Nature bestows upon us skin all over our body, like that upon our face, and custom covers up part of it, until it is so sensitive that it cannot be exposed; and fashion bids us bare it at the wrong moment, or else load it with all kinds of unwholesomenesses.
True Art stands by the side of Nature, both ridiculed, both lamenting; while Fashion and Custom, ever capricious, ride on triumphant.
For example, take the feet: I prefer to raise my eyes from the earth—to begin, as men begin to build houses, from the groundwork upwards. We muffle them in wool or cotton, and cramp them inside the stiffest of tanned skins—dead skins over living skins—and think that this can be healthy; we shape them according to a fashion—square, round, or pointed toes—never according to nature and the foot which we ought to imitate, therefore not at all according to true art, which must follow after nature, never after fashion, which must always be utterly false and ugly until it emanates directly from nature, and then there can be no god Fashion; for every man and woman will create their own ideal from themselves, and not from any brainless demi-monde, and their modesty will not run counter to the virtue which the great Creator planted within the human mind, nor shame be created over what He said was well done.
We hobble about within our wrappings with feet that swell and sweat and steam unwholesomely, bathing them when they have become intolerable with the exhalations from the living skin, and the impurities which they have drawn out of the dead hides.
We hobble about with our raised heels and our square toes, admiring one another, or envying one another, for the smallness and the tightness of the cramping, never revealing, till some one tramps upon them, the painful fact of bunions and corns, which, in silence and with Spartan endurance, we are growing all to ourselves, in order to reach the ideal that the world has set up for us to follow.
A host of other ailments are the lively produce of our efforts; but, as beauty is my aim, I will pass them over, content to regard the ugly abortion which that most lovely portion of a faultless machine has become.
The overpowering influence of fashion even on well-balanced minds must not be overlooked. When crinolines were in vogue, even men of taste were weak enough to admire the fearsome abomination—at least, they admired the creature inside that circumference, to which usage made them blind.
None of us admire the Chinese ideal of a foot, yet we are ready to grow poetic over the chef-d’œuvre of a shoemaker; we sing to the boot, for of course it would be impossible, not to say imprudent, to sing about the foot.
Once I lived near a woman who had lost her nose. At first I thought this a great disfigurement, and did not like to look in her face, but by degrees I grew to lose the first horror, and I dare say might have grown to think the want an improvement in the way of faces, had I lived near her long enough.
We admire the Greek ideal, because the Greeks had perfect untrammelled nature to copy. Their models were not curbed by stays or tight-lacings; their training was severe, and their eyes were accustomed to flowers. Luxury and sloth were crimes in Greece; in the high times of Greece, I mean, when simplicity was admired, and slaves were the Sybarites, naked men and women vied to show perfect limbs, not rich attire. The barbarians were the fashion-mongers.