There comes, we are told, a crucial moment, “a
tide” in all lives, that taken at the flood, leads on to
fortune. An assertion, by the bye, which is open to
doubt. What does come to every one is an hour fraught with
warning, which, if unheeded, leads on to folly. This
fateful date coincides for most of us with the discovery that we
are turning gray, or that the “crow’s feet” or
our temples are becoming visible realities. The unpleasant
question then presents itself: Are we to slip meekly into middle
age, or are arms be taken up against our insidious enemy, and the
rest of life become a losing battle, fought inch by inch?
In other days it was the men who struggled the hardest against
their fate. Up to this century, the male had always been
the ornamental member of a family. Cæsar, we read,
coveted a laurel crown principally because it would help to
conceal his baldness. The wigs of the Grand Monarque are
historical. It is characteristic of the time that the
latter’s attempts at rejuvenation should have been taken as
a matter of course, while a few years later poor Madame de
Pompadour’s artifices to retain her fleeting youth were
laughed at and decried.
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
vigor heretofore unknown. So general has this mania become
that if asked what one weakness was most characteristic of modern
women, what peculiarity 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 Providence has made them, is natural
enough; but that so much time and trouble should be spent simply
in trying to look “young,” does seem unreasonable,
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 fatality that has the air of a nemesis 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 commendable ambition. Unfortunately
the stupid means most of our matrons adopt to accomplish this end
produce exactly the opposite result.
One sign of deficient 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 Maiden 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 as their daughters
they challenge a comparison which can only be to their
disadvantage, and should be if possible avoided. Is there
any disillusion more painful than, on approaching what appeared
from a distance to be a young girl, to find one’s self face
to face with sixty years of wrinkles? That is a modern
version of the saying, “an old head on young
shoulders,” with a vengeance! If mistaken
sexagenarians could divine the effect that tired eyes smiling
from under false hair, aged throats clasped with collars of
pearls, and rheumatic old ribs braced into a semblance of girlish
grace, produce on the men for whose benefit such adornments have
been arranged, reform would quickly follow. There is
something absolutely uncanny in the illusion. The more
successful it is, the more weird the effect.
No one wants to see Polonius in the finery of Mercutio.
What a sense of fitness demands is, on the contrary, a
“make up” in keeping with the rôle, which does
not mean that a woman is to become a frump, but only that she is
to make herself attractive in another way.
During the Ancien Régime in France, matters of
taste were considered all-important; an entire court would
consult on the shade of a brocade, and hail a new coiffure as an
event. The great ladies who had left their youth behind
never then committed the blunder, so common among our middle-aged
ladies, of aping the maidens of the day. They were far too
clever for that, and appreciated the advantages to be gained from
sombre stuffs and flattering laces. Let those who doubt
study Nattier’s exquisite portrait of Maria
Leczinska. Nothing in the pose or toilet suggests a desire
on the painter’s part to rejuvenate his sitter. If
anything, the queen’s age is emphasized as something
honorable. The gray hair is simply arranged and partly
veiled with black lace, which sets off her delicate, faded face
to perfection, but without flattery or fraud.
We find the same view taken of age by the masters of the
Renaissance, who appreciated its charm and loved to reproduce its
grace.
Queen Elizabeth stands out in history as a woman who struggled
ungracefully against growing old. Her wigs and hoops and
farthingales served only to make her ridiculous, and the fact
that she wished to be painted without shadows in order to appear
“young,” is recorded as an aberration of a great
mind.
Are there no painters to-day who will whisper to our wives and
mothers the secret of looking really lovely, and persuade them to
abandon their foolish efforts at rejuvenation?
Let us see some real old ladies once more, as they look at us
from miniature and portrait. Few of us, I imagine, but
cherish the memory of some such being in the old home, a
soft-voiced grandmother, with silvery hair brushed under a
discreet and flattering cap, with soft, dark raiment and
tulle-wrapped throat. There are still, it is to be hoped,
many such lovable women in our land, but at times I look about me
in dismay, and wonder who is to take their places when they are
gone. Are there to be no more “old
ladies”? Will the next generation have to look back
when the word “grandmother” is mentioned, to a
stylish vision in Parisian apparel, décolleté and
decked in jewels, or arrayed in cocky little bonnets, perched on
tousled curls, knowing jackets, and golfing skirts?
The present horror of anything elderly comes, probably, from
the fact that the preceding generation went to the other extreme,
young women retiring at forty into becapped old age.
Knowing how easily our excitable race runs to exaggeration, one
trembles to think what surprises the future may hold, or what
will be the next decree of Dame Fashion. Having eliminated
the “old lady” from off the face of the earth, how
fast shall we continue down the fatal slope toward the
ridiculous? Shall we be compelled by a current stronger
than our wills to array ourselves each year (the bare thought
makes one shudder) in more and more youthful apparel, until
corpulent senators take to running about in “sailor
suits,” and octogenarian business men go “down
town” in “pinafores,” while belles of sixty or
seventy summers appear in Kate Greenaway costumes, and dine out
in short-sleeved bibs, which will allow coy glimpses of their
cunning old ankles to appear over their socks?
