To those who know how to read the signs of the times it will have become
apparent, in the course of these last days and weeks, that the Silly
Season is close upon us. Already—and this in July with the menace of
three or four new wars grumbling on the thunderous horizon—already a
monster of the deep has appeared at a popular seaside resort. Already
Mr. Louis McQuilland has launched in the _Daily Express_ a fierce
onslaught on the younger poets of the Asylum. Already the picture-papers
are more than half filled with photographs of bathing nymphs—photographs
that make one understand the ease with which St. Anthony rebuffed his
temptations. The newspapermen, ramping up and down like wolves, seek
their prey wherever they may find it; and it was with a unanimous howl
of delight that the whole Press went pelting after the hare started by
Mrs. Asquith in a recent instalment of her autobiography. Feebly and
belatedly, let me follow the pack.
Mrs. Asquith’s denial of beauty to the daughters of the twentieth
century has proved a god-sent giant gooseberry. It has necessitated the
calling in of a whole host of skin-food specialists, portrait-painters
and photographers to deny this far from soft impeachment. A great deal
of space has been agreeably and inexpensively filled. Every one is
satisfied, public, editors, skin-food specialists and all. But by far
the most interesting contribution to the debate was a pictorial one,
which appeared, if I remember rightly, in the _Daily News_. Side by
side, on the same page, we were shown the photographs of three beauties
of the eighteen-eighties and three of the nineteen-twenties. The
comparison was most instructive. For a great gulf separates the two
types of beauty represented by these two sets of photographs.
I remember in _If_, one of those charming conspiracies of E. V. Lucas
and George Morrow, a series of parodied fashion-plates entitled “If
Faces get any Flatter. Last year’s standard, this year’s Evening
Standard.” The faces of our living specimens of beauty have grown
flatter with those of their fashion-plate sisters. Compare the types of
1880 and 1920. The first is steep-faced, almost Roman in profile; in the
contemporary beauties the face has broadened and shortened, the profile
is less noble, less imposing, more appealingly, more alluringly pretty.
Forty years ago it was the aristocratic type that was appreciated;
to-day the popular taste has shifted from the countess to the soubrette.
Photography confirms the fact that the ladies of the ’eighties looked
like Du Maurier drawings. But among the present young generation one
looks in vain for the type; the Du Maurier damsel is as extinct as the
mesozoic reptile; the Fish girl and other kindred flat-faced species
have taken her place.
Between the ’thirties and ’fifties another type, the egg-faced girl,
reigned supreme in the affections of the world. From the early portraits
of Queen Victoria to the fashion-plates in the _Ladies’ Keepsake_ this
invariable type prevails—the egg-shaped face, the sleek hair, the
swan-like neck, the round, champagne-bottle shoulders. Compared with the
decorous impassivity of the oviform girl our flat-faced fashion-plates
are terribly abandoned and provocative. And because one expects so much
in the way of respectability from these egg-faces of an earlier age, one
is apt to be shocked when one sees them conducting themselves in ways
that seem unbefitting. One thinks of that enchanting picture of Etty’s,
“Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm.” The naiads are of the
purest egg-faced type. Their hair is sleek, their shoulders slope and
their faces are as impassive as blanks. And yet they have no clothes on.
It is almost indecent; one imagined that the egg-faced type came into
the world complete with flowing draperies.
It is not only the face of beauty that alters with the changes of
popular taste. The champagne-bottle shoulders of the oviform girl have
vanished from the modern fashion-plate and from modern life. The
contemporary hand, with its two middle fingers held together and the
forefinger and little finger splayed apart, is another recent product.
Above all, the feet have changed. In the days of the egg-faces no
fashion-plate had more than one foot. This rule will, I think, be found
invariable. That solitary foot projects, generally in a strangely
haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the
edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those
provocative feet in Suckling’s ballad:
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out.
It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a
tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is
utterly unlike the feet of nineteen-twenty. To-day the fashion-plate is
always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich
baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab
horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more
radically. On the text, “the feet of the young women,” it would be
possible to write a profound philosophical sermon.
And while I am on the subject of feet I would like to mention another
curious phenomenon of the same kind, but affecting, this time, the
standards of male beauty. Examine the pictorial art of the eighteenth
century, and you will find that the shape of the male leg is not what it
was. In those days the calf of the leg was not a muscle that bulged to
its greatest dimensions a little below the back of the knee, to subside,
_decrescendo_, towards the ankle. No, in the eighteenth century the calf
was an even crescent, with its greatest projection opposite the middle
of the shin; the ankle, as we know it, hardly existed. This curious calf
is forced upon one’s attention by almost every minor picture-maker of
the eighteenth century, and even by some of the great masters, as, for
instance, Blake. How it came into existence I do not know. Presumably
the crescent calf was considered, in the art schools, to approach more
nearly to the Platonic Idea of the human leg than did the poor distorted
Appearance of real life. Personally, I prefer my calves with the bulge
at the top and a proper ankle at the bottom. But then I don’t hold much
with the _beau idéal_.
The process by which one type of beauty becomes popular, imposes its
tyranny for a period and then is displaced by a dissimilar type is a
mysterious one. It may be that patient historical scholars will end by
discovering some law to explain the transformation of the Du Maurier
type into the flat-face type, the tea-leaf foot into the baroque foot,
the crescent calf into the normal calf. As far as one can see at
present, these changes seem to be the result of mere hazard and
arbitrary choice. But a time will doubtless come when it will be found
that these changes of taste are as ineluctably predetermined as any
chemical change. Given the South African War, the accession of Edward
VII. and the Liberal triumph of 1906, it was, no doubt, as inevitable
that Du Maurier should have given place to Fish as that zinc subjected
to sulphuric acid should break up into ZnSO4 + H2. But we leave it to
others to formulate the precise workings of the law.