Among the many advantages of being very young is one's absolute
certainty that there is only one type of beautiful girl in the world.
That type we make a religion. We are its pugnacious champions, and the
idea of our falling in love with any other is too preposterous even for
discussion. If our tastes happen to be for blondness, brunettes simply
do not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure,
our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression.
Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to
other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and
that the man in the street--who, strangely enough, we conceive as having
no eye for beauty--can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the
type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as
she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of
that rare and exquisite quality which only a few favoured ones can
apprehend--like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been
chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this
beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to
love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with
their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How
fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden
from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less.
In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far
as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our
ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful
in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly
clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments--radiantly
independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our
ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and
that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no
disappointment.
We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely,
in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a
gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no
matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing
to do with it--indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point
to the fact--which is true enough--that the most famous beauties
of antiquity were plain women--plain, that is, according to the
conventional standards.
We also maintain--again with perfect truth--that mystery is more than
half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through
the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we
discover through our devotion to the one face that we love--and we
should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely
cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way
of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by
mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the
ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will
serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books
engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen
attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery
of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise
we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should
have been less securely grounded.
So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of
one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other
faces--though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could
ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during
the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it
is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense
discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority,
but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty
brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious
threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us;
that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining
essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel.
The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its
sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say,
conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect,
faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses
of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the
very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of
combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of
all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it
is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive
that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we
chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no
more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a
wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half
in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how
beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and
orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete,
marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal.
The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never
speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a
beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways,
victoriously alive?
Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us
that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some
contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to
the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not
realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste.
Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from
temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as
well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all
beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is
to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the
Mephistopheles of experience.
As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact
opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who
loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of
the raven-haired in their middle age, and _vice versa_. The change is
but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years,
substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for
idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a
part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow
realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves--in
fact, a little more so,--and their tastes and ways of looking at things
may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this
stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for
us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not
merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations
of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of
beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed
that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no
longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the
beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called
it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its
perfection of type.
The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain
tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making
love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted
type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the
attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel
when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly
revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have
thought us!
Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue
eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you
forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold?
Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not
know.
O my beautiful cypress, stately queen of the garden of the world,
forgive me that once I gave to the little shrub-like women the worship
that is rightly yours!
Lady, whose loveliness is like white velvet, a vineyard heavy with
golden grapes, abundant as an orchard of apple blossoms, forgive that
once I loved the shadow women, the sad wreathing mists of beauty, the
silvery uncorseted phantoms of womanhood. It was in ignorance I sinned.
I did not know.
Ah! That Mephistopheles of experience! How he has led us from one fair
face to another, teaching us, one by one, the beauty of all. No longer
lonely sectarians of beauty, pale prophets of one lovely face, there is
now no type whose secret is hidden from us. The world has become a
garden of beautiful faces. The flowers are different, but they are all
beautiful. How is it possible for us, now that we know the charm of each
one, to be indifferent to any, or to set the beauty of one above the
other? We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not
unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more
beautiful than the lily? Surely not. They are differently beautiful,
that is all.
Are blue eyes more beautiful than brown? I thought so once, but now I
see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair
more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are
differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady,
more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze.
Come sad, or come with laughter, beautiful faces; come like stars in
dreams, or come vivid as fruit upon the bough; come softly like a timid
fawn, or terrible as an army with banners; come silent, come singing ...
you are all beautiful, and none is fairer than another--only differently
fair.
And yet ... and yet ... Experience is indeed Mephistopheles in this: We
must pay him for all this wisdom. Is it the old price? Is it our souls?
I wonder.
This at least is true: that, while indeed he has opened our eyes to all
this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we
could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these
faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as
much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of
the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we
are wonderful connoisseurs.
It is our souls.