The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-06-24
PRETTY WOMEN.


world, not making speeches nor making pud-
.dings, but making life SUMMER and more
beautiful. Man has forsworn beauty al
together. 1t hopeless to recall the Peri
clean idea of manhood, to insist on the de-
velopment of personal beauty as not less
manly than that 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 world of ugliness, !
and the good-looking fellow who starts for |
the prizes soon discovers what Madame de |
Girardin calls le mGLeur d'etre 6cau He is
guessed to he frivolous, he is assumed to be
poetic, there are whispers that his morals
are no better than they should be. In a
society resolrde to be ugly there is no post
for an Adonis but that of model or
Guardsman. But woman does for mankind |
what man has ceased to do. She clings to the
Periclean ideal. Her aim from very child
hood is to be beautiful. Even as a school
girl she notes the progress of her charms, the
deepening color of her hair, the growing
symmetry of her arm, the ripening contour
of her cheek We watch with silent interest
the mysterious reveries of the maden she is
dreaming of a coming beauty, and painting
for the glories of eighteen. Insensibly she
becomes an artist, her roem studio her
glass an academy. The hours work with her,
but she works with the hours. What silent
musings before her mirror, what dreams,
careful cleaning of experience, what sudden
flashes of invention 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 loneli-
ness of her chamber; she grows like any
great art-creation, the result of patience, of
hope, of a thousand delicate touchings and
retouchings But even to the Gioconda the
moment of perfectness, of completion, comes
at last; the master takes his work from
the easel and gives it to the ages. Woman is
never perfect, never complete. restless
night undoes the beauty of the day; sunshine
blurs the evanescent coloring of her cheek;
frost nips the tender outlines of her face into
sudden harshness. Her pencil has ever to be
at work even while the hours work for her,
and the hours work against her at last. Care
ploughs its lines across her brow; motherhood
destroys the elastic hghtness of her form; the
bloom of her cheek, the quick flash of her
eye, fade and vanish as the years go by. But
woman 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 Fra Angelica to the severe matronage of
her mantle around her-''buried in woollen
'twould a saint PROVOKED" Death listens pitt
fully to the longings of lifetime and the
wrinkled face smiles back its last cold smile
with something of the prettiness of eighteen.
Perhaps we enjoy beauty less than we
might from the absurd connection which men
have established between the enjoyment of
it and love. We fancy it impossible to care
much about pretty face unless we can hang
it in our own gallery. "What care l how
fair she be, so she is not fair to me !" 1t is
perhaps truer to say that nine-tenths of our
enjoyment of beauty disappears with possess
sion. The lover dwells on his mistress face
till he loses all sense of the world of beauty
without it, He is like the connoisseur who
so dotes on the little Correggio he has picked
up for a song that he ceases to care for the
larger range of art. The real way of enjoying
pretty women would be never to fall in love
with pretty woman at all. The true Joys of
life are its unconscious joys, the pleasure we
derive from the laughter of children, from the
landscape that we drive dreamily through, from
the music which we have not listened to.
And SO the truest enjoyment of beauty lies,
not in the observation or analysis of this
face or that, but in the sense of pretty forms
and pretty faces about one The Joy of variety
the pleasure of the inexhaustible range of the
beautiful, comes to the admirer of pretty
women. We are not quarrelling with the in
Stlnct which IeauS us through pretty races
into paths of domestic peace. 1t is often
necessary to restrict ones sphere of enjoy
ment; and if one is absolutely obliged to
marry, one had far better marry pretty wife
than an ugly one The refinement which the
student of art gains from constant contact
with beauty of color and form every one
gains in some degree from daily contact with
the beautiful in flesh and blood. Woman is
the art of home, the Giorgione whose bril-
liancy flashes through the quiet parsonage,
the Perugino whose grace tempers the rough
ness of every day, the Rubens whose large
ness and abundance fling glow of comfort
and ease over the most ungenial career Life
becomes more harmonious, it beats with a
keener pulse of enjoyment, in the presence
of pretty women. After all, a charming
little figure, piquant little face, is the best
remedy for half the ills of existence, its wor-
ries, its vexations, its dulness its disappoint-
ments. And even in the larger and more
placid types of beauty, in the beauty of a
Lady Dumbello, if there is. tinge of stu
pidity, there is at any rate an atmosphere OF
repose, genial influence moulding our social
converse and habits into gentler shapes. II
is amusing to see how the prettiness of woman
tells on her dress, how the order and pro
priety of her dress tells on the home. The
pursuit of beauty, the habit of prettiness
gives an ideal dignity to the very arrange
ment of her bonnet-strings In every NOV
ment in the very sweep of her ample folds
in the pose of her languor, in the CAV start OF
her excitement, one feels the softening, har
monizing influence of her last look in the
glass. She may be gay, or sorrowful, or
quiet, or energetic, but she must be pretty.
Beauty exercises an imperceptible compul