LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK
It is only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse,
or among the marble figures of the Parthenon frieze, that one can
find the ideal representation of the marvellous beauty of that face
which laughed through the leaves last night as Hester Grazebrook.
Pure Greek it is, with the grave low forehead, the exquisitely
arched brow; the noble chiselling of the mouth, shaped as if it
were the mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and
splendid curve of the cheek; the augustly pillared throat which
bears it all: it is Greek, because the lines which compose it are
so definite and so strong, and yet so exquisitely harmonized that
the effect is one of simple loveliness purely: Greek, because its
essence and its quality, as is the quality of music and of
architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely mathematical
laws.
But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless
serenity, with the beauty of this face it is different: the grey
eyes lighten into blue or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds
fancy; the lips become flower-like in laughter or, tremulous as a
bird's wing, mould themselves at last into the strong and bitter
moulds of pain or scorn. And then motion comes, and the statue
wakes into life. But the life is not the ordinary life of common
days; it is life with a new value given to it, the value of art:
and the charm to me of Hester Grazebrook's acting in the first
scene of the play last night was that mingling of classic grace
with absolute reality which is the secret of all beautiful art, of
the plastic work of the Greeks and of the pictures of Jean Francois
Millet equally.
I do not think that the sovereignty and empire of women's beauty
has at all passed away, though we may no longer go to war for them
as the Greeks did for the daughter of Leda. The greatest empire
still remains for them--the empire of art. And, indeed, this
wonderful face, seen last night for the first time in America, has
filled and permeated with the pervading image of its type the whole
of our modern art in England. Last century it was the romantic
type which dominated in art, the type loved by Reynolds and
Gainsborough, of wonderful contrasts of colour, of exquisite and
varying charm of expression, but without that definite plastic
feeling which divides classic from romantic work. This type
degenerated into mere facile prettiness in the hands of lesser
masters, and, in protest against it, was created by the hands of
the Pre-Raphaelites a new type, with its rare combination of Greek
form with Florentine mysticism. But this mysticism becomes over-
strained and a burden, rather than an aid to expression, and a
desire for the pure Hellenic joy and serenity came in its place;
and in all our modern work, in the paintings of such men as Albert
Moore and Leighton and Whistler, we can trace the influence of this
single face giving fresh life and inspiration in the form of a new
artistic ideal.
SLAVES OF FASHION
Miss Leffler-Arnim's statement, in a lecture delivered recently at
St. Saviour's Hospital, that "she had heard of instances where
ladies were so determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement
that they had actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids
fastened the fifteen-inch corset," has excited a good deal of
incredulity, but there is nothing really improbable in it.
