THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL.
“Onely man,” says Sir Philip Sidney quaintly, meaning by “man” what we
term _a human creature_, for there is here no sex limitation, “onely
man, and no beast, hath that gift, to discerne beauty.”
When “that gift” is of generous proportions, as happens once in a
while, there is given the further ability to discern “something than
beauty dearer.” That phrase is a poet’s. Beauty has been from of old
a theme of poets, and the poets of this country, from Chaucer to
Browning, have made beautiful girls their theme. Chaucer has good and
bad to tell of them. The good may be read in many a tale, and the bad
will be best left unread. Browning has good and bad to tell of them.
There is good told of “beautiful Evelyn Hope—sixteen years old when she
died,” and there is bad told of “the beautiful girl, too white, who
lived at Pornic by the sea,” the girl who hoarded gold.
Browning, perhaps better than any English poet who ever lived, could
describe a beautiful girl’s face and incidentally point out a thing in
it detracting from its beauty. He does this with remarkable directness
in his poem called “A Face,” which opens—
“If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!
No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
In the pure profile; _not as when she laughs,
For that spoils all_.”
[Illustration: SPOILT]
How did that girl laugh? Probably as too many an English girl
laughs—riotously. Of such an one was said a little while hence: “When
she laughs, there seems no room left in the world for any other sound.”
The loose use of the word “beautiful” in English is largely commented
on by foreign visitors to this country. The many English faces that
are lovely in colour must strike everyone, but that only a minority of
these are lovely in line is undeniable. Now a face to be beautiful must
be lovely in colour and in line.
“Health and mirth make beauty,” says a Spanish proverb wrongly. They
do not so, though they make what is by many deemed a better thing than
beauty, being that lovely and pleasant thing named comeliness.
The following is a question put by a girl—
“Can a girl with a bad nose be called beautiful?”
That is a question which one is tempted to meet with the
counter-question—
_What is a bad nose?_
A bad man—and even, alas! a bad woman—is a thing conceivable; but—a bad
nose—No.
The thing meant by this girl, it has transpired, is an unbeautiful
nose. Certainly a girl with such a nose, suppose it to take the form of
a tip-tilted nose, cannot be called beautiful. For her consolation, let
her be told that she can fairly be called pleasing, the actual fact, it
would seem, being that a tip-tilted nose sets a girl in one matter at
an advantage. A London journalist some little time ago gave his readers
this piece of information—
“One of those statisticians who find out what others cannot find out
asserts that girls with _retroussé_ noses marry sooner than young
ladies with Greek and Roman noses.”
[Illustration:
A NEW READING.
The retrousseau nose]
That is a remarkable assertion, not the least remarkable thing about
it being the phrasing of it—“_girls_ with _retroussé_ noses,” “_young
ladies_ with Greek and Roman noses.”
Welladay!
If it be conceded, as I think it must be, that classical outline is an
essential part of beauty, “young ladies” with Greek and Roman noses are
not without one feature essentially beautiful. In the case of those
with Greek noses, there are commonly other features satisfying the
severest exactions in regard to beauty. This fact notwithstanding, the
faces in question may be so far from pleasing to those who look, as the
poet did, for something than beauty dearer, as to bring upon themselves
the censure contained in certain words by Shakespeare—
“This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving,
And yet so fast asleep.”
Beautiful faces too often lack animation.
As a natural consequence, beautiful faces lack another thing. A young
face to be pleasing must hold out a promise, just as an older face to
be pleasing must tell a story. Now there are more unbeautiful young
faces that hold out a promise than there are beautiful young faces that
do this, just as there are more unbeautiful older faces that tell a
story than there are beautiful older faces that do this.
In like manner, the regularity of line that is a main part of beauty is
often attended by defects in another direction, calculated to arouse
comment such as the following, being a speech made in reference to a
woman of great beauty—
“Her profile is delicious, but her full face is an empty face.”
The woman in question lacked somewhat in intellectuality. A beautiful
woman—so fairly on the whole are gifts distributed—is rarely a clever
woman, and a beautiful girl is often a goose. Thus it was a beautiful
girl of not ten but twenty years of age, who put to paper this account
of Spain—
“That is where the Inquisition was, and there are bull-fights there,
and the ladies wear black on their heads, and _Westward Ho!_ was there.”
It was a beautiful girl who asked lately—
“Has a cow horns?”
To which the counter-query put by an unbeautiful girl was—
“Did you ever hear of the nursery rhyme of ‘the cow with the crumpled
horn’?”
[Illustration]
It was a beautiful girl who wrote of a sailor as unfurling the
anchor, who spoke of the dress of a Chinese mandoline, who answered
the question put by a Frenchwoman, “What is the English for _raison
d’être_?” in the words, “_Raison d’être_ is English,” and who formed
one in a dialogue which took the following turn—
_He:_ “What are dead languages.”
_She:_ “The languages which were spoken by the dead Romans and Greeks.”
_He:_ “But how could the dead Romans and Greeks speak?”
_She:_ “Silly!”
_He:_ “‘Silly’ yourself!”
Not only do beauty and stupidity often go hand in hand, but beauty and
commonplace affections often do this. Butterflies love the flavour
of cabbage, and some beautiful girls—by their own confession—“love”
onions. It is no crime to like onions, but to “love” them is to waste
sweetness.
[Illustration: PARIS UP TO DATE]
That vanity, as a whole, is less often met with in beautiful girls than
in unbeautiful ones is a well-known fact, and it is a fact which I am
so little inclined to challenge that I give the following cases as
being to my full belief exceptions to the rule.
A beautiful girl, known to me, while really very young poses as being
very much younger. Her age is seventeen or thereabouts, and she poses
as being fourteen. If her age were forty or thereabouts, and she posed
as being seventeen, one would more easily forgive her. She will derive
the benefit of this mental bias some twenty years hence.
[Illustration: The fashion-plate girl]
In the case of another beautiful girl known to me, so much of her is
dress that her appearance seems to warrant what once seemed to me an
unwarrantable piece of English, being the following extract from a
society paper of the year 1887—
“Among the younger ladies was a pretty white tulle with marguerites and
a white satin bodice.”
At first reading of that I asked myself, “What sort of a young lady is
a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice?”
I do not ask myself that question now.
[Illustration: HEART VERY HARD AND IN THE WRONG PLACE]
Thirdly, a beautiful girl of my acquaintance has a face with what her
enemy calls “Inspection invited” all over it. That is unbeautiful
phrasing, but the charge thus levelled is not without foundation in
fact. One hopes that some day there may happen to this girl what there
happened once to a beautiful girl. She looked in the glass to see her
face, and she saw her heart, and that day all vanity left her.
As a picture of a beautiful girl I give in conclusion the following:—
_The Girl with the Face, described by one who knew her._
She used to pass my windows.
She had a face of quite perfect loveliness, the mouth and eyes very
merry, and flashing brown hair that hung open to her waist.
She was slightly deformed, her figure being thrown on one side, like
the leaf of a begonia. I never liked the leaf of a begonia until I
came to see her.
In all I may have seen her a hundred times, then she ceased passing my
windows, and after a while they brought me news that she was dead. By
special favour, they let me see her lying in her coffin, and this is
how she looked:—Her mouth, that had always been very merry, was quite
grave, and her hands were folded on her breast. They had put a rose in
one of them, and it laid its soft round cheek against her breast. Some
of them—this vexes me still as I write it—had tried to lay her hair
about her so as to hide that slight deformity that made her lie like a
begonia leaf.
This girl was in death, as she had been in life, the most beautiful
girl I ever saw.
(_To be concluded._)
SHEILA’S COUSIN EFFIE.
A STORY FOR GIRLS.
BY EVELYN EVERETT-GREEN, Author of “Greyfriars,” “Half-a-dozen
Sisters,” etc.