CHAPTER XXXII
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD
The Irish, Hungarian and Spanish women – The beauty of the English and French women – The redeeming feature of every American woman
If I were asked to name the spots of the earth where my eyes had the privilege of beholding the most beautiful specimens of womanhood, I think I would name the streets of Buda-Pesth and the drawing-rooms of Ireland. If, on the other hand, I were asked to say whether there is not, perchance, a spot of the earth where no woman is absolutely, helplessly plain, where she always has a redeeming feature to speak in her favour, I would unhesitatingly answer: 'Yes, the United States of America; for in that country, let a woman have as unpleasant a face as possible, as bad a figure as "they make them," there is an air of independence, a deliberate gait, a pair of intelligent eyes, that will go a long way towards making you forget or overlook the shortcomings of the body.'
On the whole, I think the Hungarian women are the most beautiful in the world. They have the faces of Madonnas and the figures of Greek statues; both Raphael and Phidias would have chosen them for models. They are not languishing, diaphanous creatures; they are the embodiment of health and strength. They stand erect and straight, are hearty and vigorous to the core, perfect pictures of abounding vitality. Yet their limbs and features are full of delicacy. They have large eyes and small feet, full arms, plump hands with small, tapering fingers, and delicious ankles. The inclination of the shoulders is perfect, and the bosom absolutely classical. No curve is exaggerated, but every one is there, the right size in the right place. The sun has spread a reddish golden tint, like the colour of a beautiful ripe peach, over her complexion.
She seldom presents a riddle to the psychologist, and effeminate ethereal poets do not sing of her. She is the vigorous embodiment of sensible womanhood. As her exterior, so her whole character is enchantingly fresh and matter-of-fact. She eats well and heartily, and is an athlete. She swims, dances, rides, walks. In England, you find very pretty faces among the lowest class people; in France, you seldom do. In Hungary, grace and beauty know no difference between high and low, and often bestow upon a poor, barefooted, short-skirted peasant girl (with her beautiful oval face framed in a kerchief tied under her chin) the same ravishing form, the same graceful carriage, the same magically attractive glance as upon her more favoured sister.
But who can touch – even approach – the Irish woman with her dark hair, her blue, sometimes light purple large eyes, her glorious complexion, her soft, velvety skin, her beautiful, graceful form? Sometimes the lower portion of the face is a little too long, but her brow is beyond competition. The Irish woman is a symphony in white satin. Add to these physical attractions the brightness of her expression, the amiability of her smile, and you will come to the conclusion that her charm is unapproachable.
There is so much patriotism in the world, or, I should rather say, so much provincialism, that men all over the earth give the palm for beauty to the women of their own country. Now, dear American friends, you know this is true. Would any of you deny that the American women are the most beautiful women in the world?
I am sorry to say that the beauty of French women is praised by my compatriots only.
I am such a cosmopolitan that I have no biassed mind. I have been a traveller for thirty years. In 1870 I shed a pint of blood and lost the use of my right arm (for military purposes at any rate), so that France and myself are quits, and I feel I have a right to express myself on French topics quite as freely and independently as on any other country. I thoroughly believe that the French women are the most charming and certainly the most sensible women (where would France be now but for the women?), but they are far from being beautiful. They have not the eyes of the Spanish women, nor the complexion and shapely figures of the English, nor the brilliant faces of the American women; but what makes them charming is that they have a little bit of everything, of which they know how to make the best. The French woman is an ensemble.
It must be admitted that, after praising the women of their own country, most men award to Spanish women the palm for beauty. The conclusion must naturally be that the Spanish woman is very beautiful; but, to my mind, it is a kind of beauty that does not appeal to the heart or the soul as it does to the senses. Her large eyes, veiled by thick lashes, her delicate nose and well-formed, ever-moving nostrils, her undulating form, the suppleness, almost boneless, beautifully moulded limbs and figure, her vigour, her languor – every fibre of the Spanish woman's body, I say, appeals to the senses. She does not make you dream of sentimental walks by moonlight, much less still of a quiet, happy life in some retired, secluded little cottage. In her company, you would never dream of being mayor of your city and father of a numerous family. No, the Spanish woman strikes you as a bewitchingly beautiful creature, jealous, sensitive, proud, a sort of mixture of lioness and tigress that would suggest to you the idea of spending your life sailing on a stormy sea. On looking at her, you would almost like to start an acquaintance with a quarrel. If I were married to a fair woman of Andalusia, I would feel that the best moments of my life would be 'making it up' with her.
If the law of my country made polygamy compulsory, I would make love to an English woman or a fair daughter of Virginia; I would have my house kept by a German wife; my artistic inclinations I would trust to a French woman; my intellectual ones to an American one. Then, when life got a bit dull and I wanted my blood stirred up, I would call on my Spanish wife. I would get it.
CHAPTER XXXIII
BLONDES AND BRUNETTES
Characteristics of blondes and brunettes – The ingénue and the villainess – Which of the two do men like better? – Sauterne and Burgundy – I like both – All women cannot afford to be blondes – Blondes with dark eyes – Brunettes with blue eyes
The ideal beautiful woman of the painters is a blonde.
Eve, Venus, Helen of Troy, all the celebrated beauties of antiquity and mythology, are invariably represented as blondes.
Only Cleopatra escaped it.
The reason is no doubt that the very colouring of the blonde, her fair white skin, her light blue or gray eyes, suggest in her the possession, the embodiment of all that is womanly. The blonde is the woman par excellence.
Some people declare that blondes appeal to the imagination, to the heart and to the soul, and brunettes to the senses – that the former are sentimental, sweet, modest, good-tempered, obedient, nay, angelical, whereas brunettes are strong-minded, assertive, conceited, quick-tempered, passionate, often revengeful, and sometimes devilish.
I have known brunettes to be perfect angels, and sweet blondes to be perfect little devils, and so have we all.
However this may be, most women desire to be blondes, and the proof of it is that, whereas a blonde never dyes her hair black, many brunettes dye theirs gold, blond cendré, light mahogany, and other hues of the blonde family.
On the stage the ladies of the ballet and the chorus wear blonde wigs, and the only possible reason to give for this is that managers believe they will look more attractive to the audience as blondes than as brunettes.
In the modern melodrama, the ingénue is blonde and the adventuress or villainess is dark, especially in England and America, where every member of the caste has to be well labelled from the beginning. If the villainess were a blonde, the gallery would take her for the heroine, and things would get terribly mixed. The gallery would no more understand a blonde villainess than they could take for a villain a man who did not wear a chimney-top hat and patent leather boots, smoke a cigarette, squint all the time to the right and to the left, and hiss like a snake every time he took breath.
Poets are quite as partial as artists to blondes. Alfred de Musset sang of her who was blonde comme les blés. Petrarch's sonnets were addressed to the blonde and blue-eyed Laura. The ancient Greeks used to call young blondes 'children of the gods.' For that matter, blondes especially appeal to the men of the south on account of their rarity.
Large, dreamy blue eyes, fair and soft skin, dainty features, slender figure, such are the characteristics of the blonde which help to make her the ideal young girl; but there is another beauty besides that of the young girl, it is the beauty of the full-grown woman of thirty to forty, a beauty that you will find oftener in the brunette than in the blonde, a beauty more piquant, more solid, and more lasting; but I know brunettes of thirty who are passées, and blondes of forty who are beautiful. You cannot lay down any rule.
Did I hear you ask me which I prefer? How can you ask such a question? How can any man answer it? Good light sauterne is an exquisite wine; full-bodied Burgundy is a most excellent beverage.
I like both.
It is not every woman who can afford to be a blonde. If I were a rich woman of leisure, I think I would ask to be a blonde. The blonde requires much more care than the brunette. She has to avoid exposure, and her beauty will last only as long as her appearance remains youthful. The brunette does not suffer from exposure; on the contrary, the sun improves her beauty as it does peaches.
In northern countries you very seldom see a pretty woman among the working classes; they are faded, wrinkled or freckled, and lack expression.
In Italy and Spain you see, in the streets, flower-girls and fruit-sellers who could have given sittings to Raphael and Murillo.
But I will tell you what I like, although you do not ask me, and that is a blonde with brown eyes or, better still, a fine, tall brunette with dark-blue eyes and the fine delicate skin of a blonde; and, if you want to see the latter, go to Ireland, you will find her there in plenty.
CHAPTER XXXIV
FLIRTS AND COQUETTES
The difference between the two – Points of resemblance
There is a great difference between the flirt and the coquette. The flirt accepts, even invites, your attentions, without expecting intentions. The coquette is a woman who gives you a promissory note with a firm intention of dishonouring her signature. Just as the prude often says No when she means Yes, the coquette whispers Yes all the time meaning No. The flirt promises nothing. She has nothing to refuse, because she does not allow you to ask for anything. She does not compromise herself in any way. She says neither Yes nor No. She encourages you to go on. You say to yourself, 'Will it be Yes or No? Who knows? Perhaps Yes, perhaps No.'
The coquette is generally a cold-hearted, cold-blooded woman, as perfectly sure of herself as those famous Mexican horsemen who can ride at full speed toward a precipice and stop suddenly dead on the edge of it. The coquette has no capacity for love; she does not seek love, but admiration and homage only. Unlike the flirt, she lacks cheerfulness and humour. To obtain admiration and boast of a new conquest she will risk even her reputation, compromise herself; yet her virtue is in safe keeping, for she has neither heart nor passion. In the comedy of love the coquette is the villain of the play.
The coquette uses man as she does her dresses: she likes to be seen with a new one every day. She kills for the sake of killing. She hunts, but does not eat the game she brings down. She plays on man's vanity to satisfy hers. The moment she has received a man's homage she will leave him to occupy herself with one who has refused it to her. She is dull and dreary. She may be as beautiful as you like, she is never lovable. She should be shunned like the card-sharper, whom she resembles all the more that against your good money she has nothing but counterfeit coin.
The flirt, on the contrary, is cheerful, jolly, often full of fun, and if you can make up your mind to accept her for what she is worth, she may help you pass a very pleasant time. She is not serious, and she does not want you to take her seriously. She is honest. She wants fun, innocent fun. The coquette tries to lead you as far as she wishes you to go; the flirt does not lead you any further than you wish to go. And it may be added that, while flirts have often been known to make very good wives, coquettes have invariably proved detestable ones.
Winthrop was helplessly wrong when he said, 'A woman without coquetry is as insipid as a rose without scent, champagne without sparkle, or corned beef without mustard,' unless he meant (which he did not) to use the French adjective, and not the noun, and say that a coquette is a woman who, by the care she bestows on her dress and general appearance and many other ways, knows how to make herself attractive and show herself in the most advantageous light.
The French language expresses the difference to a nicety. The word as an adjective is complimentary, but certainly not as a noun. Elle est coquette means 'she dresses very elegantly, and has very winning manners,' whereas C'est une coquette means 'she is a coquette,' that is to say, 'she tries to fascinate for the mere sake of fascinating.'
The coquette plays on man's vanity and makes a fool of him. The flirt displays her accomplishments and personal charms either to make you have a pleasant time with her, or, when more serious, to lead you on to an offer of marriage, which she will honestly accept, often with the best results for yourself.
It is only when you say of a woman that she is a 'desperate flirt' that you may come to the conclusion that she is a coquette. Of course, when the flirt is a married woman, she is a coquette; but when she is a young girl, I would call her a very harmless person. On the other hand, in opposition to that epithet of harmless, the adjective that is most commonly coupled with the word 'coquette' is not 'harmless,' but 'heartless.'
The word 'flirt' comes from the French fleureter, which means to go from flower to flower, to touch lightly; but although the word is of French origin, the thing itself is not French. Flirtation is a pastime which is most essentially English. We do not flirt in France; we are more serious than that in love-affairs. After all, flirtation is trifling with love, and that game would be a dangerous one to play with a Frenchman. A woman who flirts would pass in France for giddy, if not worse. She knows her countryman well, and is aware what she would expose herself to if she flirted with him.
The English girl in flirting does not play with fire. Englishmen are reserved, cold. The customs of the country grant liberty to the women, and they accept flirtation for what it is worth. The worst they might say of a girl who flirted with them would be, 'She is an awful flirt,' with a mixed expression of pity and contempt. An English girl who has had a good time at a party, a picnic, a ball, can say, 'I have had such a flirtation!' Why, she could say that to her own mother, and if that mother was still fairly young and good-looking, she might answer, 'And so have I.'
I take the American woman to be too intelligent – I had almost said too intellectual – to enjoy that childish pastime.
I hate the coquette and somewhat pity, if not despise, the flirt. I love straightforwardness. I admire that woman who blooms in the shade, who is earnest in her affections, and who waits until she is in love to allow the curtain to rise; then who honestly, devotedly, straightforwardly, goes through the whole comedy.
In everything I hate imitations. If I cannot get the real article, I do without it.
CHAPTER XXXV
WHAT IS A PERFECT LADY?
'Am I the man as wants a gentleman to drive him?' – How can you tell a lady? – A lady is a woman who adds to the virtues of a woman the qualities of a gentleman
In a clever article, Lady Violet Greville recently asked, 'What is a lady?'
A friend of mine was once asked in New York by a coachman if he was 'the man as wanted a gentleman to drive him.'
I was myself told once by a negro hotel-porter, whom I had asked a question about some baggage of mine, to apply 'to that gen'l'man over there' – another negro porter.
A lady friend of mine who visits the poor of her district once called at a tenement house to inquire after a poor woman who was ill. The woman who answered the door shouted to someone upstairs: 'Will you tell the lady on the second floor that a young person from the district has called to see her?'
A lady acquaintance, who once happened to be alone in her home with a maid who was ill, out of consideration for that girl, went herself to open the door to a friend she had seen go up the steps of her house, so as to save the maid the trouble of coming upstairs. The following day that maid told a servant next door that 'her mistress was no lady,' as she answered her door herself.
'What is a lady?' asks Lady Violet Greville.
Well, it is hard to tell in these democratic days, when every class strives to ape the others above, when all people are equal to their superiors and superior to their equals.
With the modern extravagance in dress, the boisterous hats, the outrageously decollété dresses in restaurants and other public places, the cigarette-smoking, the card-playing for high stakes, and what not, I shall feel inclined to answer: 'You can tell a lady by the efforts she makes to be taken for – anything but a lady.'
Every class of society has its own definition of a lady. To the inhabitants of the slums it is a woman who stops her nose when in contact with them; to servants, it is one who does not do a stroke of work in her house, pays their wages regularly, throws at them her left-off clothes, and treats them like dirt; to tradespeople, it is one who pays cash for what she buys; for dressmakers and milliners, it is a woman who never bargains, and is known never to wear her gowns and hats more than half a dozen times.
What is that new supreme desire to pass for a lady?
'It proceeds purely,' said Lady Violet Greville, 'from a wish to imitate; it is vulgarity pure and simple.
'It is the aspiration after gentility, the longing to appear what we are not, the desire of the fly for the dinner-lamp.
'It is the natural consequence of the religion of the Anglo-Saxon race – make-believe.
'A real lady's existence,' continues her ladyship, 'seems to outsiders to be all sweetness, and passed in a land of milk and honey; whereas, in reality, could her poor, crawling admirers realize it, the modern lady's life is a compound of hard work, exhausting excitement, anxious ease, and infinite disillusion. To begin with, she is often poorer than her prosperous neighbour, compelled to practise petty and galling economies, travel second class, wear cleaned gloves, and spend unpleasant moments in street-cars and omnibuses. It is the vulgar nouveaux riches who own the carriages, the horses, the jewels, and the money.'
Yet the vulgar rich may be as lavish as they please, may throw gold out of the windows, give a small fortune for their horses and carriages, they have not enough money to buy what that lady possesses, her delicacy and refinement. Even their servants know that, for they can take the measure of the mushroom nobility to a T.
In a few years more, no doubt, the word 'lady,' entirely divested of the original meaning, far away buried in the mists of time, will merely be the equivalent of the feminine gender, the female of the male, and then the gentler bred and wiser of the sex will exult in bravely calling themselves women. And they will be right. 'A perfect woman' sounds to my ears far more sweetly than 'a perfect lady.' There is no misunderstanding about the former. 'I am not an angel,' says an ingénue to her fiancé in some French play, the name of which now escapes me; 'don't expect too much from me. I am only a woman.' A woman – only a woman. Heavens! that is good enough for anybody!
Lady Violet Greville concludes her clever article by a beautiful definition of a lady:
'The real lady settles her debts, does not forget her liabilities, would as soon cheat as commit murder, and actually considers an engagement a binding duty. She has a soft voice and a pleasant manner; she is the daughter of evolution and the survival of the fittest. If she has nerves, she does not show them. She has courage of the finest sort, the courage of her opinions and the moral courage to deny herself.'
I feel almost inclined to draw myself up, and say of the real lady: 'In short, she possesses all the qualities that make up a gentleman.'
Tell me, ladies, if this is not just like a man.