Beauty’s Rival

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 645, 23 April 1929, Page 5

Beauty’s Rival

Best “Treatment” for Personality

Personality is the great, though vague, hope of those of us who are not beautiful. You know how it is when we hear someone say of another woman: “She isn’t pretty, no, not a bit, but she is attractive.” A faint hope stirs in the most modest breast. May it not be that we also are, to some people, anyway, “attractive”? Is there not, after all, something more subtle about that indefinable appeal of personality than about obvious physical beauty? Given tlie chance of obvious physical beauty, we would, of course, seize it with both hands, but if there is no chance of it, and there is a possibility of this other power, with what eager wistfulness or with what sensible determination —according to our types—we consider it. But personality is not won by wishing. Not even by willing. It may ibe stunted or developed bj* circumstances, but it is as much a gift as that more patent one of beauty. You can, of course, laboriously develop mannerisms and what you hope are charms; you can imitate the speech or the gestures of someone who has personality. All people of great personality do, indeed, give us something to copy; they make a tradition.

The world at large, in some measure, is impressed by them, really bears their stamp, but unconsciously. Directly the copy is a conscious one, the authentic touch is gone. A Favourable Air l£ we have a fragment of personally the best way to make it grow is to forget it in the study of other people. Knowledge of other men and other women is the air in which the only self-knowledge worth having thrives. Many of us, the sensitively diffident as well as the confidently vain, waste precious opportunities of enrichment. We are so much concerned with ourselves, so keen to enjoy the impression we are going to make, or so anxious about it, that we forget to be observant and receptive. So we remain in the cramped enclosure of self instead of inheriting those wide spaces which belong to the free spirit. This freedom will not, of course, confer the fascinatingly complex personality with which people of tremendous character are born. But it will create a real, if an unspectacular, self, and reality is something in a world that is sick with egotism and pretensiousness.