e
neck and the knees, according to the fashion of the moment, and Nature
may as well put her fingers in her ears and go home. Savages, we are
told, do not even believe in the manifest generalisation of death:
they regard each new death as an entirely surprising event, due not to
natural, but to accidental causes. Similarly, the fashionable woman
regards the body each Spring as an entirely new body, subject to none
of the generalisations which seemed appropriate to the body of even a
year before. This is the grand proof she offers us of her superiority
to the animals. She will have no commerce with the monotony of their
ways. She will not submit herself to the regular gait of the sheep,
the horse, or the cow, which is the same this year as it was in the
year of Waterloo, or, for that matter, in the year of Salamis. She
claims for her body the liberty to move one year with the long stride
of a running fowl, and the next at a hobble like a spancelled goat. It
might be said of her that she is not one animal, but all the animals.
She will borrow from all Nature, dead and alive, indeed, as greedily
as a poet. She will colour her hair to look like a gorse-bush and her
lips to look like a sunset. She will capture the green from the grass,
the purple from the hills, the blue from Eastern seas, the silver from
the mists, as it suits her fancy. One year she will demand of life
that it shall be gorgeous in hue as a baboon's courtships; the next,
that it shall be as colourless as a rook's funeral. She enters upon
the labour of life as though it were a long series of disguises.
Probably it was her success in passing from form to form that led the
ancient Greeks to suspect the presence of nymphs now in trees, now in
running water, and now even in the hills. Everywhere in Nature man
sees evasive woman. There is nothing anywhere, from a mountain valley
in flower to a chestnut tree glistening into bud, which does not
remind him of something about her--her hats, her cloaks, or her
ribbons. Such a plunderer of beauties would, one cannot but feel,
become a great artist if only she possessed some standards. But she
dresses without standards, without philosophy: there is nothing but
appetite in it all, and a capricious appetite at that. She has no
settled principle but the principle of change. She flies from grace to
ugliness lightheartedly, indiscriminately. She is like the kind of
butterfly which you could get only in a fairy tale--a butterf