Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in WomanWalker, Alexander
Philosophy
Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman
Walker, Alexander
Beauty, Personal; Women
"In the personification which we naturally give to all inanimate objects
which are susceptible of movement, we may easily perceive the influence of
the same association. We speak commonly, for instance, of the graceful
motions of trees, and of the graceful movements of a river. It is never,
however, when these motions are violent or extreme, that we apply to them
the term of grace. It is the gentle waving of the tree in slow and
measured cadence which is graceful, not the tossing of its branches amid
the storm. It is the slow and easy winding which is graceful in the
movements of the river, and not the burst of the cataract, or the fury of
the torrent.
"It is only in the perfection of the human system, in the age when the
form has assumed all its powers, and the mind is awake to the
consciousness of all the capacities it possesses, and the lofty
obligations they impose, that the reign of physical grace commences; and
that the form is capable of expressing, under the dominion of every
passion or emotion, the high and habitual superiority which it possesses,
either to the allurements of pleasure or the apprehensions of pain. It is
this age, accordingly, which the artists of antiquity have uniformly
represented, when they sought to display the perfection of grace, and when
they succeeded in leaving their compositions as models of this perfection
to every succeeding age."
* * * * *
It is evidently the UNION of all that is good in the varieties now
described which renders beauty, in the thinking system, perfect.
This is well illustrated in the Minerva of the Giustiniani gallery, which,
in this respect, is scarcely the less valuable because it is draped, for
it is the head that ever bears the greatest impress of intellectuality.
This union is by no means perfect in the English female head, although,
from the considerable development of the forehead and the moderate one of
the backhead, the general form of that head is beautiful. As to the French
female head, a Frenchman, writing under the name of Count Stendhal,
scruples not to say: "The form of the head in Paris is ugly; the cranium
approaches to that of the ape; and this occasions the women to have the
appearance of age very early in life." The women of Paris differ not, in
this respect, from those of France generally. Nearly all have the
character here described.
* * * * *
It is under this species that the _nervous temperament_ falls, which is
constituted by great sensibility and corresponding mobility, and therefore
belongs to the _first and the last of those varieties_; a temperament
chiefly to be found among women.
This temperament scarcely exists in the athletic, is weak in the
phlegmatic, is moderate in the sanguine, and is rather active in the
bilious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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