Author of "How to be Happy Though Married," "The Five Talents of Woman" etc., etc.

The Prudent People - An Irish Girl's Retort - Marrying for Beauty - "Furniture" Wives and Husbands - The Value of Good Looks - Beautiful at Sixty - Idea-less Girls - The Truly Fascinating

Woman - Dr. Johnson's Opinion

The sort of people who tell the young that when marrying they should only be "prudent," and should not consult their feelings, generally go on to say, "Do not allow yourself to be influenced by beauty, for beauty is only skin deep."

I never hear this remark without thinking of the reply which was made by an Irish girl, a friend of mine. She was good-looking, and was talking to a young man of an opposite description. Thinking that the lady was rather proud of her looks, and wishing to "take her down a peg," the young man remarked in the course of conversation, "But, you know, beauty is only skin deep." The maiden fixed him with her glittering eye, and with one of her sweetest smiles answered, "I know that beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness goes into the bone."

A rounded figure, bright eyes, a clear complexion, these are signs of health and indicate that the possessor of them is selected by Nature to marry and continue the race. To affect to despise beauty, then, is to object to Nature herself.

It is anything but wise, however, to marry for beauty alone. As even the finest landscape, seen daily, becomes monotonous, so does the most beautiful face.

To preserve the balance of nature, men are often led by instinct to choose wives who are the direct opposites to themselves, like the tall man of the story who, saying that of evils we should choose the least, deliberately selected a small woman for his wife.

What displeases one pleases another, and vice versa. One countryman said to another, "If everyone had been of my thinking, everyone would have wanted to marry my old woman." His friend reassured him by saying, "If everyone had been of my mind, no one would have wanted to marry your old woman." So it is that each eye forms its own idea of beauty.

"Furniture Wives"

The worst of it is, however, that men do not consult their individual tastes when choosing their wives. In many cases they marry not to please themselves, but to please others, to satisfy convention. They take to themselves what Charles Lamb called "furniture wives." "Men marry," he says, "for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but much oftener than is suspected they consider what the world will say of it; how such a woman in their friends' eves will look at the head of a table. Hence, we see so many insipid beauties made wives of that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all; as many buy furniture and pictures, because they suit this or that niche in their dining-rooms. These I call furniture wives. Your universally cried up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all cannot have that individual charm which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only - perhaps you know not why."

And women like furniture husbands - men, that is, so handsome that their wives can make their lady friends envious.

"When I marry," said a budding schoolgirl, "I shall want a fine, tall, broad, handsome man whom everybody will admire." "There's where you are wrong," said her elder and more experienced sister. "You'd have much less trouble in watching a plainer man, and would enjoy a good deal more of his society."

But though a husband need not be handsome, he should be good-looking, in the sense of looking good morally and physically. It is a mistake to marry one in whose face the ten commandments are conspicuous by their absence. "When I see a man," says Addison, "with a sour, rivelled face, I cannot forbear pitying his wife; and when I meet with an open, ingenuous countenance, I think of the happiness of his friends, his family, and his relations."

If our faces were our fortunes, many of us would be in the poor-house. But if our features are irregular, there is a kind of beauty that we can make for ourselves. This is the beauty that reflects a good heart and unselfish disposition. Holiness of soul makes the plainest features pleasant to look upon. No cosmetics are so capable of making and preserving beauty as the smile of good temper and a desire to please. Our faces are formed, or at least changed from time to time by the lives we live. A woman cannot choose whether she shall be beautiful at twenty, but it is her own fault if she is not beautiful by the time she is sixty.

This beauty, which comes from the possession of moral and intellectual qualities, not only lasts longer, but gives far more pleasure than fairness of complexion or regularity of features. So we find that pleasing-looking but not handsome women get more chances of marriage than insipid beauties. Even quite plain girls sometimes marry before those who have the gift of beauty. This is because, knowing their deficiency, they try to make themselves agreeable in other ways. Unlike professional beauties, they neglect nothing that can possibly please.

It is sometimes said that a woman is not worth looking at after thirty years of age; but often she is not worth speaking to before that. "Idea-less girls," as Dr. Johnson called them, are a bore, though they may be preferred by idea-less young men.

The girl I shall marry," remarked a young man to his friend, " must have three qualifications. She must be handsome, rich, and a fool." "Why all that?" "She must be handsome and rich, or I will not have her; she must be a fool, or else she will not have me."

Men who are sensible, however, see no charm in a foolish woman. They prefer brains to mere milkmaid beauty.

And, surely, when a woman marries she will make a better wife if she have not a beauty record to depend upon, but makes up for this by trying to realise in her home life the motto, "Handsome is that handsome does."

The Love That Lasts

Leigh Hunt used to say that "the most fascinating women are those that can most enrich the everyday moments of existence." The woman who has a well-stored mind and common-sense fascinates her husband much longer than a beautiful nonentity who has no opinions, or, if she have any, will not take the trouble to express them. When a man has been married twenty years, he values regularity in his home more than in his wife's features, and thinks more of the cooking of a cutlet than of the condition of her complexion.

Dr. Johnson said, "There is no such danger in marrying a pretty woman as is apprehended; she will not be persecuted if she does not invite persecution. A pretty woman, if she has a mind to be wicked, can find a readier way than another; and that is all." This may be true, but it does not allay the pangs of jealousy endured by the husbands of heart-breaking beauties. They must be nearly as uncomfortable to marry as glass-breaking suffragists.