
From the London Spectator.
Beauty is a result of circumstances, such
as personal freedom and mode of life and of
continuous diet, not of intelligence, and
stall less of the acquisition of knowledge,
which latter can only benefit the individual
whose features are fixed past serious
change before study is even begun. A man
or woman inherits his or her face, and
mental habitude, though 1t may greatly
affect its meaning, can no more alter its
shape than assiduous training can turn a
smooth fox terrier into the wiry kind from
Airedale.
1t may even be doubted, strange as many
will deem the assertion, whether continuous
education will produce beauty, whether the
growth of intelligence will even in ages
yield the physical result which we notice the
authors OF Utopias always assume, as if it
were a scientifically demonstrable conse-
qence of the new society. The most beauti-
full black race'in Africa a tribe of Nyassa-
| land, on whose looks even missionaries grow
eloquent, and who are really as perfect as
bronze statues, are as ignorant as fishes, and
though they have discovered the use of fire,
have never risen to the conception of clothes
of any kind. The Otaheitan, when discov-
cred, was as uncultured as the Papuan now
is; yet the former approached as nearly to
positive beauty as the latter does to positive
deformity. The keenest race in Asia, and,
as all who know them assert, the strongest
in character, the Chinese, is decidedly the
| ugliest of semj-civilized mankind; while the
Hindoo, if sufficiently fed, Is even when as
ignorant as an animal, almost invariably
handsome. The Circassians, who know
nothing and are rather stupid than excep-
tionally intelligent, are physically fault
less race, far more so than the Germans, who,
though the best trained people in the world,
display marked commences Of feature,
as if the great sculptor, nature, had Used
good clay, but taken no trouble about the
modelling. Some of the very ablest among
them belong to the fiat.nosed, puff checked,
loose-hpped variety.
The keenest race In the world and proba-
bly, the one most susceptible to culture, the
Hebrew, presents few types of beauty, being
usually at once hook-nosed and fabby-
checked, though in physique, as in thought,
that race occasionally throws out trans
scendent examples. The tanned Arabs of
Egypt, who seem to possess poor brains and
of course have no education, are often ex-
| traordinarily handsome; while in 1860 the
grandest head in Asia, a head which every
artist copied as his ideal of Jove, belonged
to an Arab horse dealer, who, outside his
trade, knew nothing No modern men of
culture would pretend, in mere perfectness
vi lOEiIl, W EiFhl tu6 OAu 0Teek ATHLETES, WHO
intellec tually were probably animals. or the
Berserkers, who were for the most part
only hard-drinking soldiers. The royal
caste, which has been cultivated for 900
years, seldom produces beautiful men, and
still schooner beautiful women; most prin-
cesses, though sometimes dgnifed, having
been marked, as to features, by certain
ordinariness often wanting in the poor, and
especially the poor of certain districts, like
Devon in England and Aries and Marseilles
in France Devon is no better taught than
| Suffolk, but mark the difference in peasant
| forms. In the last century the ablest men
| in Europe were remarkable for a certain
| superfiuity of flesh, of which Gibbons face
| is the best known and most absurd example
and in our own time, intellect, even heredi-
tary intellect is constantly found ASSOCIATED
from good looks, and even from distinction.
some of the ablest men being externally
| heavy and gross, and some of the ablest
women marked by an Indebtedness of
| check and chin, as if they had been carved
by the fingers in putty. No stranger ever
saw Tennyson without turning round, but
Browning would have passed unnoticed in
any English or Austrian crowd. The air of
physical refinement, which is what con :
tinuous culture should give, is precisely the
air which is often lacking among the Guilt
waited, as it is also in many aristocratic
families. Indeed, though caste must mean
more or less hereditary culture, it is doubt
full If it secures beauty. 1t does not in the
royal houses, and in any regiment, though
an officer or two will probably stand first,
Incorporation of splendid men will be found
greater among the non-commiSSiOned than
the commissioned officers.