One of the redeeming features of what is ironically called “full-dress”
is the opportunity it gives of admiring a woman’s shapely neck,
shoulders, and arms—if she has such. No healthy woman of the well-to-do
classes need have an ill-favoured arm if she has a sensible mother, who
compels her from her childhood to exercise her muscles. The great
preponderance of leathery, angular, bony arms at ballrooms shows,
therefore, how shamefully the hygienic arts of personal adornment are
neglected in our best society. The stifling heat which commonly prevails
at social gatherings suggests the thought that many ladies are
indifferent to the display of their bony arms on the grounds given in
Sydney Smith’s exclamation: “Heat, ma’am! it was so dreadful here that I
found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in
my bones.”
A meagre, skinny arm is objectionable not only because it offends
against all the conditions of Beauty—plump roundness, softness, fresh
colour, smoothness, gradual tapering to the wrist—but because it is
associated with the aspect of old age and disease; and again, because it
suggests man’s lowly origin by its approximation to the appearance of
the arms in our simian country cousins.
Man’s arm has become differentiated from the ape’s not only in the
matter of greater muscular rotundity and smoothness, _i.e._ loss of
hair, but also in regard to length. An ape’s arms are much longer than a
white man’s, the negro’s being intermediate. Says Mr. Tylor: “In an
upright position and reaching down with the middle finger, the gibbon
can touch its foot, the orang its ankle, the chimpanzee its knee, while
man only reaches partly down his thigh.... Negro soldiers standing at
drill bring the middle finger-tip an inch or two nearer the knee than
white men can do, and some have been even known to touch the knee-pan.”
Taking this in connection with the fact that the arms of sailors, who
use them constantly in climbing, are longer than those of soldiers, we
may safely infer that man’s arms have gradually become shorter because
he has ceased to climb trees; while the greater muscular rotundity,
especially of the forearm, has been acquired through the varied activity
and movements of the hand and fingers: a circumstance almost
self-evident on physiological principles, and furthermore corroborated
by the fact that negroes, unskilled in trades which call for
manipulation of the separate fingers, again occupy an intermediate
position. “Even in muscular negroes the arms are less rotund,” says
Professor Carl Vogt; and, according to Van der Hœven, the skin
between the fingers reaches up higher in the negro, which must impede
activity.
The peculiar arrangement of the hair on man’s arm has been referred to
by Wallace and Darwin as one of the countless signs arguing our descent
from apelike ancestors. On the arm of man, as of most anthropoid apes,
the hair “tends to converge from above and below to a point at the
elbow.” Now it is known that the gorilla, as well as the orang, “sits in
pelting rain with his hands over his head”; and Mr. Wallace, therefore,
suggests that the present inclination of the hair on man’s arms is
simply a survival of the time when his arboreal ancestors used to sit in
that fashion, the hair having gradually assumed the direction which
would most easily allow the rain to run off.
The evolution theory that the hair on the arm, as on the body in
general, was lost through Sexual Selection, is corroborated by the fact
that woman’s arm has made more progress toward complete smoothness than
man’s, owing to the circumstance that man is in Sexual Selection more
guided by æsthetic, woman by dynamic, considerations. Yet there can be
no doubt that a hairy arm and hand are always ugly, in man as in woman,
not only on account of their simian suggestiveness, but because they
cover the smooth skin and its delicate tints, and, moreover, especially
if black, are very apt to make the arm and hand look as if they needed a
good scrubbing. Hair on the hand may sometimes be permanently removed by
passing the hand quickly and repeatedly through a large flame—a much
less painful process than the use of pincers.
The _muscular_ deviations from the lines of beauty are much more
pardonable in a man’s arm than the hair, although it is evident that a
professional athlete’s excessively muscular arm is æsthetically
objectionable, however much it may be admired on other grounds. To
feminine beauty, and the chances of inspiring Love, an arm which is so
muscular as to obliterate the lines of beauty is absolutely fatal. Among
the labouring classes there are many women whose arms are so hard and
sinewy that the very bones to which they are attached have become heavy
and masculine, so that it becomes difficult to tell a woman’s from a
man’s skeleton, which ordinarily is very easy.