On A Painted Face

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Title:     On A Painted Face
Author: A. G. Gardiner [More Titles by Gardiner]

The other day I met in the street a young lady who, but yesterday, seemed to me a young girl. She had in the interval taken that sudden leap from youth to maturity which is always so wonderful and perplexing. When I had seen her last there would have been no impropriety in giving her a kiss in the street. Now I should as little have thought of offering to kiss her as of whistling to the Archbishop of Canterbury if I had seen that dignitary passing on the other side of the road. She had taken wing and flown from the nest. She was no longer a child: she was a personage. I found myself trying (a little clumsily) to adapt my conversation to her new status, and when I left her I raised my hat a trifle more elaborately than is my custom.

But the thing that struck me most about her, and the thing that has set me writing about her, was this: I noticed that her face was painted and powdered. Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows it as willingly or unwillingly as you or I follow our respective callings. At the moment, for example, I would do anything to escape writing this article, for the sun is shining in the bluest of April skies and the bees are foraging in the orchard, and everything calls me outside to the woods and hills. But I must bake my tale of bricks first with as much pretence of enjoying the job as possible. And in the same way, and perhaps sometimes with the same distaste, the Juliet of middle age puts on the bloom of the Juliet of seventeen.

But that any one, not compelled to do it for a living, should paint the face or dye the hair is to me unintelligible. It is like attempting to pass off a counterfeit coin. It is either a confession that one is so ashamed of one's face that one dare not let it be seen in public, or it is an attempt to deceive the world into accepting you as something other than you are. It has the same effect on the observer that those sham oak beams and uprights that are so popular on the front of suburban houses have. They are not real beams or uprights. They do not support anything, or fill any useful function. They are only a thin veneer of oak stuck on to pretend that they are the real thing. They are a detestable pretence, and I would rather live in a hovel than in a house tricked out with such vulgar deceits that do not deceive.

And in the same way the paint on the face and the dye on the hair never really achieve their object. If they did they would not cease to be a sham, but at least they would not be a transparent sham. There are, of course, degrees of failure. Mrs. Gamp's curls were so obviously false that they could not be said to be intended to deceive. On the other hand, the great lady who employs the most scientific face-makers in order to defeat the encroachments of Time does very nearly succeed. But her failure is really more tragic than that of Mrs. Gamp. How tragic I realised one day when I was introduced to a distinguished "society" woman, whose youthful beauty was popularly supposed to have survived to old age. At a distance she did indeed seem to be a miracle of girlish loveliness. But when I came close to her and saw the old, bleared eyes in the midst of that beautifully enamelled face, the shock had in it something akin to horror. It was as though Death himself was peeping out triumphantly through the painted mask. And in that moment I seemed to see all the pitiful years of struggle that this unhappy woman had devoted to the pretence of never growing older. Her pink and white cheeks were not a thing of beauty. They were only a grim jest on herself, on her ambitions, her ideals, her poor little soul.

Why should we be so much afraid of wrinkles and grey hairs? In their place they can be as beautiful as the freshest glow on the face of youth. There is a beauty of the sunrise and a beauty of the sunset. And of the two the beauty of the sunset is the deeper and more spiritual. There are some faces that seem to grow in loveliness as the snows fall around them, and the acid of Time bites the gracious lines deeper. The dimple has become a crease, but it is none the less beautiful, for in that crease is the epic of a lifetime. To smooth out the crease, to cover it with the false hue of youth, is to turn the epic into a satire.

And if the painted face of age is horrible the painted face of youth is disgusting. It is artistically bad and spiritually worse. It is the mark of a debased taste and a shallow mind. It is like painting the lily or adding a perfume to the violet, and has on one the unpleasant effect that is made by the heavy odours in which the same type of person drenches herself, so that to pass her is like passing through a sickly fog. These things are the symptom of a diseased mind--a mind that has lost the healthy love of truth and nature, and has taken refuge in falsities and shams. The paint on the face does not stop at the cheeks. It stains the soul.

[The end]
A. G. Gardiner's essay: On A Painted Face

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