The ideal then includes
the characteristics which are supposed to result from or to go
with a life of leisure consistently enforced. The ideal accepted
under these circumstances may be gathered from
descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of the
chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies
of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to
be scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting
chivalric or romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of
the face, and dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the
hands and feet, the slender figure, and especially the slender
waist. In the pictured representations of the women of that time,
and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought and
feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme
debility. The same ideal is still extant among a considerable
portion of the population of modern industrial communities; but
it is to be said that it has retained its hold most tenaciously
in those modern communities which are least advanced in point of
economic and civil development, and which show the most
considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.
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