e English
community. It thus comes about that when we are in northern France we find
that gray eyes, a very fair but yet unfreckled complexion, brown hair,
finely molded features, and highly sensitive facial expression combine to
constitute a type which is more beautiful than any other we meet in
France, and it belongs to the fairest section of the French population.
When we cross over to England, however, unless we go to a so-called
"Celtic" district, it is hopeless to seek among the blondest section of
the community for any such beautiful and refined type. The English
beautiful woman, though she may still be fair, is by no means very fair,
and from the English standpoint she may even sometimes appear somewhat
dark:[164] In determining what I call the index of pigmentation--or degree
of darkness of the eyes and hair--of different groups in the National
Portrait Gallery I found that the "famous beauties" (my own personal
criterion of beauty not being taken into account) was somewhat nearer to
the dark than to the light end of the scale.[165] If we consider, at
random, individual instances of famous English beauties they are not
extremely fair. Lady Venetia Stanley, in the early seventeenth century,
who became the wife of Sir Kenelm Digby, was somewhat dark, with brown
hair and eyebrows. Mrs. Overall, a little later in the same century, a
Lancashire woman, the wife of the Dean of St. Paul's, was, says Aubrey,
"the greatest beauty in her time in England," though very wanton, with
"the loveliest eyes that were ever seen"; if we may trust a ballad given
by Aubrey she was dark with black hair. The Gunnings, the famous beauties
of the eighteenth century, were not extremely fair, and Lady Hamilton, the
most characteristic type of English beauty, had blue, brown-flecked eyes
and dark chestnut hair. Coloration is only one of the elements of beauty,
though an important one. Other things being equal, the most blonde is most
beautiful; but it so happens that among the races of Great Britain the
other things are very frequently not equal, and that, notwithstanding a
conviction ingrained in the language, with us the fairest of women is not
always the "fairest." So magical, however, is the effect of brilliant
coloring that it serves to keep alive in popular opinion an unqualified
belief in the universal European creed of the beauty of blondness.

We have seen that underlying the conception of beauty, more especially as
it manifests its