Fair Without and Within.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXII, Issue XII, 19 March 1904, Page 62

Fair Without and Within.

This unjust assumption is part of the folly of beauty worship. To blindly connect perfection of heart with perfection of body is nothing but blind adoration and prejudice—yet there is surely something excusable about assuming that, purity’ and loveliness go hand in hand, for they ought to do so. The woman ' whom God has given the priceless gift of loveliness should above all other women strive after perfection of soul. She wears on her face the fulfilment of an ideal. So fair without, she should be equally fair within. The low white brow, the speaking eye. the pure white skin and soft red mouth should by Nature’s right belong to 'the pun* and upright and modest heart. I often think that if two people mated who were both good as well as beautiful. and if they trained their children and their children’s children to Im* virtuous beyond all other things on earth, they’ would produce a race of perfect physical beauty. Note how a plain woman’s fare becomes irradiated when the nobler emotions pass over it, such as Love, self sacrifice and good-temper. If a naturally plain face can thus be idealised,

what would not virtue do for a naturally beautiful one? Let those among us then who are plain cultivate the beauty of mind that softens our unloveliness, and let tho <- who are beautiful cultivate the nobleness of thought, lowliness of heart, and the uprightness of soul that will make beauty more perfect than mere physical loveliness alone ean ever really make it. The man who marries a plain woman often discovers in her many virtues he has never suspected—virtues that daily endear her to him more and more. The man, alas! who marries a beauty often finds that he has a spoilt, wilful nature to deal with. This should be so. La Bruyere tells us that “a beautiful woman with the qualities of a noble man (which I take it means courage and truth, and judgment combined with pity ami tenderness) is the Jnost perfect thing in nature.” Bear this in mind, then, ye women who are beautiful! It is the beauty who ought to possess these secret hidden treasures, so that man in discovering them finds that he has allied himself to beauty and virtue as well, and is constrained by not only his eyes, but his heart, to worship in her an Ideal, a pure and spotless Eve, whom God has' placed in his Garden of Eden. o o o o o