Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

From this point of view Grace is synonymous with functional fitness. A monkey’s foot is less beautiful than a man’s, but in climbing it is more graceful; whereas in walking man’s is infinitely more graceful. Apes rarely assume an erect position, and when they do so they never walk on the flat sole. “When the orang-outang takes to the ground,” says Mr. E. B. Tylor, “he shambles clumsily along, generally putting down the outer edge of the foot and the bent knuckles of the hand.”

I have italicised the word “clumsily” because it touches the vital point of the question. Man owes his intellectual superiority largely to the fact that he does not need his hands for walking or climbing, but uses them as organs of delicate touch and as tools. To acquire this independence of the hands he needed feet, which enabled him to stand erect and walk along, not “clumsily,” but firmly, naturally, and therefore gracefully. Hence in course of time, through the effects of constant use, there was developed the callous cushion of the heel and toes; while, through discontinuance of the habit of climbing, the toes became reduced in size. In the ape’s foot, it is well known, the toes are almost as long as the fingers of the hand: a fact which led Blumenbach and Cuvier to classify apes as quadrumana or four-handed animals. But Professor Huxley showed that this classification was based on erroneous reasoning. The resemblance between the hands and feet of apes is merely physiological or functional—because hands and feet are used alike for climbing. But anatomically, in its bones and muscles, etc., the monkey’s apparent hind “hand” is a true foot no less than man’s. If the physiological function, i.e. the opposability of the thumb to the other fingers, were taken as a ground of classification, then birds, who have such toes, would have no feet at all but only wings and hands.

There is a limit, however, beyond which the size of man’s toe’s cannot be reduced without injuring the foot’s usefulness and the grace of gait. The front part of the foot is distinguished for its yielding or elastic character. Hence, says Professor Humphrey, “in descending from a height, as from a chair or in walking downstairs, we alight upon the balls of the toes. If we alight upon the heels—for instance, if we walk downstairs on the heels—we find it an uncomfortable and rather jarring procedure. In walking and jumping, it is true, the heels come first in contact with the ground, but the weight then falls obliquely upon them, and is not fully borne by the foot till the toes also are upon the ground.”

One of the reasons why Grace is more rare even than Beauty on this planet is that the toes are cramped or even turned out of their natural position by tight, pointed, fashionable shoes, and are thus prevented from giving elasticity to the step. Instances are not rare (and by no means only in China) where the great toe is almost at right angles to the length of the foot. In walking, says Professor Flower, “the heel is first lifted from the ground, and the weight of the body gradually transferred through the middle to the anterior end of the foot, and the final push or impulse given with the great toe. It is necessary then that all these parts should be in a straight line with one another.”

It is a mooted question whether the toes should be slightly turned outward, as dancing-masters insist, or placed in straight parallel lines, as some physiologists hold. For the reason indicated in the last paragraph, physiologists are clearly right. With parallel or almost parallel great toes, a graceful walk is more easily attained than by turning out the toes. Even in standing, Dr. T. S. Ellis argues, the parallel position is preferable: “When a body stands on four points I know of no reason why it should stand more firmly if those points be unequally disposed. The tendency to fall forwards would seem to be even increased by widening the distance between the points in front, and it is in this direction that falls most commonly occur.”

EVOLUTION OF THE GREAT TOE

Perhaps the most striking difference between the feet of men and apes lies in the relative size of the first and second toes. In the ape’s foot the second toe is longer than the first, whereas in modern civilised man’s foot the first or great toe is almost always the longer. Not so, however, with savages, who are intermediate in this as in other respects between man and ape; and there are various other facts which seem to indicate that the evolution of the great toe, like that of the other extreme of the body—the head and brain—is still in progress.

There is a notion very prevalent among artists that the second toe should be longer than the first. This idea, Professor Flower thinks, is derived from the Greek canon, which in its turn was copied from the Egyptian, and probably originally derived from the negro. It certainly does not represent what is most usual in our race and time. “Among hundreds of bare, and therefore undeformed, feet of children I lately examined in Perthshire, I was not able to find one in which the second toe was the longest. Since in all apes—in fact, in all other animals—the first toe is considerably shorter than the second, a long first toe is a specially human attribute; and instead of being despised by artists, it should be looked upon as a mark of elevation in the scale of organised beings.”

Mr. J. P. Harrison, after a careful examination of the unrestored feet of Greek and Roman statues in various museums and art galleries, wrote an article in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain (vol. xiii. 1884), in which he states that he was “led to the conviction that it was from Italy and not Greece that the long second toe affected by many English artists had been imported.” Among the Italians a longer second toe is common, as also among Alsatians; in England so rarely that its occurrence probably indicates foreign blood. Professor Flower, as we have seen, found no cases at all; Paget examined twenty-seven English males, in twenty-four of whom the great toe was the longer. “In the case of the female feet, in ten out of twenty-three subjects the first or great toe was longest, and in ten females it was shorter than the second toe. In the remaining three instances the first and second toes were of equal length.”

Bear these last sentences in mind a moment, till we have seen what is the case with savages. Says Dr. Bruner: “A slight shortening of the great toe undoubtedly exists, not merely amongst the Negro tribes, but also in ancient and modern Egyptians, and even in some of the most beautiful races of Caucasian females.” And Mr. Harrison found this to be, with a few exceptions, a general trait of savages. The great toe was shorter than the second in skeletons of Peruvians, Tahitians, New Hebrideans, Savage islanders, Ainos, New Caledonians.