All that I have said on this subject applies with even greater force to girls and women than it does to youths and men. Women, alas, as I have before remarked, have the worser part in life. No one but a physician sees how much of their wretchedness is owing to ignorance or neglect of the laws of physical health. There is no excuse for this in this day. The wicked old doctrine which taught that ignorance of their own nature is a necessary condition of innocence in girls ought long since to have been cast out of window. It is as false as that the seclusion of a harem is necessary to insure the virtue of wives. In nine cases out of ten a woman’s health in life depends on the care she
exercises between early puberty and the birth of her first child; and this is the precise period when the prejudices of society strive to keep her in profoundest ignorance of the laws which govern her own bodily functions!
More delightful to any true woman than the pleasures of health or the praise of her faculties is the adoration compelled by her beauty. Madame de Stael regretted that she could not exchange her magnificent powers and her literary fame for the personal charms of Madame Recamier. She was right. Let no woman be persuaded to abate one jot or tittle in her cult and culture of the comely in face and form. Only cramped bigots and dull pedants cheapen the value of beauty.
Beauty is real; it is that which alone is permanent and visible; it lurks behind a thousand masks and distorted countenances, ever struggling to body itself forth; it is the manifestation of potent and mysterious natural laws, which but for it would remain forever hidden from us. Its proud power is to awaken Love with all her joyous train; and Love means the unconscious attraction of the Ideal, the noblest incitement to human endeavor.
These are not mere phrases. They are facts proved by the life-history of the human race. As nations advance in civilization from the savage condition to one of enlightenment, their ideals of physical beauty steadily near a definite and the same conception of the perfect human form, the underlying motive of which is the highest function and a perfected capacity. This progress is rapid in proportion as
that which is peculiarly human in man is cultivated beyond that which is merely animal. Not that any rigid canon of proportion or mechanical norm will ever be attained; because the endeavor is toward the Ideal, and this is beyond the reach of mortals.
These are the teachings of the learned in the Science of Man; they are constantly supported by the experience of history. Beauty is and ever has been the Desire of all Nations. For it, in all time, men have counted as nought their honor, their gold, and their hopes of heaven. For it, they have poured their heart’s blood on a thousand stricken fields, and laughed at death and hell. Think you that the noblest of the race would have thus reckoned the world well lost, and paid all that, wisdom holds precious for a smile from the lips of loveliness, were there not some strange and wondrous compensation, some immortal and unearthly significance, in Beauty itself?
There is such significance, and nowhere is it so visible as in the perfect female face and form. This is the most beautiful of all objects in nature or art. To it we turn to gaze, forgetting the works of the greatest masters which may be spread before us; unmindful of the sublimest scenes which mountain and lake may combine to show us. Nearer than anything else does it bring us to that Ideal World whose margin forever recedes as we approach it; louder in its presence sound the tinkling bells of that Fairyland which guards the fruition of our sweetest hopes and dreams.
The beauty of woman has been the incentive of physical
progress in the race and the inspiration of its noblest arts. It shadows forth the embodied ideal of humanity, and in its resistless strength binds men as slaves to its chariot. But does it confer happiness on the possessor? Sad and faithful is the reply of the poet—