In other days it was the men who struggled the hardest against their fate. Up to this century, the male had always been the ornamental5 member of a family. Cæsar, we read, coveted6 a laurel crown principally because it would help to conceal7 his baldness. The wigs8 of the Grand Monarque are historical. It is characteristic of the time that the latter’s attempts at rejuvenation9 should have been taken as a matter of course, while a few years later poor Madame de Pompadour’s artifices11 to retain her fleeting12 youth were laughed at and decried13.
To-day the situation is reversed. The battle, given up by the men—who now accept their fate with equanimity—is being waged by their better halves with a vigor15 heretofore unknown. So general has this mania16 become that if asked what one weakness was most characteristic of modern women, what peculiarity17 marked them as different from their sisters in other centuries, I should unhesitatingly answer, “The desire to look younger than their years.”
That people should long to be handsomer or taller or better proportioned than a cruel Providence18 has made them, is natural enough; but that so much time and trouble should be spent simply in trying to look “young,” does seem unreasonable19, especially when it is evident to everybody that such efforts must, in the nature of things, be failures. The men or women who do not look their age are rare. In each generation there are exceptions, people who, from one cause or another—generally an excellent constitution—succeed in producing the illusion of youth for a few years after youth itself has flown.
A curious fatality20 that has the air of a nemesis21 pursues those who succeed in giving this false appearance. When pointing them out to strangers, their admirers (in order to make the contrast more effective) add a decade or so to the real age. Only last month I was sitting at dinner opposite a famous French beauty, who at fifty succeeds in looking barely thirty. During the meal both my neighbors directed attention to her appearance, and in each case said: “Isn’t she a wonder! You know she’s over sixty!” So all that poor lady gained by looking youthful was ten years added to her age!
The desire to remain attractive as long as possible is not only a reasonable but a commendable22 ambition. Unfortunately the stupid means most of our matrons adopt to accomplish this end produce exactly the opposite result.
One sign of deficient23 taste in our day is this failure to perceive that every age has a charm of its own which can be enhanced by appropriate surroundings, but is lost when placed in an incongruous setting. It saddens a lover of the beautiful to see matrons going so far astray in their desire to please as to pose for young women when they no longer can look the part.
Holmes, in My Maiden24 Aunt, asks plaintively:—
Why will she train that wintry curl in such a springlike way?
That this folly is in the air to-day, few will dispute. It seems to be perpetrated unconsciously by the greater number, with no particular object in view, simply because other people do it. An unanswerable argument when used by one of the fair sex!
Few matrons stop to think for themselves, or they would realize that by appearing in the same attire
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