BEAUTIES.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5142, 15 September 1877, Page 6 (Supplement)

BEAUTIES.

(From the World.) “IP ladies be but young and fair. They have the gift to know it. A great many, who are neither, are but too apt to suspect it, for it is the most natural and inherent desire in the female breast. “ What is your sex’s earliest, latest care. Your heart’s supremo ambition ? To bo fair.” Fortunately, there is no country where beauty is so widely sown, or where so many varieties of it exist, as in this ; and there is hardly an English family, comprising daughters, which cannot boast of a beauty. Beauty is comparative, however, and many a girl who passes for a belle amongst her worse-favored sisters will not pass muster when tried by a higher standard. Then there are so many spurious kinds of beauty. The heauti du diahle, for instance, which, depending solely upon youth and health, blooms for a season and passes away like last year’s butterfly. Also the many questionable beauties who have their partisans and admirers, and are canvassed, criticised, and judged more from the sympathies and predilections they excite than from any absolute rule of perfection. To such is the success of chance and opportunity ; and as ‘ a saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn,' so are their charms enhanced by social position and all the adventitious aids of diamonds and dress. There are, moreover, the artistic beauties, the ladies

whose garments are fearfully and wonderfully made, who stick out their chins and noses, as at Oamelot, and who.m it requires an aesthetic education and a perception accorded only to a gifted few adequately to appreciate. It does sometimes happen—too rarely indeed—that a star of such transcendent light appears on the horizon, that all competitors are eclipsed and rivalry is out of the question. “ You common people of the skies, What are you when the moon shall rise?” Before one of these queens of flesh and blood the envious, the spiteful, and that large proportion of society which may be called the denigrating are silenced, or forced by the current of public opinion to acknowledge her supremacy. A few such ideal beauties appear in a generation. We may count them on our fingers as we look back through the vista of time. They shine out from amongst the crowd of pretty faces, serene, superb, insolent, and unassailable with the beauty which, the poet tells us, “is not a blessing, but a mark from heaven.’ It is generally their fate to be treated like a Sdvres vase, a good example of Sir Joshua, or a Kembrandt etching in its first stage, and knocked down to the highest bidder, unless, indeed, they have been discovered by a chance explorer, hiding, like the modest violet in some village hedgerow. In that case their inventor may have to pay the penalty, if he brings them to the light of day, of losing his individuality, and becoming that unenviable personage Xe marie de madame , to say nothing of finding himself suddenly pitchforked into a set which is not naturally his. Moreover, if he aspires to escape the common lot, he must make up his mind to run the gauntlet of much ill-natured abuse ; to be pronounced jealous, suspicious, and a dog in the manger to be literally a watchdog to his wife, and stand in the light of half-gaoler, halt-detective in her eyes ; besides rapidly learning to distrust his best friends, and feeling that every hand is against him. On such terms die et lui may enjoy their advantages for a few brief seasons, be feasted and caressed by society, possessing the “ Open Sesame” before which every door, from the highest to the lowest, flies open. Nothing lasts long in perfection, however ; and it may be some consolation to her contemporaries to know that, even as every dog has his day, so has the proudest beauty ; and as that beauty yields to time and wanes, and the light of other days fades, haw much darker the shadow and colder the twilight as the shades of night gather in and compass her round about! It is seldom that a woman accustomed to the incense of the world can accept gracefully “ the change and not the change ; ” and sweet, indeed, must be the disposition which can regard without bitterness the falling away of friends and lovers, the averted eye, the illconcealed indifference, succeeding to what was but yesterday universal homage. The less bountifully endowed by Nature have probably made some harvest of their youthful charms, have secured at least a friend, or, having time for the exercise of human sympathy and the interchange of kind offices, have endeared themselves to a circle of acquaintances. But a beauty has no time ; every hour has been taken up in suffering herself to be adored ; the constant round, the ever-shift-ing and never-ending succession of worshippers have barely given her leisure for a preference, much less for an affection ; her mind, saturated and enervated by perpetual adulation, has had but little chance of improvement, her thoughts can hardly fail to be centred on herself, and she is utterly without resources to fall back on, and might meditate sadly on the quaint old words of Euphues addressed “to such fine dames as are in love with their own looks : ” “ When their beauty shall be like the blasted rose, their wealth wasted, their bodies wome, their faces wrinkled, their fingers crooked, who will like of them in their age who loved none in their youth ?” Those to whom the gods have given beauty should have an additional share of brains. As a matter of fact, the reverse is generally the case. Beauty is like a double-edged knife, apt to cut the fingers of its bearer, bringing with it a shoal of unseen temptations, and for a time keeping its owner in a fool’s paradise, with a false estimate of most things. Those who have not the dangerous gift, or who have only been granted a modest measure of it, may take comfort in the reflection that a woman is always beautiful to the man who loves her; and, as Congreve truly says, Beauty is the lover’s gift; ’tis he bestows your charms ; your glass is all a cheat.”