Types Of Beauty

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 20

Types Of Beauty

npym yim iff l_ p d What Is “The Modern Face”? 'H

THERE is a marked difference, so an artist friend tells me, between the modern face and that of a couple of centuries ago. The change, he says, has been in the direction of greater refinement, although in many cases the decrease in coarseness has meant a loss of strength in the features, writes the Viscountess Molesworth in the “Daily Mail.” I have noticed something of this change when comparing the faces of members of certain old families of my acquaintance with their ancestral portraits. The living descendants were more refined of countenance, but much of the rugged strength displayed in the faces that stared down at me from the old canvases had disappeared; in many cases even the typical family look had died out. Nevertheless the "ancestral type” can be very persistent, even In un-

favourable circumstances. I was once greatly impressed by the singularly aristocratic face and bearing of a young woman engaged in a subordinate capacity in the house of a friend. Feeling curious about her patrician appearance, I made inquiries and found that she bore the name of a county family that centuries ago owned thousands of acres in the district, but in course of time had lost its estates and had dwindled into complete decay. This woman was almost the sole survivor, but the race type had persisted. There are, of course, several historic families in which certain members have preserved the family type so well that if they were to dress in, say i Georgian or Elizabethan costumes, or even in armour of earlier periods, they would “look the part” to perfection. Studying faces in the street, or in a railway carriage, I am impressed

with the truth of my artist friend’s remark, for only in exceptional cases do I coine on a countenance that is reminiscent of the past. But these exceptions are striking. They give me the impression that the owner of the face is dressed out of his or her period. Once it was a brother and sister who seemed to belong to the old Puritan days. On another occasion it was a literary man who might have stepped out of the pages of Chaucer. In a third Instance it was a woman whom I instantly identified with the royal house of Stuart. After we were introduced I discovered that she actually was a descendant of that through a Polish branch. She was a foreigner, speaking very little English, but through all the admixture of foreign blood the family face h%d per sisted.