THE HABIT OF BEAUTY

Evening Star, Issue 20020, 10 November 1928, Page 21

THE HABIT OF BEAUTY

AH ANALYSIS fßy Stephen Gwynn, in ‘ The Times.’] Beauty docs not como at once, not merely by nature; it is more than a happy disposition of limb and feature, colour and line: like the singer’s art it grows out of a natural gift and out of the desire to use the gift, which every singer has by instinct, and every beautiful person. Only in use is it perfected, and many are born with a physical endowment which the? '-.ck the genius to develop into beauty. For beauty as a human attribute means something quite other than the beauty of a landscape, a flower, or an animal; it is a result, like a work of art; it is accomplishment; and for tho height of accomplishment it depends on tho conception of beauty which is in the mind of its possessor. Tho most superb bodily structure may be disgraced by vulgarity or stupidity of nature. Also, just as tho einger or the poet is his own first and most essential audience, so tho beautiful person knows and sees, subconsciously, bow she looks or moves. Unconscious beauty, it it is not a contradiction in terms, is at least a misuse of them; and beauty is the wrong word to use of a child’s loveliness which, except for the promise implicit, and, indeed, for the early promptings of Nature, is no more than a kitten’s: it has charm and delight. But beauty has power. Beauty has not como to bo beauty until it is aware of itself, for its very essence is in bestowal; and the gift must have been recognised by its possessor before it can attain to its full flower in the gracionsness of giving. Here, it should not be necessary to sa?, is no , question of sex, for where beauty is, whether in woman or in man, its power is felt almost equally by men and women. The nun in a convent school may get as much worship as any of her sisters in the world, and may bestow her beauty «s Graciously, and the beautiful woman in the world gives instinctively to young and old, man and woman, with no more desire to trouble or subjugate than tho artist feels in his creation. She obeys what has como to be tho law of her being, and moves to an unheard music.

One must phrase it of the woman, for in this country it is impossible even to frame these thoughts in terms of both sexes an ancient Puritanism inhibits. Tho Greeks were perhaps the last in Europe who could think equally of man and woman when they thought of beauty. Yet the art of_ tho film, appealing to the eye only, if it becomes nobler in conception, may abolish this prejudice. At present all its attitude to beauty is vulgarly sex-ridden. While tho facts of life remain there will always be allurement in beauty, and science does not deny that bird and flower, it they do not shape and colour themselves, aro shaped and coloured to attract. But beauty in the true sense, though lying open to desire, does not challenge it; it is not wantonly provocative. That attitude destroys repose and destroys dignity, which are proper to beauty’s habit of being. Beauty is neither warded in the home nor circumscribed by family circles; it is as gericral as tho sun, but, like the sun, it can “ purge the air of pestilence.” Did oven Shakespeare over speak more nobly of it than in that line? Who other than Shakespeare can render beauty? Homer, when lie called up Helnti ifalking on tho walls of Troy and the old men, whoso rooftrees were to burn for her, saying that it was no wondei n.en should make ten years’ war for- such a woman.! Dante also, no doubt. Of your prosemakers Pickling, Thackeray, and Dickens never reach beyond prettiucss. But there is out master here. The world seems to be in some doubt today about Meredith’s quality, yet who can deny that -Meredith conveyed again and again through his printed page tho actual thrill of beauty? 'i he painters, of course, have don© it —it u> their special privilege. Yet it is curious to note how Sargent, who for u generation painted the officially reputed beauties of his time, could only show, when ins work was brought together, women having brilliancy, having stylo, hazing elegance, above all having fashion; but look for beauty there, and scarcely in one instance would you find it on his unreposeful canvases. Yet it was present more than once in his pictures of men. One aitist (Gainsborough) had tho power at times to sAow beauty emanating h*om a face whose plainness of features was not disguised. For beauty may pass and kindle suffuse or glow, momentarily, anywhere. Genius can catch and fix sucri moments. Yet to say that a human being has beauty moans, properly speaking, something at command, no loss constant than an artist’s skill; it is literally and metaphorically a habit—literally something that has become part of the nature by usage, and metaphorically a vesture —which envelops and expresses the personality within There are, ol course, exceptional cases. Mine Suggia walks on to n platform, frank and boyish, and bows with an almost clumsy brusqueness; then she begins to play, something lights up inside, and the music, born of sounds weeping or merry or tumultuous, passes not only into her face but every muscle of her working body; she assumes the habit of beauty as an accidental consequence of the beauty that her how creates.

People talk —people award beauty prizes—as if beauty were a matter of the face only. 1 here may be, no doubt, a beautiful face on an ill-shapen body, yet where the genius for beauty is it would master the defect even were it actual deformity Foi you cannot standardise beauty; the Greeks came near to doing it. yet even they made the bust of Socrates beautiful. But beauty as an attribute of man or woman is harmony, and it is gesture, play of feature and of limb; a beautiful woman is beautiful in her downsitting and in her uprising"; and though extreme youth has its bloom and has also its natural suppleness of movement, yet the art of beauty is not completed till it governs every motion and makes every fibre eloquent. When to that art once mastered is added the graciousness of a generous and lovely nature shining through, a beauty has been created which defies decay. For when the magic resides not in any flush of youth or transient moulding of the flesh which time can alter, but in the structure of the bones, the shape and set and line of the head and neck and figure, and when these are crowned by the beauty of countenance, time may change, but can never disparage; and a person so gifted, so, accomplished, retains the accomplishment and: the irradiation white life lasts. Fillen Terry kept the habit of beauty till her eightieth year.