The Washington times., 1922-09-10


TT is time to revise our ideas of
beauty. High time to stop
= using the word beautiful in the
loose, indiscrimnate way we have been
doing.
All my life have been a seeker for
beauty. l have tried to see it wherever
| have been. Around the world | have
gone seeking tin America, in Europe,
in Egypt my studies have been ardent
and intensive. | have studied tens of
thousands of women. | have known thou
sands of them. | have painted hundreds.
For never mind how many years.
am not married and do not wish to af-
fright the hesitant sex, but | .dmit that
in my search my hair has grown thinner
and has taken on silver tints above the
ears and about the temples have
sought beauty. My search has been al
most fruitless. AS man and artist | say,
say it sadly, that beauty in woman is so
rare that it scarcely exists.
Not one woman in ten thousand is
',eautiful.
feminine and challenging passes, "What
beautiful woman" For in that ex-
clamation you almost surely are not tell
ing the truth.
In all my world search have seen but
three beautiful women. One Of them is
dead. One is unknown. The third was
but yesterday a child. At eighteen she
is undeniably beauty.
Let us agree upon the definition for a
beautiful woman. l beg you to accept
one that crystallized during more than
twenty years of an intense scrutiny of
women. Beauty is perfection. A beauti-
full woman is one who is perfect in every
detail.
In a passing view of a woman we may
say-or you may for | shall never again
make that mistake-"She is beautiful"
But sit across the table from her at tea
or beside her at the theatre, and you will
note many imperfectons No woman
possessing one imperfection is beautiful.
Suppose the famous Nine. Recamier
came to life. You might say, as you
glimpsed her silhouette through the win
dow of her car on the way to the opera,
"a beautiful woman" But 81 sses
turned upon her at the opera would
reveal that your observation was mac
curate, your judgment incorrect. She
would not be perfect. She never was
perfect.
No, the woman whose long preserved
charms have been the inspiration of all
women who know her story-Mme. Re-
camier, who kept her lover until after
she was ninety, dying beloved, was not
a beautiful woman. She was not on,
hundred per cent. Her beauty vanished
in it's analysis
am tired of hearing of the beauty
of the Venus de Milo; | am weary of
seeing fatuous groups signing about her
in the corridor of the Louvre. She is a
fat woman, whose head is too small for
her body.
Lillian Russell, known for forty years
as the American beauty, was not 'beauti-
full. Her mouth was not that of beauty.
1t was loose hung 1t had not the double
curve, nor the pink point in the middle of
the upper lip that form the Cupid's bow
of beauty. 1t dipped at the left corner.
| might talk of her thorough and en-
chanting womanliness. might speak of
her nose, which was perfection in noses
could speak even emotionally of the
blue beauty of her eyes. But | won't
This is a cold analysis of beauty. Were
it not for the imperfection of her mouth,
Lillian Russell still would not have been
a beauty, for she was too heavy-too
heavy by ten pounds the earlier of the
years in which | remember her and too
weighty by twenty-five pounds the last
ten years of her life.
Lantelme, the lamented beauty" of
Paris, whose tragic end on yacht is still
a mystery, was not beauty, because her
nose was too long-only third of an
take the palm of beauty from her.
Lady Diana Manners, whom Great