BEAUTY AND BRAINS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 15, 18 January 1930, Page 8

BEAUTY AND BRAINS.

A man of somewhat homely features once found himself seated at the dinner table between a lady who was a famous wit and one who was a famous beauty. Wishing to make himself pleasant, he said, "How fortunate.l am to find myself thus placed between wit and beauty." I "Yes," said the wit, "and without possessing either." The idea that beauty and brains are incompatible persists in spite of much evidence to the contrary, and it has lately been revived by the attack made on women students at Glasgow University by a writer in the "Students' Magazine." He describes the women students as "ugly in face, form and mind, with no love of beauty or taste in dress." This is akin to the belief that clever men must necessarily be ugly and untidy. Yet Thompson, the famous master of Trinity, was accounted the handsomest man of his day, and Jebb, the Regius professor of Greek, was the best-dreesed man at the university. He roused the wrath of the master when he was tutor, and Thompson said of him that the time he could spare from the neglect of his duties as tutor he devoted to the over-elaboration of his toilet. Miss Fawcett, who was placed above the senior wrangler at Cambridge, was by no means devoid of good looks, and the same might be said of Miss Ramsay, who was placed above the senior classic. Somehow beauty is supposed to be a thing apart. A pompous vicar asked a little girl if she would rather be beautiful or good when she grew up, to which the little maid replied that she would rather be beautiful and repent. The mind ought to add a charm all its own to the face, and give intelligence and expression to what otherwise might be a merely doll-like beauty of form and feature. Much of what passes for beauty to-day owes its appearance to artificial aid, and the application of these aids calls for intelligence of no mean order. The phrase that "the highest art is to conceal wit" applies with special force to the art of make-up. To produce a perfectly natural bloom of health on the cheeks, the ripe red of the cherry on the lips, and a languishing droop of the eyelids, means not only the selection of the right cosmetics, but also brains in their application. The sweet girl graduates may not any longer have the golden hair that Tennyson wrote about, but they could have it if they wished. Men have for so long ruled the universities that they resent any. intrusion into their preserves. Hence the attack on the girl graduate. Why will people continue to think that cleverness cannot go with other gifts? "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever," wrote Kingsley, as if goodness and cleverness were things apart. "Tut, tut," said a doctor to his patient. "A man of your age ought to have known better than to eat lobster. Don't you know the saying that a man of forty is either a fool or a physician?" "Why can't he be both, doctor?" said the patient. Similarly a woman may be both clever and pretty and good. She often is. —W.M.