The Most Famous Beauties

Perhaps chance has played, in fame won by beauty, throughout the various ages of history, a greater part than it has played in every other kind of fame; for many of those whose beauty history has kept on record escaped the flood of oblivion — which spares nothing and leaves nothing — only because their lives were joined to the life of some great man, or of an infatuated poet, or a masterly sculptor, or a gifted painter; though there has been no lack of beauties known for gifts or destinies that were worthy in themselves of rescuing their memory from extinction.

Were we to attempt to speak of absolute beauty, all speech would become impossible; for the wrappings of time may well have hidden, in some deserted village, or barren desert, or far-off isle, girls to whose beauty the beauty of those whose memory we still repeat today could never rise — those whose portraits we still pass in review, as the pen of a poet or the brush of a painter set them down — until the soul returns to those immortal passages of "Thomas Gray" in his "Elegy in a Country Churchyard":

"How many a gem of pure ray, serene, has lain hidden in the depths of the ocean; and how many a flower blooms far from all eyes, then sends forth its fragrance, wasted, into the wilderness of space!"

Between Truth and Imagination

Yet poetic souls — which are, we believe, the source of immortality for many of those whose names today awaken in the soul every image and token of beauty — were not always, indeed were rarely, critics and connoisseurs of beauty in the familiar sense. How many a one of them was enamored of a woman in whom people saw no beauty, if beauty be measured by proportion and ratio; nay, how many a one of them loved a phantom that his imagination had fashioned, then gave the phantom a name, and perhaps gave it a body, choosing a woman — whoever she might be — much as "Don Quixote" did, the day he took for himself a girl, one of the daughters of his village, and bestowed upon her a noble and splendid name, "Dulcinea del Toboso." And since such a name is given only to noblewomen, there was in Don Quixote's imagination enough to raise up from the country girl that Dulcinea for whose sake he would do battle with champions if they did not acknowledge her beauty forthwith, and humbled!

One of those restless poetic souls once cried out, as he surveyed the record of his life so crowded with adventures: "Where is that woman who was the object of my adventures? It seems to me she was not one but a hundred! And my soul, which soared on high, was never touched by any one of them." And who knows — perhaps every one of those hundred was, at the given moment, the most beautiful woman the earth bore; and perhaps our poet gathered up in her, by his imagination, all the beauty of which he dreamed.

History has preserved many of the names of those beauties. We think we need not go back and retell the tidings of Cleopatra, who contrived to return from her exile in Syria to Alexandria, where Julius Caesar was — and behold, she steps forth before him from a rolled-up carpet; and behold, Caesar, the soldier of hardened heart, is dazzled by her burning beauty, by the perpetual seething movement of her spirit, and by the tone of her voice, which could give utterance to the subtlest stirrings in a correct Latin made lovelier still by the accent of the sweet Greek tongue, Cleopatra's native language.

What is beyond doubt is that Cleopatra's ambition, which knew no bounds, had a telling effect upon the history of the whole Roman Empire. It was she who tempted Julius Caesar toward kingship, and she who drove Antony after him to the urge to seize power for himself alone, without his two colleagues, until she brought him to defeat upon the face of the waters in the famous battle of Actium, and at the last drove him to suicide.

"Pascal" spoke truly when he said in the "Pensées": had Cleopatra's nose been a little shorter than it was, the face of the whole world would have changed. But what can we do, when her nose was innocent of all shortness — indeed it was, and remains, proverbial for the beauty of the nose that descends in one line with the forehead, the nose still described to this day, in the lexicon of beauty, as the Greek nose?!

What power went forth from that woman's beauty? And what cunning was mingled with her magic? She dazzled Antony the day she came gliding to him in her ship, as though it bore all the luxury of the earth, reclining in a silken bower, with handmaids about her in gauzy robes like the waves of the sea, to mimic its goddesses, and boys who seemed, every one of them, "Cupid," the god of love, with his light and giddy wings! What power went forth from that woman's beauty? And what cunning was mingled with her magic, in the days when

she would roam the quarters of Alexandria with Antony at her side — one of the three rulers of Rome — as though he were a small child, the two of them knocking together at the windows and doors of houses, then running off in a mischief beyond the mischief of children?!

Nor do we think we need go back and retell that famous adventure of a great admiral, Nelson, who had scarcely won, in 1798, his greatest victory in war over Napoleon's fleet at Aboukir, and returned to Italy, when he fell into the toils of Lady Hamilton, wife of England's aged ambassador at Naples — that astonishing woman whose beginnings as a serving-girl in a tavern did not keep her from marrying an ambassador, after a life crowded with adventures, and then holding sway over a great admiral; though ill fortune clung to her in the last years of her life, for her husband died in 1803, and Nelson followed him in 1805, and after their deaths misery encompassed her; her creditors tightened the noose about her until they brought her to prison in 1813, and she left prison for Calais in France, where her end came in 1814.

This is the "Lady Hamilton" who was immortalized not only for her sway over Nelson but for those many magnificent oil portraits painted of her by immortal painters, "Reynolds" and "Romney" — of whom the historians say that he wore out his imagination in choosing her poses, and in setting down the breaths of magic that went forth from her beauty.

And how many beauties besides Cleopatra and Lady Hamilton have kindled the feelings of men, unlocking their gifts or wearing them away! Perhaps a woman like "Madame Récamier" ought not to be passed over when one speaks of the beauties of history, for the salon of that lady in Paris had a far-reaching effect upon the intellectual movement in France at the opening of the nineteenth century. Madame Récamier, who received her first upbringing in a convent, knew how to deal with men so as to hold them to respect for her without wounding any feeling of theirs or letting them sense any harshness. The reader may turn to the tale by "Madame de Staël" called "Corinne" to grasp the traits of soul of Madame Récamier, whom the French writer took as the heroine of her tale. And yet she singled out, from among all her admirers, two great writers, "Benjamin Constant" and "Chateaubriand," and with them she had the closest of ties — so that it may be said that whoever follows their literary works cannot fail to find there the traces of that woman of magnificent beauty and bewitching talk, that woman whose features the painters "David" and "Gérard" have left us in immortal canvases.

And there is yet another effect that women's beauty has had — their effect upon the crowds — which we add to their effect upon individuals, so as to take in the different sides of that potent magic.

This influence has gone forth from actresses and dancers in particular, and perhaps we may content ourselves here with pointing to two of them whose fame filled the horizons: the actress "Sarah Bernhardt," and the American dancer "Isadora Duncan."

Sarah Bernhardt — with her majestic, delicate, pale face, her golden hair spread out like a veil, and her supple, alluring figure — possessed a special gift in the reciting of verse, which was perhaps the first source of her magic; so much so that one of the critics described that gift by saying: "You cannot praise her for reciting verse well... The goddess of poetry herself was embodied in her, and neither intelligence nor art had any part in it. A hidden instinct led her. She recited verse as the nightingale sings, as the winds moan and the waters murmur; she recited it as Lamartine used to recite it in his old age."

And strangely enough, her outward appearance itself was all eloquent of poetry, so that this appearance was once described thus: "She was a puff of smoke, a breath of mist. She was a fleeting glimpse of delicate features covered by locks of hair and by veils like clouds."