PART VIII.
THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL.
“Onely man,” says Sir Philip Sidney quaintly, meaning by “man” what we term a human creature, for there is here no sex limitation, “onely man, and no beast, hath that gift, to discerne beauty.”
When “that gift” is of generous proportions, as happens once in a while, there is given the further ability to discern “something than beauty dearer.” That phrase is a poet’s. Beauty has been from of old a theme of poets, and the poets of this country, from Chaucer to Browning, have made beautiful girls their theme. Chaucer has good and bad to tell of them. The good may be read in many a tale, and the bad will be best left unread. Browning has good and bad to tell of them. There is good told of “beautiful Evelyn Hope—sixteen years old when she died,” and there is bad told of “the beautiful girl, too white, who lived at Pornic by the sea,” the girl who hoarded gold.
Browning, perhaps better than any English poet who ever lived, could describe a beautiful girl’s face and incidentally point out a thing in it detracting from its beauty. He does this with remarkable directness in his poem called “A Face,” which opens—
“If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!
No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
In the pure profile; not as when she laughs,
For that spoils all.”
SPOILT
How did that girl laugh? Probably as too many an English girl laughs—riotously. Of such an one was said a little while hence: “When she laughs, there seems no room left in the world for any other sound.”
The loose use of the word “beautiful” in English is largely commented on by foreign visitors to this country. The many English faces that are lovely in colour must strike everyone, but that only a minority of these are lovely in line is undeniable. Now a face to be beautiful must be lovely in colour and in line.
“Health and mirth make beauty,” says a Spanish proverb wrongly. They do not so, though they make what is by many deemed a better thing than beauty, being that lovely and pleasant thing named comeliness.
The following is a question put by a girl—
“Can a girl with a bad nose be called beautiful?”
That is a question which one is tempted to meet with the counter-question—
What is a bad nose?
A bad man—and even, alas! a bad woman—is a thing conceivable; but—a bad nose—No.
The thing meant by this girl, it has transpired, is an unbeautiful nose. Certainly a girl with such a nose, suppose it to take the form of a tip-tilted nose, cannot be called beautiful. For her consolation, let her be told that she can fairly be called pleasing, the actual fact, it would seem, being that a tip-tilted nose sets a girl in one matter at an advantage. A London journalist some little time ago gave his readers this piece of information—
“One of those statisticians who find out what others cannot find out asserts that girls with retroussé noses marry sooner than young ladies with Greek and Roman noses.”
A NEW READING.
The retrousseau nose
That is a remarkable assertion, not the least remarkable thing about it being the phrasing of it—“girls with retroussé noses,” “young ladies with Greek and Roman noses.”
Welladay!
If it be conceded, as I think it must be, that classical outline is an essential part of beauty, “young ladies” with Greek and Roman noses are not without one feature essentially beautiful. In the case of those with Greek noses, there are commonly other features satisfying the severest exactions in regard to beauty. This fact notwithstanding, the faces in question may be so far from pleasing to those who look, as the poet did, for something than beauty dearer, as to bring upon themselves the censure contained in certain words by Shakespeare—
“This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving,
And yet so fast asleep.”
Beautiful faces too often lack animation.
As a natural consequence, beautiful faces lack another thing. A young face to be pleasing must hold out a promise, just as an older face to be pleasing must tell a story. Now there are more unbeautiful young faces that hold out a promise than there are beautiful young faces that do this, just as there are more unbeautiful older faces that tell a story than there are beautiful older faces that do this.
In like manner, the regularity of line that is a main part of beauty is often attended by defects in another direction, calculated to arouse comment such as the following, being a speech made in reference to a woman of great beauty—
“Her profile is delicious, but her full face is an empty face.”
The woman in question lacked somewhat in intellectuality. A beautiful woman—so fairly on the whole are gifts distributed—is rarely a clever woman, and a beautiful girl is often a goose. Thus it was a beautiful girl of not ten but twenty years of age, who put to paper this account of Spain—
“That is where the Inquisition was, and there are bull-fights there, and the ladies wear black on their heads, and Westward Ho! was there.”
It was a beautiful girl who asked lately—
“Has a cow horns?”
To which the counter-query put by an unbeautiful girl was—
“Did you ever hear of the nursery rhyme of ‘the cow with the crumpled horn’?”
It was a beautiful girl who wrote of a sailor as unfurling the anchor, who spoke of the dress of a Chinese mandoline, who answered the question put by a Frenchwoman, “What is the English for raison d’être?” in the words, “Raison d’être is English,” and who formed one in a dialogue which took the following turn—
He: “What are dead languages.”
She: “The languages which were spoken by the dead Romans and Greeks.”
He: “But how could the dead Romans and Greeks speak?”
She: “Silly!”
He: “‘Silly’ yourself!”
Not only do beauty and stupidity often go hand in hand, but beauty and commonplace affections often do this. Butterflies love the flavour of cabbage, and some beautiful girls—by their own confession—“love” onions. It is no crime to like onions, but to “love” them is to waste sweetness.
PARIS UP TO DATE
That vanity, as a whole, is less often met with in beautiful girls than in unbeautiful ones is a well-known fact, and it is a fact which I am so little inclined to challenge that I give the following cases as being to my full belief exceptions to the rule.
A beautiful girl, known to me, while really very young poses as being very much younger. Her age is seventeen or thereabouts, and she poses as being fourteen. If her age were forty or thereabouts, and she posed as being seventeen, one would more easily forgive her. She will derive the benefit of this mental bias some twenty years hence.
The fashion-plate girl
In the case of another beautiful girl known to me, so much of her is dress that her appearance seems to warrant what once seemed to me an unwarrantable piece of English, being the following extract from a society paper of the year 1887—
“Among the younger ladies was a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice.”
At first reading of that I asked myself, “What sort of a young lady is a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice?”
I do not ask myself that question now.
HEART VERY HARD AND IN THE WRONG PLACE
Thirdly, a beautiful girl of my acquaintance has a face with what her enemy calls “Inspection invited” all over it. That is unbeautiful phrasing, but the charge thus levelled is not without foundation in fact. One hopes that some day there may happen to this girl what there happened once to a beautiful girl. She looked in the glass to see her face, and she saw her heart, and that day all vanity left her.
As a picture of a beautiful girl I give in conclusion the following:—
The Girl with the Face, described by one who knew her.
She used to pass my windows.
She had a face of quite perfect loveliness, the mouth and eyes very merry, and flashing brown hair that hung open to her waist.
She was slightly deformed, her figure being thrown on one side, like the leaf of a begonia. I never liked the leaf of a begonia until I came to see her.
In all I may have seen her a hundred times, then she ceased passing my windows, and after a while they brought me news that she was dead. By special favour, they let me see her lying in her coffin, and this is how she looked:—Her mouth, that had always been very merry, was quite grave, and her hands were folded on her breast. They had put a rose in one of them, and it laid its soft round cheek against her breast. Some of them—this vexes me still as I write it—had tried to lay her hair about her so as to hide that slight deformity that made her lie like a begonia leaf.
This girl was in death, as she had been in life, the most beautiful girl I ever saw.
(To be concluded.)