9. Men as Aesthetes
Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feeble
loveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a
woman can hold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously
conceives to be her beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is
almost always a pure illusion. The female body, even at its best, is
very defective in form; it has harsh curves and very clumsily
distributed masses; compared to it the average milk-jug, or even
cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design--in brief, an
objet d'art. The fact was curiously (and humorously) display during
the late war, when great numbers of women in all the belligerent
countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly they appeared in
public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb of aviators,
elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, their
deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man,
save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually looks better in
uniform than in mufti; the tight lines set off his figure. But a
woman is at once given away: she look like a dumbbell run over by
an express train. Below the neck by the bow and below the waist
astern there are two masses that simply refuse to fit into a balanced
composition. Viewed from the side, she presents an exaggerated S
bisected by an imperfect straight line, and so she inevitably suggests
a drunken dollar-mark. Her ordinary clothing cunningly conceals
this fundamental imperfection. It swathes those impossible masses
in draperies soothingly uncertain of outline. But putting her into
uniform is like stripping her. Instantly all her alleged beauty
vanishes.
Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the
modest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only
the rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art
comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and
crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she
is almost sure to be bow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost
sure to have bad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is almost sure to
have scrawny hands, or muddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin.
A woman who meets fair tests all 'round is so uncommon that she
becomes a sort of marvel, and usually gains a livelihood by
exhibiting herself as such, either on the stage, in the half-world, or
as the private jewel of some wealthy connoisseur.
But this lack of genuine beauty in women lays on them no practical
disadvantage in the primary business of their sex, for its effects are
more than overborne by the emotional suggestibility, the herculean
capacity for illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense of
men.
Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most
modest doses; they are quite content with the mere appearance of
beauty. That is to say, they show no talent whatever for
differentiating between the artificial and the real. A film of face
powder, skilfully applied, is as satisfying to them as an epidermis of
damask. The hair of a dead Chinaman, artfully dressed and dyed,
gives them as much delight as the authentic tresses of Venus. A
false hip intrigues them as effectively as the soundest one of living
fascia. A pretty frock fetches them quite as surely and securely as
lovely legs, shoulders, hands or eyes. In brief, they estimate
women, and hence acquire their wives, by reckoning up purely
superficial aspects, which is just as intelligent as estimating an egg
by purely superficial aspects. They never go behind the returns; it
never occurs to them to analyze the impressions they receive. The
result is that many a man, deceived by such paltry sophistications,
never really sees his wife--that if, as God is supposed to see, her,
and as the embalmer will see her--until they have been married for
years. All the tricks may be infantile and obvious, but in the face of
so naive a spectator the temptation to continue
practising them
is irresistible. A trained nurse tells me that even when undergoing
the extreme discomforts of parturition the great majority of women
continue to modify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and to
give thought to the arrangement of their hair. Such transparent
devices, to be sure, reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth,
and yet it must be plain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of
men, even the most discreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is
wholly resistant to female beauty, and I know of no man, even
among those engaged professionally by aesthetic problems, who
habitually and automatically distinguishes the genuine, from the
imitation. He may doit now and then; he may even preen himself
upon is on unusual discrimination; but given the right woman and
the right stage setting, and he will be deceived almost as readily as a
yokel fresh from the cabbage-field.
