to Baudelaire’s profound admiration for the mulatto type of beauty.[167] In every great centre of civilization the national ideal of beauty tends to be somewhat modified in exotic directions, and foreign ideals, as well as foreign fashions, become preferred to those that are native.  It is significant of this tendency that when, a few years since, an enterprising Parisian journal hung in its salle the portraits of one hundred and thirty-one actresses, etc., and invited the votes of the public by ballot as to the most beautiful of them, not one of the three women who came out at the head of the poll was French.  A dancer of Belgian origin (Cleo de Merode) was by far at the head with over 3000 votes, followed by an American from San Francisco (Sybil Sanderson), and then a Polish woman.

FOOTNOTES: 

[134] Figured in Mau’s Pompeii, p. 174.

[135] As a native of Lukunor said to the traveler Mertens, “It has the same object as your clothes, to please the women.”

[136] “The greatest provocations of lust are from our apparel,” as Burton states (Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Sec.  II, Mem.  II, Subs.  III), illustrating this proposition with immense learning.  Stanley Hall (American Journal of Psychology, vol. ix, Part III, pp. 365 et seq.) has some interesting observations on the various psychic influences of clothing; cf.  Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, pp. 330 et seq.

[137] History of Human Marriage, Chapter IX, especially p, 201.  We have a striking and comparatively modern European example of an article of clothing designed to draw attention to the sexual sphere in the codpiece (the French braguette), familiar to us through fifteenth and sixteenth century pictures and numerous allusions in Rabelais and in Elizabethan literature.  This was originally a metal box for the protection of the sexual organs in war, but subsequently gave place to a leather case only worn by the lower classes, and became finally an elegant article of fashionable apparel, often made of silk and adorned with ribbons, even with gold and jewels. (See, e.g., Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, p. 159.)

[138] A correspondent in Ceylon has pointed out to me that in the Indian statues of Buddha, Vishnu, goddesses, etc., the necklace always covers the nipples, a sexually attractive adornment being thus at the same time the guardian of the orifices of the body.  Crawley (The Mystic Rose, p. 135) regards mutilations as in the nature of permanent amulets or charms.

[139] Mantegazza, in his discussion of this point, although an ardent admirer of feminine beauty, decides that woman’s form is not, on the whole, more beautiful than man’s.  See Appendix to Cap.  IV of Fisiologia della Donna.

[140] For a discussion of the anthropology of the feminine pelvis, see Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, bd. 1.  Sec.  VI.