The Decay of Vanity
IN days gone by it was the fashion to call August and -I- September the Silly Season. Mankind in holiday mood was said to be credulous—to swallow easily tales of sea serpents and giant gooseberries. It is a fact, I sadly fear, that all seasons are silly now. Our critical sense has been dulled by the headlines so thoughtfully produced twice daily by the Press, and we swallow without surprise the incredible and the impossible.
But, on the other hand, we have developed a taste for the grotesque. We have long been accustomed to the absurdities of humorous advertisements, when our eyes are caught by figures over or under life size. But only in recent years have we looked upon pictures of real people in odd clothes and postures as things to amuse an idle hour.
For the strange fact is that, instead of avoiding the camera at all costs when dishevelled or unkempt, men and women of every class are ready, nay, anxious, to offer themselves up on the altar of publicity. Looking idly through the pictures in the weekly and daily Press, I am steadily impressed by the fact that vanity about personal appearance is on the decline.
We are supposed to live in an age when feminine vanity is supreme. To judge by the advertisements of beauty specialists, there is no reason why we should not spend the whole of our lives in beauty parlours. We can have our faces sprayed, bandaged and lifted, our nails manicured, our bodies massaged and our legs kneaded to a better shape, our ankles attended to, our eyebrows shepherded into a more attractive line, and our hair waved and perfumed. A visit to what was in more unsophisticated days an ordinary hairdresser's shop now reveals the solemn attitude of the votaries of Venus. The demeanour of the assistants is grave and serious, as befits their high calling. Their white overalls bear some resemblance to those worn by surgeons, but there is no unbending in their demeanour, while we have known surgeons enjoy a joke.
Yet, in spite of all this weight of gravity and pro- fessional care—of all the hundred and one devices for preserving youthful slimness and a school-girl com- plexion—in spite of the fact that we are supposed never to despair of our looks, be we ever so old or so ugly— the newspapers are full of pictures from which -a citizen of Ancient Greece would have averted his eyes with a shudder—at least I suppose that the Greeks regarded the human form in youth as a shapely and beautiful thing. What would they have, said if they had seen some of the recent illustrations of life on the Lido, or at Cap D'Antibes ? Would they have admired a group of bathers reclining in ungainly attitudes on the ground —the men showing bony arms and knees, sheepish grins and deserts of exposed flesh, while the women smiled archly, apparently unconscious of unbeautiful figures defined by wet bathing dresses. We are asked to admire " Lord So-and-So's p-arty enjoying the sunshine "after a bathe." We are invited to look at many pictures of " Cocktail time on the - Lido." We see a group of sprawling male figures receiving drinks at the fair hands of ladies who blink through clotted mops of hair, like the proverbial owl in the ivy bush. Worse than these are occasional pictures of the middle-aged who have recently bathed : -".Two Famous Hostesses chatting together " ; " Mr. X.; the Cabinet Minister, smiling after a dip." Unsmiling, we turn over the page, hoping that, when the• photographed see the photographs reprodueed, they will in .future cultivate a little honourable vanity.
Alas ! We are not delivered from the curse of ugly publicity when the bathing season is finished; though the worst is over. During the winter months we are forced to look at Laocoon-like groups of hunt ball .parties, all arms and legs. Indeed, female legs pervade the whole of the press in centipede-like ubiquity, in spite of the fact, as a male cynic remarked, that " hardly one woman in a hundred has got legs which are worth looking at."
It is the fashion now to ridicule the immediate past, to smile at the picture hat, the tight waist-belt, the long skirt of before the War, and to cry out at their ugliness and stupidity. From the latter charge it is difficult to clear them. But the former ? A picture hat which framed the wearer's face becomingly is really no uglier than, for instance, a beret. Could any vain woman put on a beret, which makes the face and neck look like the mis-shaped stalk under a button mushroom ? Or wear short sleeves which only too often reveal arms pitted by vaccination marks and streaked with sunburn, or a flimsy dress which shows legs like bedposts ?
It is idle to tilt at things as they are. The car, the aeroplane, the motor-boat dictate our clothes, their shortness and skimpiness. The lack of cupboard space in an overcrowded world must make us restrict our frills and furbelows, and we are in many ways happier and healthier than of yore. But surely we might give the camera a rest, and perambulate our shorn and par- celled selves in a decent obscurity.
But have we perhaps a more subtle kind of vanity ?- the vanity which instead of desiring a bright and indi- vidual shining, wishes to view itself in the " right " place at the " right " moment, however distressingly garbed or ungarbed. It is the vanity of running with the herd, if the herd has sufficient limelight turned on it.
The Preacher remarked : " Vanity of Vanities all is Vanity." perhaps he was right. SUSAN BUCHAN.
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