The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1870-07-09
Pretty Women.

! Speaking of pretty women, the Saturday
Review asks: CATER all, is the world so
very absurd in its love for pretty women ?
Is woman SO very ridiculous in her chase
after beauty? A pretty woman is doing
woman's work in the world, not making
speeches nor making buildings, but making
life SUMMER and more beautiful, Man has
forsworn beauty altogether. 1t is hope
less to recall the Periclean idea of man
hood, to insist on the development of per-
Of personal virtue, to demand the grace of
Canning from our statesmen or the dignity
of Robertson from our divines. The world
of action is a world of ugliness, and the
good-looking fellow who starts for the
prizes soon discovers what Madame de
Giardin calls le nealheur d'etre beau. He is
guessed to be frivolous, he is assumed to
be poetic, there are whispers that his NOR
ais are no better than they should be. Ina
society resolute to be ugly there is no post
for an Adenis but that of model or a
Guardsman. But woman does for man
kind what man has ceased to do. She
clings to the Pericean ideal. Her aim
from very childhood is to be beautiful
Even as school-gir she notes the pro-
gress of her charms, the deepening color of
her hair, the growing symmetry of her
arm, the ripening contour of her check
We watch with silent interest the mys-
FERROUS reveries of the maiden; she is
dreaming of a coming beauty, and painting
for the glories of eighteen. Insensibly she
becomes an artist, her room studio, her
glass an academy. The hours work with
her, but she works with the hours.
"What silent musings before her mir
ror, what dreams, what discoveries what
disappointments, what careful cleaning of
experience, what sudden flashes of inven-
ton! The joy of her toilet is the Joy of
Raffaelle over his canvas, of Michael Angelo
before his marble. She is creating beauty
in the silence and the loneliness of her
chamber; she grows like any great art
creation, the result Of patience, Of hope, of
thousand delicate touchings and retouch
ings. But even to the Gieconda the mo-
ment of perfectness, of completion, comes
at last; the master takes his work frem the
easel and gives it to the ages. Woman is
never perfect, never complete. A restless
night undoes the beauty of the day; sun
shine blurs the evanescent coloring on her
cheek; frost nips the tender outlines of her
face into sudden harshness. Her pencil
has never to be at work even while the
hours work for her, and the hours work
against her at last. Care plows its lines
across her brow: motherhood destroys the
elastic lightness of her form; the bloom Of
her cheek the quick flash of her eye, fade
and vanish as the years go by. But wo-
man is still true to her ideal. She won't
know when she is beaten, and she manages
to steal fresh victories even in her defeat.
She invents new conceptions of womanly
grace; she rallies at thirty, and fronts us
with the beauty of womanhood, she makes
last stand at sixty with the beauty of age.
1t is the same great artist who exhibits
year after year, but whose style ranges
from the girlish innocence OF a Fan Angel
leo to the severe matronage Of a Zurbaran.
She falls, like Caesar, wrapping her mantle
round her, buried in wooden It would a
saint provoke Death listens pitifully to
the longings of lifetime, and the wrinkled
face smiles back it's last cold smile with
something of the prettiness of eighteen.