(Anonymous)
I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies
retain their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to
suggest that an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can
quite appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes
me that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less
refined and delicate, so far as her physique goes, than anything that
we Western people class under the name of woman. She has an awful
ponderosity of frame--not pulpy, like the looser development of our
few fat women, but massive, with solid beef and streaky tallow; so
that (though struggling manfully against the ideal) you inevitably
think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks her
advance is elephantine. When she sits down it is on a great round
space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could
ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her
personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far
greater moral and intellectual force than she can fairly claim. Her
visage is usually grim and stern, seldom positively forbidding, yet
calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth and weight of feature, but
because it seems to express so much well-defined self-reliance, such
acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles and dangers, and
such sturdy capacity for trampling down a foe. Without anything
positively salient, or actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly
formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four-gun
ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself that there is
no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be her
onset if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict
any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a hundredfold--
better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed and
haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the
English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude and
strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a
tougher physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I
suspect, only in society and in common routine of social affairs, and
would be found powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that
might call for energy outside of the conventionalities amid which she
has grown up.
You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at
the recollection. But conceive of her in a ballroom, with the bare,
brawny arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other
corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the maiden
blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in such an overblown cabbage-rose
as this.
Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest,
slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness
has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though
very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the
truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves,
and tender womanhood, shielded by maidenly reserves, with which,
somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves
during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet
should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have
attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought
to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have
overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the
altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is
it not a sounder view of the case that the matrimonial bond cannot be
held to include the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence
when the ceremony was performed? And ought not an English married
pair to insist upon the celebration of a silver wedding at the end of
twenty-five years to legalize all that corporeal growth of which both
parties have individually come into possession since pronounced one
flesh?--_Our Old Home_.