The Tyranny of Beauty

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIII, Issue 285, 17 November 1923, Page 10

The Tyranny of Beauty

NOT SKIN DEEP, BUT SOUL DEEP. FETISH MADE OF FLESH INSTEAD OF SPIRIT. (By James Douglas.) This week I describe a miracle 1 saw in Oxford-street on Thursday afternoon. Some of my friends are sceptical with regard to my Devonsire miracles. With an ironical wink they call me “Lazarus.” One hardened infidel told me that a miracle ought to be wrought in the presence of a cloud of witnesses who had no personal or pecuinary reason for lying. I asked him how many witnesses he wanted. “Oh,” he sneereed, “about five hundred.” Unluckily for him, any Oxford street miracle was wought in the presence or more than five hundred man and women, people whose names are in Burke and Debrett, men of letters, and other members of the intelligentsia. It was wrought in tho New Oxford Theatre by the oldest and greatest actress in the world, Eleonora Duse.

THE ANGUISH OF PITY. She. is a fragile old woman without a dab of pdwder or a spot of paint on .her haggard face. But she turned a theatre packed with worldings into a holy place, and broke every heart with the agony of awe and the anguish of pity. 1 was sorry for the women who could hardly bear the disclosure of a woman’s pain. I was sorry for the mothers who could not endure the public exhibition of a mother’s tormented love. I sat beside Miss Fay Compton. She wept through three acts, and old be she felt she had no right to be on the stage. Meh wept as shamelessly as women. I watched the faces in the theatre. They were rapt; they were transfigured. They were purified by pity and by reverence. A veteran plavgover saia: “Hand-clapping here a sort of sacrilege; wo ought all to be an our knees.” And why were we all transfigured* Why, in our trance, of wonder, did we recall the Duse time after time, by making a ridiculous noise with our hands'? Because we. saw deep into the souls of all the mothers who have ever been born or who will ever be born. This is not a dramatic criticism. I refuse to trespass in the domain of our dramatic critic. lam merely explorin'my own sensations. I leave the play and the players, and I report the marvel and the mystery wrought in my own hard old heart and in the hearts of those around me. THE FETISH OF THE FLESH.

The proverb says that beauty is skin deep. The proverb lies. Beauty is soul deep. “Lady Bab” has shown us the sinister side of beauty parlours. It is a comedy: it is a tragedy. Why? Because we value the flesh more than the spirit. We ratyouth more highly thnu goodness, kindness, character, intellect, or unselfishness. We worship the face more fervently than the Heavenly my tery behind the face. Wc love beautiful hair more ardently than the beautiful brain below it. Wc adore bewitching eflres more passionately than the bewitching being who looks through them at us. In fine, wo make a fetish of the flesh instead of the spirit. You may be surprised when I tell you that I know a lady who owns a beau' v parlour near Bond street. She cannot afford to pay assistants. She stands <»n tired feet eight or nine hours a day while she wages war against the ra' - ages of time and worry, toil'and plea ■<- use. She clings to her own youth as a drowning sailor clings to a life-belt. She pays a high rent. She charges insanely low fees. She is bankrupte by bad debts. And she makes a bare living. That is another sinister side of the beauty parlour. She is too good to be prosperous. There may not be many like her. Bi.t there may be some. I think we ought to extend and enlarge out theory of beauty. Its range is ludicrously short. We ought to love ti e loveliness of youth, but we ought al. o to love the loveliness of middle age and the loveliness of old age. There are few things lovelier than a young girl whose face has not yet been chiselled by the great sculptor, Life. It is not yet defaced by sin or cruelty or selfishness. It is not yet hardened by disillusion. It is not yet soured by disenchantment. It is only an outline of histoyr. It is a blossom, not a fruit. But I am sure we ought to look for beauty in irregular features as well as in regular ones. The convention of symmetry is a curse bequeathed to us> by the Greek sculptors who dehumanised the human face. They carved women into cold goodesses and men into cold gods. They turned woman into a marble death of polished surfaces and contours. They standardised her nose and her lips, her cheeks and her chin. Our photocracy tries to conform to the Athenian formula of beauty. Our ' painters and. our sculptors grovel before it. We do not believe in the loveliness of what we call a plain and homely face, although the majority of faces, bo’b male and female, are plain and homely. THE DULNESS OF BEAUTY Let me remind you that few women of • genius are conventionally beautiful. George Eliot, Georges Sand, and Mrs Browning would not have won a prizt : in a beauty competition. Mr Ziegfeia would not admit them into his bevy of Follies. The only half-open fields for plain women are stageland and filmland, if we omit the brain market in which conventional beauty does not count. In the marriage market the plain woman is absurdly handicapped. But life also handicaps the conventional beauty, for beauty is often endowed with stupidity or malignity, and when it fades its owner is qften a bore who is • also a scarecrow. A book might be written about the dulness of standarised beauty. I have often yawned through a dinner beside a Helen or a Venus de Medici. There is something pitiful and even tragic in the humility of “plain” women. They know that many men are obsessed by the tyranny of convention. They know that many men do not suspect that the face-mask worn by a woman is an accident of heredity and that the woman behind the face-mask is more precious than the face-mask itself, which has a very low expectation of 1 life. That is the origin of the cyncial advice given by a philosopher to a young man about to marry a pretty girl: “Before you marry her go and look at her mother.” The young man looked at her mother and resolved to grow nasturtiums! And yet the pretty girl’s mother may have been worth a cartload of standardised beuaties. LIFE’S ARTISTRY. My own view is that the face is not a safe guide to the woman who owns it. It is the mind behind tho face that you marry. The face changes: the woman remains.' And a good woman, no matter how plain she may be, grows lovelier every year. Life is the supreme artist. We are blind not only to the loveliness of tho plain, good* girl; we are also blind to the loveliness of the plain, good wife. We arc still more blind to the loveliness of the plain, good mother. But tho irony of ironies is our blindness to the beauty of a good old woman. The loveliness of the plain old mother with white hair and a many-wrinkled face is marvellous. The great painters adoro it Look at Whistler’s portrait of his mother! Look at the portrait of Barrie’s mother in “Margaret Ogilvy”! Tho war ought to have taught us to reverence the sorrow-bitten faces of mother*. Believe me, this age must discover the unimportance of standardised beauty and learn to love the divine loveliness of the good soul behind the face-mask.