(3) The discouragement of walking and other exercise, involving a general lowering of vitality, sickly pallor and premature loss of the bloom of youth.
(4) The wasting of the calf of the leg to dimensions characteristic of savagedom, disease, and old age, not to speak of the numerous maladies resulting to women from the use of hard high heels of fashionable shoes, every contact of which with the ground sends a shock through the spinal column to the brain and produces obscure disorders in various parts of the organism.
(5) The mutilation of one of the most beautiful and characteristically human parts of the body. As the author of Harper’s Ugly Girl Papers remarks: “One’s foot is as proper an object of pride and complacency as a shapely hand. But where in a thousand would a sculptor find one that was a pleasure to contemplate like that of the Princess Pauline Bonaparte, whose lovely foot was modelled in marble for the delight of all the world who have seen it?”
(6) Finally, and most important of all, the loss of a graceful gait, of the poetry of motion, which is a thousand times more calculated to inspire admiration—æsthetic or erotic—than a small foot.
Man is said to be a reasoning animal; and man embraces woman. But surely in matters of fashion woman is not a reasoning being. Very large feet being properly regarded as ugly, she draws the inference that the smaller they can be made the more will they be beautiful; forgetting that Beauty is a matter of proportion, not of absolute size. A foot may, like a waist, as easily appear ugly from being too small as from being too large. A large woman with very small feet cannot but make a disagreeable impression, like a bust on an insecure pedestal or a leaning tower.
TESTS OF BEAUTY
According to Schopenhauer, the great value which all attach to small feet “depends on the fact that small feet are an essentially human characteristic, since in no animal are the tarsus and metatarsus together so small as in man, which peculiarity is connected with his erect attitude: he is a plantigrade.” But it is difficult to see any force in this reasoning, since not one person in a hundred thousand knows what the bones called tarsus and metatarsus are, nor cares whether they are larger in man or in animals; while, as regards the upright position, large feet would appear more suitable for maintaining it than small ones.
If smallness were the test of beauty in man, why should we not feel ashamed to have larger heads than animals, or envy the elephant, who, for his size, has the smallest foot of all animals?
Those who believe that human beauty consists in the degree of remoteness from animal types, will derive satisfaction from the fact that apes have feet that are larger than ours. Topinard gives these figures showing the relative sizes: man, 16·96; gorilla, 20·69; chimpanzee, 21·00; orang, 25. But why should man feel a special pride in the fact that his feet are somewhat smaller than those of his nearest relatives, whom, until recently, he did not even acknowledge as such?
It is, moreover, unscientific to compare man’s foot with the ape’s too closely, because they have different functions—being used by man for walking, by the ape for climbing—and therefore require different characteristics. It is only in those organs that have a like function—as the jaws, teeth, nose, eyes, and forehead—that a direct comparison is permissible, and a progress noted in our favour.