AP Success - AP English Language: The Cult of Beauty

What are the practical results of the modern cult of beauty? The exercises and the

massages, the health motors and the skin foods-to what have they led? Are women

more beautiful than they were? Do they get something for the enormous expenditure

of energy, time, and money demanded of them by the beauty cult? These are

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questions which it is difficult to answer. For the facts seem to contradict themselves.

The campaign for more physical beauty seems to be both a tremendous success and

a lamentable failure. It depends how you look at the results.

It is a success insofar as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater

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age than in the past. "Old ladies" are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may

well believe, they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent back and hollow

cheeks will come to be regarded as medievally old-fashioned. The crone of the future

will be golden, curly, and cherry-lipped, neat-ankled and slender. The Portrait of the

Artist's Mother will come to be almost indistinguishable, at future picture shows,

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from the Portrait of the Artist's Daughter. This desirable consummation will be due

in part to skin foods and injections of paraffin wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and

paint, in part to improved health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life.

Ugliness is one of the symptoms of disease; beauty, of health. Insofar as the campaign

for more beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up

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to a point, genuinely successful. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these

symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still,

it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. The

apparatus for mimicking the symptoms of health is now within the reach of every

moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can

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be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When

that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate,

as the natural shape of her features, with or without surgical and chemical aid, permits?

The answer is emphatically: No. For real beauty is as much an affair of the inner

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as of the outer self. The beauty of a porcelain jar is a matter of shape, of color, of

surface texture. The jar may be empty or tenanted by spiders, full of honey or stinking

slime-it makes no difference to its beauty or ugliness. But a woman is alive, and

her beauty is therefore not skin deep. The surface of the human vessel is affected

by the nature of its spiritual contents. I have seen women who, by the standards of

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a connoisseur of porcelain, were ravishingly lovely. Their shape, their color, their

surface texture were perfect. And yet they were not beautiful. For the lovely vase

was either empty or filled with some corruption. Spiritual emptiness or ugliness shows

through. And conversely, there is an interior light that can transfigure forms that the

pure aesthetician would regard as imperfect or downright ugly.