The fact is significant. To what is it due? In part, I suppo, to a general increa in prosperity. The rich have always cultivated their personal appearance. The diffusion of wealth — such as it is — now permits tho of the poor who are less badly off内双怎么画大眼妆 青岛新东方穷困的than their fathers to do the same.
But this is, clearly, not the whole story. The modern cult狂热的崇拜，迷信 of beauty is
divideintonot exclusively a function (in the mathematical n) of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hardly hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have en, they have not suffered. Women are retrenching on other things than their faces. The cult of beauty must therefore be symptomatic of changes that have taken place outside the economic sphere. Of what changes? Of the changes, I suggest, in the status of women; of the changes in our attitude towards "the merely physical."
Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hitherto rerved to the male, but also freer to exerci the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. They have the right, if not to be less virtuous than their grandmothers, at any rate to look less virtuous. The British Matron, not long since a creature of austere and even terrifying aspect, now does her best to achieve and perennially prerve the appearance of what her predecessor would have described as a Lost Woman. She often succeeds. But we are not shocked — at any rate, not morally shocked. Aesthetically shocked — yes; we may sometimes be that. But morally, n
dininghallo. We concede that the Matron is morally justified in being preoccupied with her personal appearance. This concession depends on another of a more general nature—a concession to the Body, with a large B, to the Manichaean principle of evil. For we have now come to admit that the body: has its rights. And not only rights — duties, actually duties. It has, for example, a duty to do the best it can for itlf in the way of strength and beauty. Christia-ascetic ideas no longer trouble us. We demand justice for the body as well as for the soul. Hence, among other things, the fortunes made by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the vendors of rubber reducing belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
What are the practical results of this modern cult of beauty? The exercis and the massage, the health motors and the skin foods — to what have they led? Are women more beautiful than they were? Do they get something for the enormous expenditure of energy, time, and money demanded of them by the beauty-cult? The are questions which it is difficult to answer. For the facts em to contradict themlves. The campaign f
explodedor more physical beauty ems to be both a tremendous success and a lamentable failure. It depends on how you look at the results.
It 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, neatankled and slender The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indistinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrait of the Artist's Daughter. 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 dia, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for more 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 the 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 r
eal 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 he 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?
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