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.