WITCHING WOMEN OF HISTORY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XII, Issue XIII, 31 March 1894, Page 294

WITCHING WOMEN OF HISTORY.

At the Royal Academy io London there are the portraits of three women—Lady Hamilton, Mrs Jordan, and Sophie Arnould. The lovely Emma is a type of rustic beauty at its best—not refined—likely to become coarse. Mrs Jordan shows, behind a charming face, intellect, wit, cleverness, and a gentle heart. Sophie Arnould shows greater wit, greater cleverness, and a heart not so gentle, perhaps. On each of the faces there is in addition, unmistakably, the same quality, rare and wonderful. It is the quality for which there is no other word than witchery. Ihesewere all three witches, but instead of being burned at the stake they set fire to every masculine heart that approached them. And what is the secret of this gift ? It is certainly not faultless beauty, for it is a perfectly comprehensible paradox that as a rnle the women who have been noted for the fascination of their beauty were not pretty women at all. Anne Boleyn had many plastic defects. The Duchess of Bnrgundy, who lit up the old age of Louis XIV. and the Court of Versailles, and neutralised the morose influence of Mdme. de Maintenon, had a goitrous neck and decayed front teeth, yet she was proclaimed a beauty. Marguerite de Valois, with whom most of the prominent Frenchmen of her day were at some time or another desperately in love, had heavy cheeks, too prominent eyes, and a thick, hanging under lip. The last Duchess de Berri would not have been allowed to so much as compete at a beauty show had she presented herself incognito. Sir Walter Scott, who was close to her at mass in the Tuilleries Chapel, wrote in his diary that she was plain, and that her eyes were not fellows. At what age is this charm most subtle? Swift wrote with cruel candour of Stella’s fading charms, and sent her as a birthday gift a rhymed * Receipt to Restore Her Lost Youth ’ at a period we should consider the prime of life. The caustic Dean of St. Patrick’s wondering How angels look at thirty-six proves a sharp contrast to the more modern writer, George Lewes, who in his • Life of Goethe ’ speaks of 33 as the fascinating period in a woman’s life, being that in which he considered her to have reached the full development of her powers of mind and body. And 33 was the age at which Frau von Stein proved dangerous to the heart of the poet who had survived the more youthful charms of a Gretchen, a Charlotte and a Lili. It is impossible to read the descriptions of salon life in Paris without realising the immense power of snch women as Mme. de Rambouillet, Mme. Deffand, who conld tolerate anything but the commonplace; Mme. Neckar, her brilliant daughter, Mme. de Stael, and her cherished friend, Mme. d’Houdetot, exercised in literary, social, and political matters. It is interesting to see how the age of the heroine of the modern novel differs from that of older writers. Out of thirty of Scott’s heroines sixteen are described as under 20, three as over 20, and only one, Amy Robsart, is a heroine * of an uncertain age,’ since she is historically a middle-aged matron, and fictitiously a youthful biide. But the conspicuous character of the modern novel is a woman, not a girl, who has lived and experienced much, and not unfreqnently is married, before the story introduces her as its central figure.—Walter Besant.