Savages and Orientals, being deficient in æsthetic taste, admire an excessively-developed bust. Europeans, on the other hand, long ago recognised the connection between such a bust and clumsy, unhealthy corpulence, suggesting advanced age. The same appears to have been true of the most refined nations of antiquity. Says Professor Kollmann: “The ancient as well as the modern inhabitants of the Nile region appear, in the majority of cases, like those of India, to possess hemispheric breasts, for neither in the sphinxes or other superhuman beings, nor in the images of human beauties, do we come across pointed breasts.... The Romans did not consider large bosoms a mark of beauty. Among European women the Portuguese are said to have the largest busts, the Castilians the smallest. To judge by Rubens’s nude figures, the Netherland women appear to rival the Portuguese in exuberant bosoms.”
In Greek works of art, says Winckelmann, “the breast or bosom of female figures is never exuberant.” “Among ideal figures, the Amazons alone have large and fully-developed breasts.” “The form of the breasts in the figures of divinities is virginal in the extreme, since their beauty was made to consist in the moderateness of their size. A stone, found in the Island of Naxos, was smoothly polished and placed upon them for the purpose of repressing an undue development.”
Modern Fashion, for a wonder, endorses the Greek standard of beauty as regards a moderately-developed bust. But it was not always thus. It is Fashion that induces some savages whose breasts are naturally long and hanging to use bandages which make them still more hanging and elongated in form. In Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and in other parts of Europe, on the contrary, Fashion prescribed flat chests. Plates of lead were tied on the breasts of young girls with such force that sometimes the natural form was replaced by an actual depression where “love’s pillows” should have been. In some parts of South Germany and the Tyrol a similar fashion prevails to the present day among the lower classes, the result being not only a sacrifice of beauty, but a great mortality among the children, that have to be reared artificially in consequence of it.
But if modern Fashion has a correct standard of taste in this matter, it nevertheless encourages practices which lead to as disastrous results as the Spanish fashions of three centuries ago. “The horrible custom of wearing pads,” says the author of the Ugly Girl Papers “is the ruin of natural figures, by heating and pressing down the bosom.... A low, deep bosom, rather than a bold one, is a sign of grace in a full-grown woman, and a full bust is hardly admirable in an unmarried girl. Her figure should be all curves, but slender, promising a fuller beauty when maturity is reached. One is not fond of over-ripe years.... Due attention to the general laws of health always has its effect in restoring the bust to its roundness.... Weakness of any kind affects the contour of the figure, and it is useless to try to improve it in any other way than by restoring the strength where it is wanting.”
The same author, whose book is brimful of useful advice, not only to “ugly girls,” but to those who have beauty and wish to preserve it, also recommends battledore, swinging the skipping-rope over the shoulder, swinging by the hand from a rope, as well as playing ball, “bean bags,” pillow fights, and especially daily vocal exercises with corset off and lungs deeply inflated—as excellent means of improving the bust.
If women could be made to realise how rarely they succeed, even with the aid of the cleverest milliner, in counterfeiting a properly developed chest, they would, perhaps, be more willing to submit to the exercise or regimen requisite for the acquirement and preservation of Personal Beauty. Flat chests are a consequence of insufficient muscular exercise, insufficient fresh air, and insufficient food. The main reason why the majority of girls in the world are over-delicate and fragile is because they do not get enough properly-cooked food in which fat is introduced in such a way as to be palatable and digestible. The adipose layer between the skin and the muscles contributes so much to the undulating roundness of contour peculiar to feminine beauty, that Kollmann places it among the differentiating sexual characteristics.
Too exuberant busts, on the other hand, are the result of too much indulgence in fattening food, combined with lack of exercise in the open air, which would consume the fat. Maternity, with proper hygienic precautions, is never fatal to a fine bust.
That savages, like their civilised brethren and sisters, owe their deformed chests entirely to their indolence and neglect of the laws of health, is shown by the fact that there are notable exceptions—energetic tribes living healthy lives, and therefore blessed with beautiful figures. Thus Mr. A. R. Wallace tells us regarding some of the Amazon valley Indians that “their figures are generally superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human form. The development of the bust is such as I believe never exists in the best-formed European, exhibiting a splendid series of convex undulations, without a hollow in any part of it.” And what he says in another place regarding a neighbouring tribe explains the secret of this Beauty: “Though some of them were too fat, most of them had splendid figures, and many of them were very pretty. Before daylight in the morning all were astir and came to the river to wash. It is the chilliest hour of the twenty-four, and when we were wrapping our sheet or blanket more closely around us, we could hear the plunges and splashings of these early bathers. Rain or wind is all alike to them: their morning bath is never dispensed with.”
MASCULINE BEAUTY
Wincklemann remarks that, among the ancient Greeks, “a proudly-arched chest was regarded as a universal attribute of beauty in male figures. The father of the poets describes Neptune with such a chest, and Agamemnon as resembling him; and such a one Anakreon desired to see in the image of the youth whom he loved.”