Famous Beauties of the World.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume X, Issue 24, 17 June 1893, Page 556

Famous Beauties of the World.

’Tis not a lip or eye we beauty call. But the joint force and full result of all.

THERE are two things beautiful in life: women and roses,’ says the tenderly flittering Persian, who beats ber, tyrannizes over her, enslaves her, but wreathes her with flowers, sings to her, enshrines her, guards her, and worships at her feet. • Shirin ! Shirintar ! and Shirintarin !’ be cries in the ecstasy of his delight—Sweet ! sweeter I sweetest! Only the velvet, perfumed richness of the rose suggests the subtle intoxication of her loveliness. The Oriental is franker and more imaginative, bnt all the world adores with him ; and at whatever degree of latitude or longitude beauty condescends to exist, there is an altar set up, and there worshippers abound. What it is—of what it consists—the age*, the poets and painters, and the concourse of all the nations have not been able to accurately determine or define. In the eye of the beholder? But by what laws that eye, without previous training, instinctively differentiates at a glance is not thereby explained. All peoples agree that beauty lies in health and proper vigorous proportion, to speak roughly : and yet women as fragile as thistle-down, and consumed with a wasting disease, have at times a beauty more potent than that of the rosiest young maiden. Helen, the daughter of the gods, was most divinely tall and fair, and Cleopatra was * little and black,’ it is said, and kingdoms were thrown away for both of them. There is one thing very certain : the amount of feminine beanty in the world has increased enormously since the days of Helen and the Serpent of Old Nile. Men do not leave their homes and fight ten years for even the must radiant beauty today ; nor do the great conquerors think the world well lost for any modern smile. In the days of Helen, and even of Cleopatra, beauty was very probably far more rare than now. Women in all but the wealthiest classes were illy protected from the discomforts that destroy beauty and harden and coarsen feminine loveliness. They did heavy manual labour, were poorly fed or protected from wind and weather, and like the peasants of many of the Latin nations to-day, while they may have bad a certain beaute du diab’e in the first flush of youth, the radiance quickly died and left them ugly servants and beasts of burden. Therefore, when a woman arose who possessed the true beauty that age can not wither nor custom stale, men went mad after her, fought to possess her, and possessing her thought the world but a bubble in comparison. Selection of this sort was, of course, constantly at work improving the type, and the survival of the fittest, age by age, lifted up the general plane of beauty. As civilization grew, women no longer trudged with heavy burdens through rain and blinding heat after nomad husbands, and their feet grew delicate and lightly arched. The richer wives resigned the coarser labours to their servants, and used their fingers only to spin delicate threads, to make rich needlework, to

knit, to thrum the strings of mandoline and lute, to cnrl the silken tresses of their infants, and smooth the brows and bind the wounds of their lovers and warriors. The palms grew, like Desdemona’s, moist and tender; the nails, no longer broken with coarse labour, gleamed like the delicate, transparent nacre of a shell. The skin, protected from sun and wind, grew fair and clear as rose leaves, the lips ruddy and soft. Their hair, carefully washed and tended, wound itselt into vine like cnrls, and took the smooth gleam of silk. Sufficient food gave rounded con-

tours ; long hours of soft slumber sprinkled the dew in the violets of their eyes, and the movements of dance and gay motion made their limbs slender and supple, and at last rhe modern beauty was evolved. Heine says that the sculpture and the women of Italy had a double reflective influence upon each other. The sculptor, living amid rhe statuesque women, modelled divine ideals, and the women unconsciously absorbed impressions of beauty from the statues that reproduced themselves in their offspring. Some vague consciousness of this precess has taught the modern man to adorn bis home with all the triumphs of art.

The Princess of Wales is one of nature’s queens who seem born with reginal grace and dignity of disposition as well as of appearance. Even while she was the young Danish Princess Alexandra, her beauty was famous thioughout Euiope, and when the Prince of Wa’e> came to look among the marriageable princesses of Europe for a wife, he quickly fell in love with Denmark's favourite beauty. She was nineteen years of age at the time of the wedding in Windsor Castle, and bad been only three days in England ; but the whole of the English nation fell in love with her, and her position as the prospective queen of Ergland is one which is gladly conceded by her future subjects. Her silver wedding was celebrated last year, but she is still one of the most lovely women in Europe. A few years ago she was madea Doctorof Music of Oxford University, and our portrait shews her in the academical costume of that degiee.

How much this care and tenderness (alluded to in the first part of our article) increases the sum of beauty is clearly exemplified in America, where it is notorious that women are more universally fed on the roses and laid in the lilies of life than in any other country, and where it is equally and famously certain that the women surpass all others in the flower like delicacy and perfection of theii liveliness. To make a list of only the tw st famous of these would leave no room for mention of the

women of other nations. Two, whose prominent positions upon the stage have made their beauty of world wide fame, are Mary Anderson and Cora Urquhart Potter, who are b_>th distinctively American in their type, though very unlike one another in features. Both are tall, exqnisitely slim, with faces of flower-like softness and delicacy, and with a certain air of fine, keen biilliance and vivacity that is seen in the faces of no other type. Mary Anderson was born in Sacramento in 1859, and removed to Lonisville, Kentucky, while still a small child, remaining there nntil her sixteenth year, when she made her first appearance on the stage in Albaugh's Opera House, playing for one night only in * Romeo and Juliet,’ to a business of forty-eight dollars. Her next appearance was in New Orleans, and the rest of her career is well known to the public. A charming story is told of Mary Anderson’s girlhood in Kentucky, r» non t vero e ben trovato. Her parents were not rich at the time, and she sometimes went on errands that should have been the duty of the servants. One evening just at dusk she caught up an old hat and ran without, a pitcher in her band. Louisville is quiet enough on the more retired streets at that hour for one to hope that sueh an errand might pass nnobserved. She was then a tall, angular girl of fourteen, desperately shy and conscious of her hat and dress, and when she saw coming around the corner one of the local young swells, she made a dash in the other direction, but like sweet Kitty of Coleraine her foot tripped, she stumb’ed, the pitcher it tumbled. The young man gave one irrepressible laugh, and next moment ran forward and picked up the red, wretched, and discomfited maiden, who flung away from his inquiries and offers of assistance, and ran home in tears. Twelve or more years later, when the provincial swell had become a celebrated journalist, he was bidden to a reception in honour of the young actress who had conquered all the English-speaking people. When he was presented she held out her hand impulsively aud cried : • I have waited for this twelve years ; it is one of my triumphs.’ Then to his puzzled inquiries, she replied : ‘ Doyon remember the little girl who fell down in Louisville one evening ? 1 suppose not ; but I went home and cried all the night, as only a girl of that age can weep over a gaucherie. I knew you by sight and reputation, and thought yon a very splendid person, and I vowed then through my tears that I would some day revenge myself for that laugh by becoming famous enough to make you feel it an honour to meet me. And I have never forgotten the episode, because it was the first step I made on the road I have since travelled.’

The English ideal of female fairness is something quite distinct from the product of American environment, —more calm, less vivacious, more regular and statnesque, less bewitching and beguiling. Of the pure Anglo-Saxon type, Lady Londonderry is the very flower and crown. Tall as a daughter of the gods, slim as the legendary alder from which Odin made woman, dazzlingly fair, every feature perfectly modelled, and with the haughty repose that marks the daughter of a hundred earls, she is the highest possible result of noble Norman blood. It took many generations of chivalric ancestors—men on horseback—to give her such a poise of thehead and shoulders; many hundred years of ease, luxury, the habit of command, training, and education to perfect such a type as this. Lady Londonderry is only a

little more than thirty years of age, having married in 1875 Viscount Castlereagh, eldest son of the fifth Marquis of Londonderry, who succeeded to the title in 1884 Lady Theresa Helen Talbot she was, daughter of the nineteenth Earl of Shewsbury, a family as old as the Conquest. She has given her husband one son, the little Viscount Castlereagh, who was born in 1878. Lady Londonderry's youngest sister, Muriel Frances Louisa, also a beautiful woman, is married to Vi«eount Helms ley, brother of that other famous beauty, the Duchess of Leinster.

Lily Langtry is, perhaps, the most famous professional beauty in the world, and has made her beauty of more pecuniary value to her than any woman alive. Her noted loveliness is said to be the product of the cream and brown bread, the peaches and sunshine of the island where she was born, and where she ran about a wild, tomboy girl until her fifteenth year. Her father, the Dean of Jersey, was said to have been the handsomest man in England, and her mother was also good-looking. The Le Bretons were rather an odd family. Each one looked out for himself and left the others to their own devices. ‘ The Dean’s delightful daughter’ was allowed to grow up pretty much as she pleased, and pleased to grow up extravagantly pretty. At seventeen she married an obscure London lawyer with very little money, and going to London suddenly found heiself so great a rage that for the first years of her reign even royalty in its walks abroad attracted no attention if she was by. A colonial thus describes his first view of her: * It was at a tea in the Tower of London, given by the Guards, and all the smart world was there. I was chattering away to my neighbour when I suddenly saw everyone craning neeks and jumping up on chairs. * Is it the Queen ?’ I asked. ‘ No ; it’s the new beauty, Mrs Langtry ! Then I climbed up on a chair, too, to see this royal progress of loveliness. She was not more than twenty then, and was dressed in a plain little black silk frock and wide hat with feathers, that she wore everywhere, for she was very poor then. But such a dream of beauty ! A skin of milk and roses, silken chestnut hair, blue eyes, and a dazzling smile. The people quite went out of their senses over her. But then the Londoners have always been far more enthusiastic about beauty than anyone else. Fancy respectable people in New Zealand waiting for an hour to see the most beautiful colonial that ever lived come out of her house and pass to her carriage. The English did that often for Mrs Langtry, and they tell even more wonderful tales of their enthusiasm in the past generation for the famous Gunning sisters.’ • When you dance. I would you were a wave of the sea. That you might dance for ever.' Shakespeare makes the young prince say to Perdita, and would have said it with twice the fervour had he happily lived to a green old age of two or three hundred years and

seen the fair Pearl of Seville—Carmencita, who has found a new expression for the fire and passion of youth, for the young joy of life, and the ecstasy of lose. Born in Malaga, of Andalusian parents, nineteen years ago, instead of learning to walk the first year of her life, like the average child, she learned to dance. Not the tiptoe pirouette of the Italian or French baby, who is artistic and artificial by hereditary instinct, but * like the wave of the sea,’ like the tossing of fuchsia bells in the wind, like a wind-blown flame, a flashing, vivid bit of Spanish life, deep coloured as pomegranate flowers, full of the untamed, animal grace of a people who have touches of the wild desert blood in them, and perchance, somewhere, far away, a strain of the ZingaiL At sixteen she was in full blossom of womanhood—the most exquisite type of Spanish beauty. Brought up on grapes--she says—the warmth and bloom of them got into her blood, and gave her a loveliness that was as intoxicating as wine. And she danced. No steps that masters could teach her. No wriggling on iron toes down the length of the stage with coarse exposures. She wore modest skirts to her ankles ; she was slender as a reed, and her slim feet, nnder whose insteps water would flow, were cased in satin slippers, whose high heels clicked with her castanets. M hen the heart runs over with the first joy of love, soul and body yearn for wild motion, to spread wings for the stars, to cry, to leap, to run ; and it was that ecstasy of life and movement that Carmencita danced. Spain went wild over her, and Seville called her its * Pearl.’ She danced before the baby King, and he watched her with ronnd eyes and clapped his hands when she was done—the most spontaneous applause she has ever had. Paris heard of her. For two years she danced before them, and they struck a gold medal for her. In the home of art, nature and genius were triumphant. Lady Hermione Duncombe was the eldest daughter of the Earl of Feversham, an impoverished nobleman with three sons and four beautiful daughters, who have all married wealthy men of high rank. Lady Hermione is but twenty-five years old, and in her twentieth year was wedded to the present Duke of Leinster, who was then Lord Kildare, In 1887 they succeeded to the title, and an heir was born. Her husband is premier, Duke, Marquis, and Earl in Ireland.

Europe has given encouragement to the culture ot beauty by bestowing prizes at occasional contests. The most famous beauty show is that at Sna, Belgium, where beautiful women of all nations assemble every summer. Seven prizes are given, the first of five thousand dollars, awarded by a board of disinterested judges to the ladies who are pronounced the most beautiful; but none can enter the contest a second time. Many of the fortunate gainers of the prizes have become distinguished in society and on the stage.

Beauty shows are a favourite tribute of European taste to the reign of beauty, and an encouragement of its popular culture and recognition. Even the Paris Exposition was not complete without its awards to the most lovely women of all nations. There were twelve prizes, and six prix de eonrolalu>H for those unfortunate dames who were deemed beautiful, but not quite beautiful enough to win the chief prizes. The crowd of ambitious ones was almost as great as that which besieged the Exhibition proper; but out of this emharras of female charmers the committee allowed only twenty-five to compete. Of these lucky ones, five were French, two English, on; Irish, one American, two South American, one Algerian, two Russian, one Austrian, two Italian and one Roumanian.

But the types of beauty that have moved the world have not been such as would draw a prize at any posing contest. Instead of the calm, statuesque qualities that win there, they have been varied, brilliant and captivating. The great triumphs of beauty have however been in a moment, as when the old men of in admiration of her forgave all her sins; or when the Troy gazed on Helen, after the wars she had caused, and Duchess of Cleveland looked from her coach door on the howling mob of London, wbo attributed to her all the burden of their taxes, and stopped their frenzy to exclaim • Bless her handsome face !’

Talleyrand once skilfully extricated himself from a dilemma between allegiance to intellect and to beauty. The witty but plain Madame de Stael, and the beautiful butunwitty Madame de Recamier were sitting with Talleyrand, and to embarrass him Madame de Stai ; ! abruptly asked. Suppose Madame Recamier snd I both fell into the water, which wculd you save '■ ‘Madame, you know how to swim,’ replied the imperturbable diplomat, thus adroitly complimenting her accomplishments, while maintaining his de. votion to beauty. Ami bo he showed the spell of beauty over the masses of men and women alike, though it must be conceded that the women who inspire the deepest emotions as a vn l " ate not beautiful.