Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1883 — Nineteenth Century Love and Beauty. [ARTICLE]

Nineteenth Century Love and Beauty.

Apropos of the growing powerlessness of mere beauty to sway the male mind, let us give it the benefit of the higher side of the doubt, and ask, “Is it due at all to the increasing artistic sense of the race? Are men really outgrowing the barbaric desire to possess whatever they admire ? Are they learning to admire beauty in a tempera-mentally-artistic way; to regard a live specimen in the ball-room or promenade much as they might a work of art in the museum ? Sometimes it does look as if they were. At no time was beauty more talked about; at no time, perhaps, have men vied more to claim a sliare in the notice of the acknowledged belle; but, as one notes the self-poised confidence of the belle, and the connoisseurlike air of the beau, even when they are one would have to stretch one’s imagination immensely to forecast a possible tragedy lurking in the dynamic quality—to use a George Elliot expression—of the glances they exchange. They measure one another’s forces too acurately. Fancy a modern ball-room Lothario falling so madly in love as to insist upon a midnght marriage, which had to be consolidated with a door-key in lieu of a ring, as did the Earl of Coventry with one of the Gunning sisteHL —Boston Transcript