According to the colour she wills her hair to be for
the time--black or yellow or, peradventure, burnished red--she will
blush for you, sneer for you, laugh or languish for you. The good
combinations of line and colour are nearly numberless, and by their
means poor restless woman will be able to realise her moods in all
their shades and lights and dappledoms, to live many lives and
masquerade through many moments of joy. No monotony will be. And for
us men matrimony will have lost its sting.
But that in the world of women they will not neglect this art, so
ripping in itself, in its result so wonderfully beneficent, I am sure
indeed. Much, I have said, is already done for its full revival. The
spirit of the age has made straight the path of its professors.
Fashion has made Jezebel surrender her monopoly of the rouge-pot. As
yet, the great art of self-embellishment is for us but in its infancy.
But if Englishwomen can bring it to the flower of an excellence so
supreme as never yet has it known, then, though Old England lose her
martial and commercial supremacy, we patriots will have the
satisfaction of knowing that she has been advanced at one bound to a
place in the councils of aesthetic Europe. And, in sooth, is this
hoping too high of my countrywomen? True that, as the art seems always
to have appealed to the ladies of Athens, and it was not until the
waning time of the Republic that Roman ladies learned to love the
practice of it, so Paris, Athenian in this as in all other things, has
been noted hitherto as a far more vivid centre of the art than London.
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