NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN BEAUTY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2360, 18 May 1899, Page 60

NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN BEAUTY.

(Extract from " Aspects of Rome," in Harper's Magazine.)

Northern beauty, however fine may be the line of its contour, is never, for good or evil, a mere beaxity ,of the body, a thing beginning with itself "and ending in itself; it coni tains always a suggestion ;- it is haunted' by a soul ; . it leaves for its completion some-i-thing to the imagination. But in the beauty of Boman women there is no trace Lof spiritual beauty, none of the softness of charm'; it is the calm, assured, unquestioning beauty of the flesh. There are faces which should be* seen always in pure outlino, foi they are without melting curves, delicate and variable shades, or any of that snggpstioiuwhich conies from anything but thoii own definite qualities, as they are in tlienisolvcß. Tho fucos of Roman women of tho upper classes uvo cold, hnvd, finished, mid impenetrable as cameos. Tn a face which iH at all beautiful you will not find a lino which in not norfeu.fr, and this elegance and muuness of lino goes with that coinplcxioii •which is tho finest of all complexions, pure, ivory, nnd which curries with it tho proithhis ol n tompurnment in which there is all lho HnbUoty of Jiro. Tho distinction between l,lie properly ari«tocnitio a/.u tho ulriutly pli'biiui fiiuo is, I think, less luarkutl in llimiu than in any city. Almost all Human wmnon lyivo regular faces, Mm profile, dourly cut and in a straight lino; Mark hair, often with deep tonen of bluo in it, and sometimes curling crisply; dark ovum, often of a Jtnq uniform brown, large, steady, profound, Avith that unmeaning profundity which means race, and which ono hues in lho Jewess, the gipsy. They have a truly Konian dignity, and beneath (hat the true /ire, without which dignity in but tho comely shroud of a corpse; and though there \h not a trace in them of the soft, smiling, catlike air of the women of Venice, and not much of the vivid, hardy, uncaring provocativeness of Mio women of Naples, they are content to let/ you see in them that reasonable nearness to the animal which no Italian woman is ashamed to acknowledge. They have often a cortain massiveness of build, which makes a child look like a young woman, and a young woman like a matron ; but, for Italians, they are tall, and though one sees none of the trim Neapolitan waists, it is but rarely that one sees, even among the market women bringing in their baskets on their heads, those square and lumpish figures which roll so comfortably through Venice. The day on which to see the Roman populace most easily, most significantly, is the day of S. Stefano, at that popular saint's church on the Uselian. The circular walls are covered with fifteenth century paintings of martyrdoms, naive saints, bold in colour and distressing in attitude, sufferall the tortures of pagan ingenuity. From early morning till late in the afternoon an incessant stream of people, mostly young people, out of all the alleys of Rome, and trom all the hills of the Campagna, surges in and out of the narrow doorway, where one is almost carried off one's feet in the difficult passage. Outside, where there are lines of booths covered with sweets and toys, fruits and cakes, the lane has the aspect of a fair. Inside, there is a service going on in the choir; but few pay much heed to it ; they have come to see the &how, and they make the round of all the martyrdoms. The women, almost all bareheaded, stop at the door, in the very press of the crowd, to pull out the folded handkerchief and throw it over their heads, catching the ends between their teeth. And face after face, as I watched them pass me, was absolutely beautiful — now a Raphael Madonna, now a Roman goddess — ador-

able young people in whom beauty was $ tradition. Some of them- had complexionsi like wax, others were as -brown as ma* hogany; all alike had that finished " regtU larity of feature to which the ardency otj mildness of the eyes was but one detail tho more hi a perfectly harmonious picture.; And these beautiful creatures, at once placid and vivid, were unconscious of their beauty with the unconsciousness of ani? mals; and they swarmed there like ani-i mals, with a heartless and innocent delight in the brutal details of those painted scenes of torture, in which, they saw their ancestors torturing their ancestors. As they nudged one another, their eyes glisten-? ing, and pointed to the saint who was being boiled in a caldron, the saint whose" flesh was being flayed offjn long rolls, the female saint whose breast was, being cut of£ with a long knife, I seemed to see the true Roman mob as it had been of old, as it will always be. It is just such people as these-,, with .then? strong nerves, their indifference in the matter of human life, who used ta fill the Colosseum, as simply as these filled the martyrs' church of S. Stefano Rotondo, / when the martyrs themselves were being thrown to the lions. »