There comes, we are told, a crucial moment, “a tide” in all lives, that
taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. An assertion, by the bye, which
is open to doubt. What does come to every one is an hour fraught with
warning, which, if unheeded, leads on to folly. This fateful date
coincides for most of us with the discovery that we are turning gray, or
that the “crow’s feet” or our temples are becoming visible realities.
The unpleasant question then presents itself: Are we to slip meekly into
middle age, or are arms be taken up against our insidious enemy, and the
rest of life become a losing battle, fought inch by inch?
In other days it was the men who struggled the hardest against their
fate. Up to this century, the male had always been the ornamental member
of a family. Cæsar, we read, coveted a laurel crown principally because
it would help to conceal his baldness. The wigs of the Grand Monarque
are historical. It is characteristic of the time that the latter’s
attempts at rejuvenation should have been taken as a matter of course,
while a few years later poor Madame de Pompadour’s artifices to retain
her fleeting youth were laughed at and decried.
To-day the situation is reversed. The battle, given up by the men—who
now accept their fate with equanimity—is being waged by their better
halves with a vigor heretofore unknown. So general has this mania become
that if asked what one weakness was most characteristic of modern women,
what peculiarity marked them as different from their sisters in other
centuries, I should unhesitatingly answer, “The desire to look younger
than their years.”
That people should long to be handsomer or taller or better proportioned
than a cruel Providence has made them, is natural enough; but that so
much time and trouble should be spent simply in trying to look “young,”
does seem unreasonable, especially when it is evident to everybody that
such efforts must, in the nature of things, be failures. The men or
women who do not look their age are rare. In each generation there are
exceptions, people who, from one cause or another—generally an excellent
constitution—succeed in producing the illusion of youth for a few years
after youth itself has flown.
A curious fatality that has the air of a nemesis pursues those who
succeed in giving this false appearance. When pointing them out to
strangers, their admirers (in order to make the contrast more effective)
add a decade or so to the real age. Only last month I was sitting at
dinner opposite a famous French beauty, who at fifty succeeds in looking
barely thirty. During the meal both my neighbors directed attention to
her appearance, and in each case said: “Isn’t she a wonder! You know
she’s over sixty!” So all that poor lady gained by looking youthful was
ten years added to her age!
The desire to remain attractive as long as possible is not only a
reasonable but a commendable ambition. Unfortunately the stupid means
most of our matrons adopt to accomplish this end produce exactly the
opposite result.
One sign of deficient taste in our day is this failure to perceive that
every age has a charm of its own which can be enhanced by appropriate
surroundings, but is lost when placed in an incongruous setting. It
saddens a lover of the beautiful to see matrons going so far astray in
their desire to please as to pose for young women when they no longer can
look the part.
Holmes, in _My Maiden Aunt_, asks plaintively:—
_Why will she train that wintry curl in such a springlike way_?
That this folly is in the air to-day, few will dispute. It seems to be
perpetrated unconsciously by the greater number, with no particular
object in view, simply because other people do it. An unanswerable
argument when used by one of the fair sex!
Few matrons stop to think for themselves, or they would realize that by
appearing in the same attire as their daughters they challenge a
comparison which can only be to their disadvantage, and should be if
possible avoided. Is there any disillusion more painful than, on
approaching what appeared from a distance to be a young girl, to find
one’s self face to face with sixty years of wrinkles? That is a modern
version of the saying, “an old head on young shoulders,” with a
vengeance! If mistaken sexagenarians could divine the effect that tired
eyes smiling from under false hair, aged throats clasped with collars of
pearls, and rheumatic old ribs braced into a semblance of girlish grace,
produce on the men for whose benefit such adornments have been arranged,
reform would quickly follow. There is something absolutely uncanny in
the illusion. The more successful it is, the more weird the effect.
No one wants to see Polonius in the finery of Mercutio. What a sense of
fitness demands is, on the contrary, a “make up” in keeping with the
rôle, which does not mean that a woman is to become a frump, but only
that she is to make herself attractive in another way.
During the _Ancien Régime_ in France, matters of taste were considered
all-important; an entire court would consult on the shade of a brocade,
and hail a new coiffure as an event. The great ladies who had left their
youth behind never then committed the blunder, so common among our
middle-aged ladies, of aping the maidens of the day. They were far too
clever for that, and appreciated the advantages to be gained from sombre
stuffs and flattering laces. Let those who doubt study Nattier’s
exquisite portrait of Maria Leczinska. Nothing in the pose or toilet
suggests a desire on the painter’s part to rejuvenate his sitter. If
anything, the queen’s age is emphasized as something honorable. The gray
hair is simply arranged and partly veiled with black lace, which sets off
her delicate, faded face to perfection, but without flattery or fraud.
We find the same view taken of age by the masters of the Renaissance, who
appreciated its charm and loved to reproduce its grace.
Queen Elizabeth stands out in history as a woman who struggled
ungracefully against growing old. Her wigs and hoops and farthingales
served only to make her ridiculous, and the fact that she wished to be
painted without shadows in order to appear “young,” is recorded as an
aberration of a great mind.
Are there no painters to-day who will whisper to our wives and mothers
the secret of looking really lovely, and persuade them to abandon their
foolish efforts at rejuvenation?
Let us see some real old ladies once more, as they look at us from
miniature and portrait. Few of us, I imagine, but cherish the memory of
some such being in the old home, a soft-voiced grandmother, with silvery
hair brushed under a discreet and flattering cap, with soft, dark raiment
and tulle-wrapped throat. There are still, it is to be hoped, many such
lovable women in our land, but at times I look about me in dismay, and
wonder who is to take their places when they are gone. Are there to be
no more “old ladies”? Will the next generation have to look back when
the word “grandmother” is mentioned, to a stylish vision in Parisian
apparel, décolleté and decked in jewels, or arrayed in cocky little
bonnets, perched on tousled curls, knowing jackets, and golfing skirts?
The present horror of anything elderly comes, probably, from the fact
that the preceding generation went to the other extreme, young women
retiring at forty into becapped old age. Knowing how easily our
excitable race runs to exaggeration, one trembles to think what surprises
the future may hold, or what will be the next decree of Dame Fashion.
Having eliminated the “old lady” from off the face of the earth, how fast
shall we continue down the fatal slope toward the ridiculous? Shall we
be compelled by a current stronger than our wills to array ourselves each
year (the bare thought makes one shudder) in more and more youthful
apparel, until corpulent senators take to running about in “sailor
suits,” and octogenarian business men go “down town” in “pinafores,”
while belles of sixty or seventy summers appear in Kate Greenaway
costumes, and dine out in short-sleeved bibs, which will allow coy
glimpses of their cunning old ankles to appear over their socks?