Or take our own country. While Velasquez was painting the princes and beggars of Spain, Vandyck was painting the princes and nobles of our own Court. By comparison with the faces of Velasquez, the faces of Vandyck are shallow and sentimental; but no one will deny that they are handsome faces. No one will deny, for example, that Charles I. was as handsome as any king we have had in the last century. And I suppose, judging by the records of the young Milton, it would be difficult to find in all our millions to-day a face of equal beauty to his.
I am not suggesting by all this that, so far from growing more handsome, we are growing less handsome. The probability is that the proportion of handsome faces remains about the same in all generations. But no doubt time changes the lines both of face and form. I am told that the armour in the Tower worn by the warriors of the past would be too tight a fit for the average well-developed man of to-day, and I suppose our jaws have narrowed, for the skulls of ancient peoples are remarkable for the evenness of the teeth, while to-day the bulk of us have more teeth than we have room for, and have to have some out or carry them sideways. Changes like these are due to changed conditions—softer foods, more knowledge of the body and its needs, and so on. Women, for example, are taller than they were a few generations ago when convention denied them the muscular exercises of to-day. The coming of the bicycle was their real emancipation. It abolished the long skirt, gave them the freedom of their limbs, and in the end the freedom of their minds. They are not more beautiful than their grandmothers were, but they are different. Perhaps they are better.
IN PRAISE OF MAIDEN AUNTS
I have received a rebuke from a lady at Cardiff, that, though unmerited, calls for respectful attention. In an article written during the crisis in Anglo-French relations, I said that the visits of English Ministers to M. Poincaré made as little impression on him as a visit from his maiden aunt would do. My correspondent takes the illustration as an affront to maiden aunts. "Is a maiden aunt in your opinion the most contemptible thing on earth?" she demands. "If you would say 'Yes,' please open your eyes and think again. If you would say 'No,' will you kindly help us to scotch this vulgar lie by refraining from using this irrelevant metaphor?"
I offer my correspondent and the whole company of maiden aunts a sincere assurance that in taking their names in vain I had no intention to imply a contempt which I certainly did not feel, and which, if I had felt, would have been dishonouring not to them but to me. I wanted to emphasise the disregard of M. Poincaré for the views of the British Government, and chose an illustration which I thought effective. I assumed that however much M. Poincaré loved his maiden aunt (if he has a maiden aunt) he did not act on her advice in state affairs. I still hold that view. I shall give his maiden aunt the credit of thinking that if he followed her opinion he would act with much more wisdom than he has shown. That, I admit, was not in my mind when I wrote, and I will not advance it now as a means of dodging my correspondent's arrow. But while I confess that I thought that maiden aunts were not the persons that prime ministers usually consulted on high politics, I did not mean that they were contemptible or negligible on that account. Maiden aunts, I rejoice to say, have happier and cleaner affairs to occupy them than politics.
Take the most illustrious of all maiden aunts, the dear, lovable, unforgettable Betsy Trotwood. I have had many affairs of the heart in fiction, from Rosalind to Tess, but I do not think that there is any woman who lives in books who ever won my affection more securely and uninterruptedly than Miss Trotwood. It is a pleasure merely to write her name. It must be nearly fifty years since I made that amazing journey with David Copperfield on the Dover road, but I still remember the first meeting with Aunt Betsy as I remember no other adventure in life. David was at his last gasp and I was at my last gasp with him. We could bear no more. And then, looking over the gate—the best-known gate in literature except that "wicket-gate" of another immortal journey—we saw that radiant woman appear with her handkerchief tied over her cap, her gardening gloves on, and her pruning knife in her hand, and there followed that thrilling welcome, the memory of which sweeps over the mind like a wave of glory.
I am told that the boys of to-day do not make that journey on the Dover road, and do not know what it is to feel Aunt Betsy collar them and take them into the parlour and dose them, and bath them and put their tired limbs to bed. Unhappy boys! What a bare, disinherited life is theirs! I would not sacrifice Betsy Trotwood for any memory I have, or the Dover road that brought me to her for any golden road to Samarkand. But I do not recall that Betsy Trotwood cared twopence about politics, or ever mentioned them. She had more serious interests. There were the donkeys to keep at bay, there was Mr. Dick's great mind, "as sharp as a surgeon's lancet," to inquire into, there was her garden, and there was her nephew.
What would David have done without that sublime woman? What would any nephews and nieces do if there were no maiden aunts? Betsy Trotwood was the perfect type and pattern of all the tribe. "There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and carriage." Listen to the fly-driver of whom David and I inquired the way:
"Trotwood?" said he. "Let me see. I know the name too. Old lady?"