Real Beauty

The modern cult of beauty is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. "Old ladies" are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may well believe, they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent-back and hollow cheeks will come to be regarded as medievally old-fashioned. The crone of the future will be golden, curly and cherry-lipped, and slender. This desirable consummation will be due in part to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud-baths, and paint, in part to improved health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life. Ugliness is one of the symptoms of disease, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up to a point, genuinely successful.

Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. The apparatus for mimicking the symptoms of health is now within the reach of every moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful—as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features, with or without surgical and chemical aid, permits? The answer is emphatically: No. For real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self. The beauty of a porcelain jar is a matter of shape, of color, of surface texture. The jar may be empty or tenanted by spiders, full of honey or stinking slime—it makes no difference to its beauty or ugliness. But a woman is alive, and her beauty is therefore not skin deep. The surface of the human vessel is affected by the nature of its spiritual contents. I have seen women who, by the standards of a connoisseur of porcelain, were ravishingly lovely.

Their shape, their color, their surface texture were perfect. And yet they were not beautiful. For the lovely vase was either empty or filled with some corruption. Spiritual emptiness or ugliness shows through. And conversely, there is an interior light that can transfigure forms that the pure aesthetician would regard as imperfect or downright ugly.

There are numerous forms of psychological ugliness. There is an ugliness of stupidity, for example, of unawareness (distressingly common among pretty women). An ugliness also of greed, of lasciviousness, of avarice. All the deadly sins, indeed, have their own peculiar negation of beauty. On the pretty faces of those especially who are trying to have a continuous "good time", one sees very often a kind of bored sullenness that ruin all their charm. I remember in particular two young American girls I once met in North Africa. From the porcelain specialist's point of view, they were extremely beautiful but a sullen boredom was so deeply stamped into their fresh faces, their gait and gestures expressed so weary a listlessness that it was unbearable to look at them. These exquisite creatures were positively repulsive.