PRETTY WOMEN
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.