THE BEAUTY CURVE
In a well-shaped waist, as in every other part of the body, the curved line of Beauty, with its delicate gradations, exercises a great charm. Examination of a Greek statue of the best period, male or female, or of the goddess of beauty in the Pagoda at Bangalur, India, shows a slight inward curve at the waist, whereas in early Greek and Egyptian art this curve is absent. The waist, therefore, like the feet and limbs, appears to have been gradually moulded into accordance with the line of Beauty—a notion which is also supported by the following remarks in Tylor’s Anthropology: “If fairly chosen photographs of Kaffirs be compared with a classic model such as the Apollo, it will be noticed that the trunk of the African has a somewhat wall-sided straightness, wanting in the inward slope which gives fineness to the waist, and in the expansion below, which gives breadth across the hips, these being two of the most noticeable points in the classic model which our painters recognise as an ideal of manly beauty.”
In woman, owing to the greater dimensions of her pelvis, this curvature is more pronounced than in man; yet even in woman it must be slight if the laws of Health and Beauty are to suffer no violation. “Moderation” is the one word which Mr. Buskin says he would have inscribed in golden letters over the door of every school of art. For “the least appearance of violence or extravagance, of the want of moderation and restraint, is,” as he remarks, “destructive of all beauty whatsoever in everything—colour, form, motion, language, or thought—giving rise to that which in colour we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtility and almost invisibility of natural curves and colours, and why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the religious painters,” etc.