The morning call., 1890-12-27
BEAUTY AND
CHARACTER.
Which Do the Men Look for in
Choosing Their Wives.
Harriet Prescott Spoford Thinks Woman's
Charms to Her Husband Comes From
loneliness Of Character.

A beautiful woman will still be beau
tiful at so. when a pretty woman will
possibly but confront you with the wreck
and ruin of her prettness, and when
she who was a plain woman in her
youth still keeps age at distance. But the
beautiful woman, writes Harriet Spofford
to the New York Mail and Express, is as
rare as the pretty woman Is usual; and
what lover thinks of eighty years, or of half
as many, when the lovely Lois sits beside
him?
Who of US cares the less for the rose be-
cause knowing it is soon to fall? The lover
is in tie present: the woman he loves is the
Cen ter of its atmosbere; she is its life, its
supreme expression; all the agos have been
only 10 produce her. and now that she is
here. shall the work Of the ages come to
naught? Indeed, she is to him imperish-
able, so much alive that il is impossible to
think of decay and death in connection with
her He is not even aware that any of this
is in his inner consciousness; he only knows
that it is life where she is and death where
she is not that she is indispensable to him;
that he cannot contemplate the future with
out her; that he feels an ineffable tender
ness toward her; that even her mother, and
that imp OF evil, her young brother, share in
her dearness, and that her father is as awful
being as the Homeric Jove. Her father
may never lose all the aura Of this awful
ness; the brother may come to be viewed in
the light of a nuisance and marplot; the
mother may develop into the Dale-Star OF his
existence, but the wife is part of himself.
/ and it is largely IN her own pawer TO say
whether it shall be part of his higher or
OF his lower self.
BEAUTY Is NOT ALL.
1t is not with her beauty that wife estab-
fishes this fact. Although beauty draws us
with single hair, the hair will break If all
the weight is left upon it long. Beauty is
often, but not always the determining point
in the beginning, but even the loneliness of
Helen might pail and become wearisome, if
it were rot Informed with the larger beauty
of the soul, with the sparkle of intelligence,
with the glance of innocence. These of
themselves create deathless beauty-the
beauty OF expression, of line, of gaze, the
sweetness of the mouth at rest, the gentle
ness OF intonation. that still delights the
lovers when luster and color and luxurious
outline and all the charm of youth and
bounding life are faded and fallen quite
away. is she kind as she is fair? For
beauty lies with Kindness" says he who
searched human nature with the strength
of sympathetic Imagination
They WHO assure us that a man of sense
so needs rest that companionsbip at home
with an intellect thatk keeps his own on the
alert is burdensome. not only makes the mis-
take of assuming that he is man of sense,
but are advising us to raise a race of fools
unless they mean that mothers should so
utterly count for nothing that they cannot
even deteriOrate the race. But must women
remain ounces that men may be pleased?
Alas, men must take women 3s they find
them, and they find them escaped from that
Oriental bondage which allowed them, since
they had no souls, TO cultivate only the body
and acknowledge no other lord than the
lord Of the harem
LONELINESS OF CHARACTER.
To the plain woman who is a wife her
want of beauty is almost always grief
She fancies she might have secured n more
perfect allegiance if she had worn the red
and white of some more fortunate woman;
she pities her husband among other men, as
Sir Gawain's wife may have done, that his
wife is uncomely; she longs to fill his eyes
with pleasure; she would be burned alive If
she might rise from her ashes fair enough to
take the reproach of her uncomelipess away
from him-fair enough to see his gaze follow
her with rapture. She does not realize that
1t is herself that he loves, and not an eva
nescent bloom or sparkle; that if she has
not beauty he does not miss it; that his
eyes follow her now with rapture of another
and better sort; that, fair or foul. he loves
her, and If her eyes were crossed he would
not have them Strengthened and so change
her to one fairer.
Yet no woman need be ugly. II there is
a soul in her body 1t has but TO begin be-
times to show throug. From her earliest
girlhood the thoughts she thinks, the feel
ings to which she gives way, the tones she
utters, the wishes she INDUCES, are sculp-
turing lines in her face that are capable of
making beauty all their own-lines whose
writing will remain when bloom fades and
sparkle falls.
1t is in the beginning of manhood and in
the beginning of old age that man is cap
tivated simply by pretty face, endows Its
owner with all imaginary graces Of the
spirit, and is in breathless haste to make her
charms his own possession. The maturer
man is far less subject to a mistaken infatu-
alton. The boy Looks for beauty, the glow
ing cheek, the melting eye, the lovely lip;
he cannot endure the nc ton, lie will say, of
an unlovely countenance in perpetual evil
dence.
WISDOM IN CHOICE.
But if the youth awaits few years wis
dom has found him out, and the wife he
chooses is chosen for wear. Not that such
an element enters into his plans at all-he
should dispise himself if it did-he. too, is
either taken by storm or drifts gently into
the current that, at first mere wave at his
feet, is presently the all-embracing tide but
he has become the one not to be taken by
storm or by trif1ing forces, the one not TO
TO be swept away by shallow waters, the
one to whom pIettiness alone has very in
sufficient attraction. 1t is not that he has
seen the havoc wrought by this mere pretti.
ness in the families of his unwise
friends, in the households OF those
Matthews who ate the green apples
which, as some one had said, never did agree
with the human race either in the time of
Eden or aiterward. 1t is not that it has seen
the pretty face lose all freshness with the
first illness or with few years wear, while
sickly, slovenly shape trailed around a
house that was ordered into disorder; nor
that he has seen the face still pretty, still
as empty. untitled by LIES experience with
anything mere than FIRST youth brought; it
is not that he has seen his friend, once of
some promise. reduced to the uninteligent
level Of the wife, or driven from home to
seek some sort of mental nutrition else
where; it is not that he has seen his friend
disappointed to the verge of heartbreak,
and looking on the wife has realized what
Browning meant when he said of pretty
woman,
May not liking be simple sweet
II love grew there
'Twould undo there
All that breaks the cheek to dimpe sweet?
1t is none of this that secures him. 1t is
that he has become incapable of being at
tracted by that which ravished his friend.
Yet, after all, let him see what he villa
fool at the head of another's house, an
ignorant or heartless or unintelligent
woman. virago, sloven, fright, a blue
stocking. woman
whose beauty did astonish the survey
OF richest eyes,
Whatever it may be. the circumstance will
not have great influence over his own choice,
for it is to be doubted if any of us ever
learn much of anything by the mistakes of
another.
Each lover of the list thinks that in his
choice there is no mistake, that his love Is
the one woman in whom the race has come
70 perfect flower; that his home, at any
rate, is TO be happiness, his future heaven.
WIT AND GOODNESS RULE.
Perhaps it will be. Perhaps the glamor
of a fair face has not blinded his oyes to
things that last longer. Perhaps with the
fair face has come to him the fair SOUL too,
| the clear mind, the warm heart, the strong
will, the gentle way, the sweet temper. He
may have found-why not?-beauty and
| goodness together. and wit as well. II he
| is really to have the happiness he expects
he must have some measure Of all three
| The lover who can see Helen's beauty in
the brow OF Egypt will usually find what
| answers to him for beauty in the one lie
loves But laauty " ifhnut tho coodnaes