Beauty of Deportment
It is essential that every lady should understand that the most beautiful and well-dressed woman will fail to be charming unless all her other attractions are set off with a graceful and fascinating deportment. A pretty face may be seen everywhere, beautiful and gorgeous dresses are common enough, but how seldom do we meet with a really beautiful and enchanting demeanour! It was this charm of deportment which suggested to the French cardinal the expression of "the native paradise of angels." The first thing to be said on the art of deportment is that what is becoming at one age would be most improper and ridiculous at another. For a young girl, for instance, to sit as grave and stiff as "her grandmother cut in alabaster" would be ridiculous enough, but not so much so, as for an old woman to assume the romping merriment of girlhood. She would deservedly draw only contempt and laughter upon herself.
Indeed a modest mien always makes a woman charming. Modesty is to woman what the mantle of green is to nature—its ornament and highest beauty. What a miracle-working charm there is in a blush—what softness and majesty in natural simplicity, without which pomp is contemptible, and elegance itself ungraceful.
There can be no doubt that the highest incitement to love is in modesty. So well do wise women of the world know this, that they take infinite pains to learn to wear the semblance of it, with the same tact, and with the same motive that they array themselves in attractive apparel. They have taken a lesson from Sir Joshua Reynolds, who says: "men are like certain animals who will feed only when there is but little provender, and that got at with difficulty through the bars of a rack; but refuse to touch it when there is an abundance before them." It is certainly important that all women should understand this; and it is no more than fair that they should practise upon it, since men always treat them with disingenuous untruthfulness in this matter. Men may amuse themselves with a noisy, loud-laughing, loquacious girl; it is the quiet, subdued, modest, and seeming bashful deportment which is the one that stands the fairest chance of carrying off their hearts.
APPENDIX II
EXTRACTS FROM "LOLA MONTEZ' LECTURES"
Beautiful Women
he last and most difficult office imposed on Psyche was to descend to the lower regions and bring back a portion of Proserpine's beauty in a box. The too inquisitive goddess, impelled by curiosity or perhaps by a desire to add to her own charms, raised the lid, and behold there issued forth—a vapour I which was all there was of that wondrous beauty.
In attempting to give a definition of beauty, I have painfully felt the force of this classic parable. If I settle upon a standard of beauty in Paris, I find it will not do when I get to Constantinople. Personal qualities, the most opposite imaginable, are each looked upon as beautiful in different countries, and even by different people of the same country. That which is deformity in New York may be beauty in Pekin. At one place the sighing lover sees "Helen" in an Egyptian brow. In China, black teeth, painted eyelids, and plucked eyebrows are beautiful; and should a woman's feet be large enough to walk upon, their owners are looked upon as monsters of ugliness.
With the modern Greeks and other nations on the shores of the Mediterranean, corpulency is the perfection of form in a woman; the very attributes which disgust the western European form the highest attractions of an Oriental fair. It was from the common and admired shape of his countrywomen that Reubens, in his pictures, delights in a vulgar and almost odious plumpness. He seems to have no idea of beauty under two hundred pounds. His very Graces are all fat.
Hair is a beautiful ornament of woman, but it has always been a disputed point as to what colour it shall be. I believe that most people nowadays look upon a red head with disfavour—but in the times of Queen Elizabeth it was in fashion. Mary of Scotland, though she had exquisite hair of her own, wore red fronts out of compliment to fashion and the red-headed Queen of England.
That famous beauty, Cleopatra, was red-haired also; and the Venetian ladies to this day counterfeit yellow hair.
Yellow hair has a higher authority still. The Order of the Golden Fleece, instituted by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, was in honour of a frail beauty whose hair was yellow.
So, ladies and gentlemen, this thing of beauty which I come to talk about, has a somewhat migratory and fickle standard of its own. All the lovers of the world will have their own idea of the thing in spite of me.
But where are we to detect this especial source of power? Often forsooth in a dimple, sometimes beneath the shade of an eyelid or perhaps among the tresses of a little fantastic curl!
I once knew a nobleman who used to try to make himself wise, and to emancipate his heart from its thraldom to a celebrated beauty of the court, by continually repeating to himself: "But it is short-lived," "It won't last—it won't last!"
Ah, me! that is too true—it won't last. Beauty has its date, and it is the penalty of nature that girls must fade and become wizened as their grandmothers have done before them.
In teaching a young lady to dress elegantly we must first impress upon her mind that symmetry of figure ought ever to be accompanied by harmony of dress, and that there is a certain propriety in habiliment, adapted to form, complexion, and age. To preserve the health of the human form is the first object of consideration, for without that you can neither maintain its symmetry nor improve its beauty. But the foundation of a just proportion must be laid in infancy. "As the twig is bent the tree's inclined." A light dress, which gives freedom to the functions of life, is indispensable to an unobstructed growth. If the young fibres are uninterrupted by obstacles of art, they will shoot harmoniously into the form which nature drew. The garb of childhood should in all respects be easy—not to impede its movements by ligatures on the chest, the loins, the legs, or the arms. By this liberty we shall see the muscles of the limbs gradually assume the fine swell and insertion which only unconstrained exercise can produce. The chest will sway gracefully on the firmly poised waist, swelling in noble and healthy expanse, and the whole figure will start forward at the blooming age of youth, and early ripen to the maturity of beauty.
The lovely form of women, thus educated, or rather thus left to its natural growth, assumes a variety of charming characters. In one youthful figure, we see the lineaments of a wood nymph, a form slight and elastic in all its parts. The shape:
"Small by degrees, and beautifully less,
From the soft bosom to the slender waist!"
A foot as light as that of her whose flying step scarcely brushed the "unbending corn," and limbs whose agile grace moved in harmony with the curves of her swan-like neck, and the beams of her sparkling eyes.
To repair these ravages, comes the aid of padding to give shape where there is none, stays to compress into form the swelling chaos of flesh, and paints of all hues to rectify the dingy complexion; but useless are these attempts—for, if dissipation, late hours, immoderation, and carelessness have wrecked the loveliness of female charms, it is not in the power of Esculapius himself to refit the shattered bark, or of the Syrens, with all their songs and wiles, to save its battered sides from the rocks, and make it ride the sea in gallant trim again. The fair lady who cannot so moderate her pursuit of pleasure that the feast, the midnight hour, the dance, shall not recur too frequently, must relinquish the hope of preserving her charms till the time of nature's own decay. After this moderation in the indulgence of pleasure, the next specific for the preservation of beauty which I shall give, is that of gentle and daily exercise in the open air. Nature teaches us, in the gambols and sportiveness of the lower animals, that bodily exertion is necessary for the growth, vigour, and symmetry of the animal frame; while the too studious scholar and the indolent man of luxury exhibit in themselves the pernicious consequences of the want of exercise.
Many a rich lady would give thousands of dollars for that full rounded arm, and that peach bloom on the cheek, possessed by her kitchen-maid. Well, might she not have had both, by the same amount of exercise and simple living?
But I weary of this subject of cosmetics, as every woman of sense will at last weary of the use of them. It is a lesson which is sure to come; but, in the lives of most fashionable ladies, it has small chance of being needed until that unmentionable time, when men shall cease to make baubles and playthings of them. It takes most women two-thirds of their lifetime to discover that men may be amused by, without respecting, them; and every woman may make up her mind that to be really respected she must possess merit; she must have accomplishments of mind and heart, and there can be no real beauty without these. If the soul is without cultivation, without refinement, without taste, without the sweetness of affection, not all the mysteries of art can make the face beautiful; and, on the other hand, it is impossible to dim the brightness of an elegant and polished mind; its radiance strikes through the encasements of deformity, and asserts its sway over the world of the affections.