TALL GIRLS.
THE assertion that the fancy of the day flows towards tall girls, about which so many essays have already been written, and that girls are manifestly taller than they were, is, we think, true ; but it requires limitations. Nobody knows much about any general changes in the height or girth of the population, the only data we have, the measurements of recruits applying for enlistment, being utterly deceptive. They are younger and weedier, because the wages of soldiers correspond less and less with the wages of powerful unskilled men, because the dislike to long engagements increases—and three years is now a long engagement—and because the poorest and pluckiest class is found more and more in overcrowded towns, where brawniness develops, if at all, rather late in life. We think ourselves, as matter of observation, that English men and women have profited by the cheaper food of the last thirty years, and are decidedly bigger than when we were lads, but we freely admit we are unaware of any scientific evidence to support that opinion. We are only sure that a certain limited class, the well-to-do section of the middle class, has become decidedly bigger, healthier, and, as regards its younger women, apparently taller than was the case forty years ago. We cannot understand how there can be any doubt upon the subject, and would appeal with the utmost confidence to any jury of mothers accustomed to mix in general society. They would say, thereby correcting an omission in the popular view, that in seven out of ten families they knew, the sons were larger than the fathers, unless the latter were specially big men ; and that the daughters not only were larger than the mothers, bat that they at all events seemed to be taller too. Nor is there anything surprising in the statement. The first cause of bulk and stature is probably race—we do not mean superior race, for the Negroes of many districts are bigger than are the English, and the " barbarians " were all bigger than the
Roman soldiers who enslaved them—but race, and the con- tinuance alike of pedigree and conditions of life usually in- volved in that word ; but the second cause is diet in infancy ; and the third, training in childhood and early youth. Much milk, for example, makes good bones ; and soldiers caught
young visibly lengthen out under their food and drill. In
both these latter conditions, the change within the last genera- tion—we are speaking only of the well-to-do—has been very great indeed. The world has grown unconsciously much wiser as to the management of children. Nothing improves physique like good milk—that, and not porridge, is the cause of the tall Highlanders, Irishmen, and Sikhs—and the little children of our day are nourished on cream-and-water, or milk procured from the great dairies, which is as good as milk can be, and as different from the milk of thirty years ago as Brand is different from old beef-tea. The very cows are of a different breed, not to mention the improve-
ment in their food and lodging. Then a prejudice of an extraordinarily injurious character—we write these sentences on first-class medical evidence—has silently, no one knows why, entirely disappeared. Nothing nourishes like good sugar, possessing as it does just the requisite heat-giving quality ; but the mothers of 1830-50 dreaded sugar. They had an idea that it sickened babies, who always crave for it like horses for salt; that it spoilt the teeth of growing children; and that it swelled the tongues of children a little more advanced in years,—the last a fancy based on the effect of sucking toffy. They therefore withheld sugar, thus leaving the children half-nourished, and permanently sensi- tive to a climate which for seven months in the year is always chilly. Nowadays, everybody among the cultivated knows that sugar is beneficial, and the children are left to their instincts, with the result that they make flesh, and are almost always warm. Then the matrons of 1830-50 had a fixed idea, incurable by the men, who never quite gave in to it, that children, if left alone, would invariably over-eat themselves, a theory true of about 5 per cent. The nurseries were dieted like prisons, with the result—all nurses exaggerating the popular ideas—that the children who longed for food were never fed enough, and the children who disliked much food— a peculiarity of many good constitutions—were gorged to indigestion. And finally, children are kept warm enough. The horrible old idea of those two decades, that children should be " hardened " by exposure, has died away ; the nurseries, besides being properly ventilated, are kept warm, and the whole principle of children's clothing has been radically, and we hope finally, modified in the sense that the " body," as distinguished from the limbs, is thoroughly and warmly clad. The result is, that the child with a tendency to grow does grow, and that a greatly increased per-centage of boys run towards 5 ft. 11 in., and of girls towards 5 ft. 8 in. and 5 ft. 9 in., than has ever been the case before. Moreover, as the boys and girls grow naturally, they keep their good looks, and, except for a year or two of life, it has become a positive rarity to see " gawky " lads and lasses, as great a rarity as to see the latter with the shining red elbows which forty years ago were at once the most dreaded and the most frequent of the minor deformities. The improve- ment, always, mind, in a strictly limited class which hardly considers the cost of food, is manifest at every turn, and is re- ported not only by every artist, but every caricaturist in the country. The undersized lads and skinny girls have disappeared from pictures of the middle class, even when drawn with dis- tinctly hostile intent.
Food has been helped by training. It has become a custom to let girls live in the open air, to suffer them to play games which thirty years since would have been pronounced "hoy- denish "—then a most opprobrious adjective—and even to train them through gymnastics with scientific attention and regularity. They may take as much exercise as they like, and owing to the partly accidental introduction of vigorous games in which both sexes can share, they like to take a good deal. " Ladies' cricket" and " ladies' golf " are imitative tricks, with nothing to recommend them but the open air ; but lawn-tennis is sharp, healthy work, a great deal better than the hay- making of the last century, which overtaxed the spine, and so are riding, as now practised, and the walk of eight or ten miles, even if it ends in a rather fatiguing trudge. Exercise of that kind, while it makes the boys lissom, sets the girls up, a change which is no doubt one cause of their apparent increase in height. They stand on their feet and stand up as their grandmothers, with all their drilling on backboards and injunctions to sit straight up against chair-backs, which were Ortnres, never did. The girls stand like soldiers, without their stiffness ; and because they can do it, and know they can, they fall instinctively into a style of dress which displays their ability, which recognises, for example, the place of the waist in the human figure. Girls do not " lollop " now, have, indeed, almost forgotten a word which forty years ago was incessantly in their seniors' mouths, and was the origin in thousands of cases of positive physical harm. A well-bred girl nowadays does not sit as if she were listening to a rebuke, and stiffening herself to disregard it ; but she does not " lollop," any more than she ties her waist-belt about five inches too high.
We suppose, also, that there has been a positive change in taste, such as occurs at least once in every fifty years, and that tall men and maidens, being appreciated, are more noticed, and therefore seem to the observer's eye more numerous ; but we wonder whether there is or is not another cause at work, whether, that is, the approval of a type posi- tively produces that type in answer to the demand. This seems to be absurd, unless, indeed, we grant so many genera- tions that any cause for selection would tell on the species ;
but nevertbless, those who believe the theory have a great deal of evidence to produce in their favour. No one ever studies the history of a generation, carefully reviewing its portraits as well as its biographies, without being struck with the pre- valence of a predominant type, especially among women. You cannot mistake Holbein's great ladies, whose faces have always character and seldom soul ; or the ladies of the Puritan houses; or the women of Charles IL's Court ; or the beauties of the early years of George III.; or the " fine women" of Cruikshank's day, women who, whether it was his fault or not, now all appear to have positively unnatural cheeks. If they were all married women, the explanation would be simple, for the fact would merely mean this, that taste having taken a definite direction, those who pleased it suc- ceeded in marriage, and were therefore the principal subjects of the portrait-painters ; but the existence of a type extends to unmarried women too, and to well-born lads, and seems, we confess, quite beyond a perfect explanation. A little may be due to the varied education of each generation—the graciously thoughtful type of to-day, with its careful modelling and tendency towards a Greek outline, either in ivory or fine flesh-tints, is, for example, a clear result of culture—and a little more to positive effort, every girl and nearly every young man trying to realise in themselves the understood ideal— for example, completely altering in accordance with it the arrangement of the hair—and much must be allowed for dress, but there is something else nevertheless. We suspect that the general consensus of a society as to the conditions of beauty does modify the kind of beauty prevalent in that society, and that we only exaggerate the degree in which the alteration occurs. That exaggeration is natural,—first, because we always find more or less what we look for; and secondly, because we judge much from pictures, and artists cannot help giving the type-influence which they so clearly perceive something more than its fair weight. For all that, there is a type specially acceptable to each generation, and it is difficult not to speculate, as one turns over a volume of sketches of society, what the next one will be. Imitation helps to settle the type of beauty, just as it helps to settle—in Europe only—the ever-changing type of dress ? If the general tendency indicates the law, the next type should be slightly Oriental, for it is the East which is in the ascendant, and the East prefers the low, broad brow, rounded contours, and black eyes ; but the " fashion" is just as likely to be set by a great actress, a great heroine, or a great Queen. Were there any brunettes at all in Queen Elizabeth's Court ?
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