MISS AUSTRALIA.
Everything goes by comparison. If I were unacquainted with England,
America, France, Germany and Italy, I might share the delusion cherished
by most Australian people--that your women are beautiful. But, having
seen the rose, how can I be content with the dandelion?
In accepting the praise of Miss Lily Brayton, your women should remember
that this popular actress had a royal time in Australia, and probably
was not unmindful of the possibilities of a return visit. No, I am not a
disgruntled actress who has found Australian audiences unappreciative of
my talent. I am merely a much-travelled woman blessed--or cursed--with
the faculty of being able to see things as they really are. When I say
that the women to be seen in the streets of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide
and Hobart are unattractive, I am merely stating the truth as it appeals
to me.
Someone with a surprising lack of humour--or an extra large share of
it--once wrote of the stately carriage of Australia's matrons and
daughters. In my travels in this country the number of women
encountered who knew how to walk might be counted on the fingers of one
hand. I have seen more grace among the factory girls of Poplar, among
the midinettes of the Latin Quarter, and among petticoated toughs of the
Bowery, than it has been my fortune to meet in Pitt-street or on the
Melbourne Block. Australian women don't walk. Those who don't waddle
with an unnatural movement of the hips, like a drake expressing his
satisfaction with an extra fat frog, affect a ridiculous mincing gait
that resembles nothing so much as the painful perambulation of a
youngster who takes off his boots on a hard, pebbly road for the first
time.
The best figure I have seen in Australia was that of a young girl of
about 18. She was beautifully moulded, with a bust to inspire a poet,
and hips of exquisite roundness. Generally speaking, Melbourne women are
more favoured in this respect than their Sydney sisters. Here, due
possibly to surf-bathing--the bust development is abnormal, while the
hips have a flat, board-like appearance. One Sydney woman with rounded
hips was introduced to me at tea at the Australia. She was so well
formed that I couldn't resist the temptation of testing her genuineness
with a hatpin. I don't say that she was padded--I only assert that she
took half an inch of steel without flinching!
The best complexions in the Commonwealth are seen at Hobart and
Toowoomba--in fact, there seems to be no really pretty skins at any
other places. Your women paint and powder too much. The spectacle of
young girls of 17 and 18 with rouged cheeks and carmine lips is an
absurdity in a country that believes that its women are beautiful.
The new short skirt about to be tried in Paris will never become
popular--Australian legs could not be held up to ridicule in that way.
It is noteworthy that while in other countries the girl with a pretty
ankle and a shapely calf is not unconscious of her charms, the
Australian woman is always careful to adjust her skirt on seating
herself in tram or train. Why? Because she regards it as immodest to
show her legs? The display on the surf beaches disposes of that idea.
The answer is found in the fact that, generally speaking, Australian
legs are better hidden from view. They are either thick and stocky at
the ankles, with a heap of ill-formed flesh above, or are thin almost to
the vanishing point. One misses the beautifully-rounded ankles and the
graceful tapering calves that peep from beneath petticoats in
Bond-street, the Avenue de l'Opera, and Fifth-avenue.
I was amused while at the Hotel Australia one afternoon last week to
notice that one "lady," who had evidently studied my first article in
the Sydney "Sun," was endeavouring to prove that local legs are worth
viewing. Her dress had been carefully adjusted so as to provide a
generous display of stocking reaching nearly to the knee. Like so many
people in a young country, where the polish and refinement that comes
from association with countries in which culture is a much more
highly-prized asset, is lacking, she failed to recognise the border line
that separates easy naturalness from sheer vulgarity. A woman who pulls
up her dress deliberately in order to show her legs is pitifully
immodest. The woman who, with malice aforethought, shows her legs is
vulgar, and the woman who takes all sorts of trouble to hide them is a
prude, but the woman who allows them to be viewed, if the position in
which she is seated permits their display, is unaffected and natural. In
the society in which I moved in England, France and America, both the
women and the men are frankly natural. Here there is, on the one hand, a
restraint that is ludicrous, and, on the other hand, a familiarity that
is indelicate.
Mr. Norman Lindsay--whose clever work I admired long before I came to
this supersensitive Commonwealth--has done me a service in subscribing
himself as the man who has seen more of the Australian girl than any of
his envious countrymen. If his knowledge is so extensive, and he is the
true artist that we all believe him to be, it follows that his drawing
must reflect the local type. And what do we find--the grace and beauty
over which so many of your frenzied correspondents have rhapsodised? Not
on your life. The Norman Lindsay girl is hardly a girl at all. With the
calves of a footballer and the upper limbs of a Sandow, she is a fearful
and wonderful example of the female form divine. The faces of Mr.
Lindsay's women remind me more than anything else of the religious
pictures of my youth, designed to represent the torments of hell, and to
frighten people into the narrow way. Your foremost black-and-whiter
admires the beauty of strength. Well, a draught horse with whiskers half
way up its legs is a beautiful thing to draw a heavy load of turnips or
road metal, but no one would think of comparing its ungainly proportions
with the symmetrical form of the thoroughbred racer. If Australia is
trying to breed a race of Amazons, well and good--you are getting along
very nicely. But if you are anxious to match your girls with the
comelier women of other countries--you have a perfectly clean palette,
as my old friend Charles Dana Gibson would put it.
People who read their history closely are familiar with the evolutionary
phases through which most young countries pass. Here is first the
halting, apologetic stage, represented in the case of Australia by its
early-day subservience to England and everything English. Nothing could
be any good that was not imported. The next stage was reached when you
began to produce a handful of clever men and women, whose success in
science, music, art, and sport laid the foundations of a belief that
gradually developed into arrogant big-headedness. If Australia could
produce a Brennan, a Melba, a Mackennal, a Trumper, an Arnst, and a
Gray, why should there be any limit to the fertility of its
genius-breeding soil? The idea tickled your vanity, and you allowed it
to grow recklessly. People who came from other countries saw your
weakness, recognised it as an inevitable phase in your progress towards
national sobriety and staidness, and said nice things about you. It made
the visitors' stay more pleasant, and, as you will in time grow out of
your folly, it helped rather than impeded your development.
Have you ever noticed a puppy let off the chain after being tied up for
a long time? He will jump and frisk as though jumping and frisking were
the things he was born for, and every time you pat him he bounds a
little higher. By-and-bye he begins to feel tired, his tail-wagging
becomes less vigorous, and eventually he sits down quietly and wonders
why he was silly enough to exert himself so needlessly. He notices,
too, that the other dog who watched him with amused tolerance isn't
quite such a mongrel as he seemed to be when he gambolled round him; in
fact, on closer inspection, he is recognised as being bigger and
possessing a shinier coat than his chastened observer. The puppy has
learned wisdom. But that pawing and prancing and hind leg foolishness
were a necessary part of his education, and every human caress helped
him along.
Australia is not yet through the cavorting stage, but it will grow out
of it in time, just as other countries have done. If I were an altruist
instead of an impartial observer, whose tongue and pen are always guided
by clear vision and ripened judgment, I would, I suppose, have helped on
the evolutionary process by feeding your vanity with the tablespoonsful
doses administered by other visitors. I know I have made myself very
unpopular because I wrote the truth as it appealed to me, but we all
can't take liberties with our consciences, even to please the women of
Australia.
I have been in this country for several months, so that I have had
plenty of opportunity of judging the external excellencies of my
self-confident southern sisters. The diagrams which I have prepared may
help my critics to understand what a perfect figure should look like.
The outline of the average Australian woman is shown alongside that of
my friend, Miss Maimie Valdervant, of Fifth-avenue, New York. The
colonial imperfections are easily distinguishable--the pouter-pigeon
breast, the low, flat hips, and the thick, stocky ankles. Miss
Valdervant is a beautifully moulded girl, but her shapeliness is not
unique. At a weekend party on the Adirondacks at least 10 of the 22
girls present were equally comely. Well do I remember the late
Stanford White saying, when someone remarked upon his display of
Phidias-chiselled womanhood, that it was nothing unusual. At the Grand
Prix meeting at Longchamps Count Pielliet's party was similarly
noteworthy; the same thing might be said of the late Viscount Avonmore's
famous gathering of 1907, in which I shared with Lady Marjorie Warshane
the honor of being the finest figured woman on the lawn.
Who is Valerie Desmond, that she should dare criticise the myriad
Venuses of Australia? What does she know of beauty? He who drives fat
oxen should himself be fat, and similarly she who writes of the feminine
form should have some pretensions to shapeliness herself. I append my
measurements for the benefit of my numerous critics:--
Height 5 ft. 5 in.
Weight 10 st. 3-1/2 lb.
Neck 14 in.
Bust 38-3/4 in.
Waist 25 in.
Hips 41 in.
Calf 14-1/2 in.
Ankle 7 in.
The fact that I was asked by the late Sir Edward Poynter to sit for one
of his classical studies indicates what a famous artist thought of these
proportions.
The reference by one visiting actress who attacked me in the paper to
Miss Annette Kellermann's perfection of figure amused me. Everyone in
America, if not in Australia, knows how much of her popularity is due to
beauty and how much to her press agent. Your clever and jolly water
nymph is anything but well balanced. Her legs are--or were when I last
saw them--much too thin for her superb bust. It is just the reverse with
Miss Pansy Montague (La Milo). The upper half of her spoils an
otherwise beautiful figure. The genius of Cruikshank--an Australian of
whom, in his own particular line, his country has reason to be
proud--makes amends for this deficiency. He was able to convince the
English public that La Milo was one of the most beautiful women living,
and the habit of admiring her became general. I remember drawing Mr.
W.T. Stead's attention to her comparatively puny bust, but so completely
had Cruikshank gulled him that he wouldn't hear a word against her.
[Illustration: THE AUSTRALIAN FIGURE. A PERFECT FORM.]
It is not difficult to understand why Australian women should regard
themselves as beautiful. You know the Papuan natives who stain their
teeth with betel nut think white molars hideous. When any country sets
up its own style of beauty it takes a good while to convince it that any
other style can be beautiful, let alone to force the admission that the
local gods are false. So few Australians have travelled that a
restricted horizon is natural. I don't say that your women have anything
to be ashamed of in having abnormal busts, flat hips, and thick ankles,
but when they arrogate to themselves the right to set up a standard for
the world I really must protest.