Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

drapery. Some ethnologists even assert that not woman’s modesty, but her
knowledge of this inferiority has caused her to veil the lower part of her
body. The artists who have striven for the purest expression of beauty
have tried their utmost to cover this defect, and the safest remedy proved
elongation. It is a psychological peculiarity of all cultured beings that they
find more esthetic gratification in long and thin objects (as long-stalked
flowers, tapering glasses, etc.) than in short and heavy ones. All forms have
a geometrical basis, and the parallelogram is more graceful than the square,
the isosceles more than the ordinary triangle.
Through elongation the intricacies of the human form become simpler,
less plastic, more vague and subtle and more outlined in color. It apparently
puts aside the earthly and sensual, to live solely in the rhythms of beauty.
Yet by losing her roundness of form the woman becomes androgynous,half-boy,
half-girl, as in Da Vinci, and in the pictures of modern painters like Khnopff,
Toorop, Burne Jones, etc. And thus, although chastened in the directness
of its physical expression, the body becomes a vague embodiment of im-
morality which betrays itself even in the completely dressed body through
dress and drapery. Beardsley, perhaps the most perfect master of that
synthetical lineal art which is produced by geometrical calculation, was well
aware of this.
This peculiarity of taste is not restricted to the Aryan race. We also
find it in the Japanese. Their painters continually changed their style in
the depiction of the female figure. One school was for shortness, another
for tallness, a third again, for shortness, and so on, but the foremost depicters
of the Japanese women like Haronobu Kiyonaga and Outomara, and the
painters who have the character Yei in their name like Yeichi, Yeiri, Yeizan,
had a passion for tallness. Their women all show a beauty of line such as
can only be achieved by long, sweeping curves, and it is impossible to make
any striking display of these if the lower extremities are shorter than the
upper part of the body. The women of Haronobu, ethnologically correct
as their plumpness is, are deprived of the rhythmical and lineal ornamenta-
tion of the other masters. The Japanese women themselves, by nature
rather dwarfed in size, seem to agree with their portrayers, as they use with
preference vertical lines and designs in their robes and try to gain in height
by wearing the high Ashida (similar to the stilt-shoe worn in Europe in the
sixteenth century).
At certain periods of history, when a community is steadily growing in
prosperity and power as Athens before the reign of Pericles and the duke-
doms of Northern Italy in the fourteenth century, the average of women is by
nature taller than at others. We in America have arrived at such a period.
The ideal type of the American woman belongs to one of the most perfect
expressions of beautiful womanhood. And it is not merely a cold beauty
of form that the American woman excels — she also possesses Lord Bacon's
highest beauty, the beauty of decent and gracious motion. “ Some of our
country-girls have the same majestic walk as the women of Saracinesco,
Anticolo, Cerverra in the Apenines, who, as Paul Heyse tells us, ' walk like

33