The women of England, not to say of Scotland, have of late years lain under the reproach that they are ceasing to be possessed of the fatal gift of beauty. I am well aware that there is not a reviewer exercising his calling between Land’s End and John o’ Groats who will not profess to foam at the mouth on the strength of this statement. Yet the fact remains that ugliness is rapidly becoming the common heritage of English women and Scotch women alike. There is an old superstition, not, of course, tolerable to the minds of the smart people of to-day, that wickedness, or, not to put too fine a point upon it, ugliness of temperament is calculated gradually to induce ugliness of physique. Without going into the question of the general wickedness of Anglo-Saxon femininity, we may put it down for a scientific fact that the beauty of them is wearing away—let us hope to the land of the leal. In those remarkably æsthetic organs which sell fifty process-block portraits per week for sixpence, we are treated continually to what the editors take for types of English beauty. You pay your sixpence and you open your hot-pressed beauty-show. On the first page—that is, of course, after the advertisements—you have a speaking presentment of something with elaborate hair and an inexhaustible fund of torso which, frankly, might pass very well for a sign to a public-house called “The Bald-faced Stag.” Beneath you read in capital letters “Miss or Mrs. So and So—The Famous Beauty.” No woman in England apparently is allowed to know whether she be beautiful or not until either Mr. Keble Howard Bell or Mr. J. M. Bulloch has so labeled her; Bell and Bulloch being, of course, the only possible judges of feminine beauty England possesses. In the politest circles it is quite dangerous to praise a woman’s good looks without reference to the files of The Sketch and The Tatler. A certain nobleman, however, is understood to have earned something of a reputation for himself as connoisseur by openly avowing his contempt for both sheets, and surreptitiously swotting up the picture pages of the Daily Mirror. This, however, like the Daily Mirror, is probably neither here nor there. The solemn fact remains that the beauty of England’s fairest daughters and Scotland’s bonniest lasses alike, has become a doubtful quantity. Any person who is troubled with qualms on the subject need only visit a Court, or the Opera, or Messrs. Peter Robinson’s, or an A. B. C. shop, or a mothers’ meeting. Hard faces, bleary eyes, saw teeth, humpy shoulders, and an undignified gait, not to mention greasy complexions, scanty hair, bony hands and knock knees, are the rule and not the exception among English womankind. We have scarcely a beauty left, even at the Gaiety Theater. In fact, leaving out the ravishing pictures of the illustrated press, there are really only two beautiful women in England, and both of these are married to reviewers. Now, I say and maintain that any male person, possessed of an eye for the charms of what is commonly called the opposite sex, will find that in Ireland the decay of female beauty has not yet commenced. Whether he be in Dublin or in Cork, in Sligo or in Limerick, pretty women take his vision—as the daffodils take the winds of March—at every corner. In fine, it may be said without exaggeration that if Ireland possesses a characteristic which renders her entirely different from the countries to which, on the face of it, she displays a sort of second hand, tumble-down resemblance, it is the prettiness of her women. I take it for granted that this trait has been commented upon by other travelers; but I do not think that it has heretofore been in any sense properly impressed upon the public mind. It is generally understood among artists that Irish women have delicate hands and an eye with a sparkle about it. Irish poets, in more or less halting English verse, have done their best to indicate that Irish women are, to say the least of it, worth looking at. But I am not aware that on the whole the literature about Ireland insists, to anything like a reasonable degree, on the beauty of Irish women. If the present work were from the “exquisite” pen of Mr. Arthur Symons, our failure adequately to portray the beauty of Erin’s daughters would, no doubt, be counterbalanced by the insertion of a selection of half-tone portraits of representative specimens. As it is we are compelled to admit that words fail us, and that, even if we cared to employ them, the process-block makers would fail us also.
It may be said roughly, that the beauty of an Irish woman, while quite tangible and perfect to the vision, is an elusive matter when one comes to cold type. The Anglo-Saxon beauty can be hit off in words, quite as handily as she can be hit off in paint. What she amounts to as a rule is pink and white, and yellow hair, or mouse-colored hair, and a genteel pallidity. But in Ireland all this is different, beauty of a witching and almost eerie quality is a commonplace throughout the country. An Irishman will speak to you of “the red-haired woman,” or “that shlip of a girl,” when he means pieces of loveliness that Titian might have given his eye teeth for a sight of. In France at the present moment there is an artist who is understood to be making a fortune by drawing pretty faces. He could find more subjects for his pencil in a day in Dublin than he could find in a month in Paris. For this information I make no charge. Even Mr. Gibson, who appears to have invented a “girl” of his own, might do very well out of the green country. Mr. Gibson’s young lady is believed to typify the fairest that the United States of America can boast. At times, and when Mr. Gibson is at his best, she is undoubtedly a young woman of prepossessing appearance. That she is also a truly American type may be taken for granted. There are plenty of women in Ireland, however, who come quite up to the Gibson girl standard, and for that matter beat it. In journeying through the country I have been struck continually by the remarkable facial resemblance which exists between the Irish and the American people. In an Irish railway train you see faces which at once give you the impression that you are at the Hotel Cecil. The high cheek bones and lank shaven jaw of the full-blooded American are here in great force, and it is only when their possessors open their mouths that you can tell the difference. Of course, the thing is accounted for by the fact that a very considerable proportion of the population of America is Irish, and that for a hundred years Ireland has been sending her best blood to those states.
Besides being comely, the Irish women have the advantage of what one may term an individual beauty. In England you might rake together twenty beautiful blondes and twenty pretty brunettes, and discover that they were merely blondes and brunettes and nothing more. That is to say the blondes might readily pass for sisters, and so might the brunettes, both sorts lacking the ultimate gift of individuality. Irish women are different—indeed, you may safely say of them that they are all pretty and all different. They never repeat their beauty, there is nothing of the white rabbit or puss, puss, puss about them, and consequently they do not bore you. As most things have a cause it seems possible that there are reasons for the beauty of Irish womanhood. For myself I should be disposed to ascribe it to the circumstance that the average Irish woman, be she rich or poor, leads the life which a woman was intended to lead by the order of things, namely, the domestic life. Irish women are not without the wit to know that they are beautiful; they have an armory of feminine allurements, and wit enough to handle them with skill, and they cannot be considered insensible to the fripperies which all women love. But they do not make gaiety and ostentation the aim and end of their existence, and they do not shirk the plain duties of womanhood. In Ireland, though the women of the poorer classes have to work in the fields and undertake tasks which by good rights should be done by men, there is absolutely no third sex. The manly woman, the emancipated woman, and the impertinent flat-chested typewriter banger, which so infest Great Britain, are unknown. Even the Irish sportswoman—and, as everybody knows, she is pretty numerous—retains her womanliness in a way that is quite beyond the horsey or doggy woman of the Shires. So that in one respect at least Ireland may be reckoned something of a paradise.
CHAPTER XI
THE LONDON IRISH
The Irishman in London appears to lose a great deal of his luster. If you wish to see him at his best in this Metropolis you must go to the Bar. If you wish to see him at his worst you must go to the House of Commons. And both best and worst are pretty bad. The Irishmen at the Bar shall not be named, but all the world knows that they are a fairly ill-conditioned community—savage, rude, reasonably illiterate, and not in the least witty. Many of them model themselves on the late Lord Russell and come off accordingly. Others again are beefy and vulgar and notorious bullies. The judicial bench does not include an Irish judge. Possibly this is fortunate. In London journalism the Irish scarcely count. Mr. W. M. Thompson edits a sheet called Reynolds’s Newspaper to the complete satisfaction of Mr. Clement Shorter, and Mr. T. P. O’Connor edits T. P.’s Weekly and M. A. P., both of them journals with which London could well afford to dispense. As for Irish reporters and sub-editors, they are few and timid and well under the heel of the Scotch, who are numerous and rampant and unblushing. In the minor professions, such as physic, publishing, and stockbroking, the Irish do not figure at all impressively. The truly great physicians of London are mostly Scotch, so—thank Heaven!—are the truly great publishers; while the stockbrokers are commonly believed to belong to the tribe of Manasseh. Of the politicians a great deal more has been written than the politicians are worth. Let us draw a decent green veil over them. Few Englishmen nowadays know which of them is alive and which of them is dead; neither can one tell off-hand whether they are for the Government or agin it. I have heard rumors of the existence in London of an Irish Literary Society. Somewhere in Holborn there exists, too, I am told, an Irish Club. So far as letters are concerned, London is pretty well denuded of Irishmen. Mr. George Moore no longer abides with us. Mr. W. B. Yeats has latterly preferred Dublin to the Euston Road. Mr. George Bernard Shaw has become an American playwright. If these gentlemen are members of the Irish Literary Society so much the better for the Irish Literary Society. There is an Irish poetess resident in Twickenham, but Who’s Who informs us that her Celtic quality has not been stimulated by a sojourn in her native land. The Irish Club would seem to devote itself to “Smokers,” “Socials,” and “Enjoyable Evenings.” Its saturnalia are duly reported in Reynolds’s Newspaper. Probably the most distinguished Irishman in the Metropolis is Sir Thomas Lipton, whose name is as prominently associated with sport as it is with tea. Then there are the Irish Guards, one of the finest bodies of men in the King’s service, and Mr. Dennis O’Sullivan, England’s only Irish actor. It will thus be seen that the London Irish do not shine effulgently. None of them is at the top of things, as it were; none of them has got very far above the middling. The reason no doubt is that the Irish temperament is coy. The Scotchman who comes to London knows that he is an alien and an interloper, and despised of his fellow-men, but he blusters it out. The Irishman, on the other hand, feels his position keenly and refuses to be other than diffident. As a rule, too, he is without commercial aptitude, and not vastly taken with the blessed word thrift. Besides which, Irishmen do not come to London in droves, as do the Scotch. When they emigrate, their natural tendency is toward America. In any case it cannot be suggested that the London Irish have at any time presumed to be aggressive. Neither have they made pretensions to superiority, or exhibited a disposition to clannishness. That they do not count is therefore probably their own fault; for London, in a greater degree perhaps than any other city in the world, is always open to prostrate herself before the invader, providing he be assertive and pushful enough. Leaving out the more or less eminent, and glancing for a moment at the common rank of Irishmen in London, one is confronted with two facts, and two facts only. The first of them is that the London Irish can muster in sufficient force to make a St. Patrick’s Day concert or so financially successful, and the second is that the morning after, the metropolitan magistrates have invariably to deal with a fairly noble batch of Irish “drunks.” Practically this is all that is known by the Cockney respecting his Irish fellow-citizen, and I think that it is distinctly unfortunate for Ireland, because it fosters a false impression. The Scotch, who are wilier, take great care not to get drunk on St. Andrew’s Day.