If the truth be fairly stated, women have many excuses for their infatuation regarding small waists. It is Mrs. Haweis who says, "The reason why a small waist is a beauty is because, when it is natural, it goes together with the peculiar litheness and activity of a slenderly-built figure. All the bones are small, the shoulders and arms _petite_, and the general look is dainty and youthful." In other words, a small waist is only a beauty when it is in proportion to the rest of the figure. The common mistake lies in considering it a beauty in a large woman of massive proportions. A few centuries ago women did not take a scientific view of things, and fell into delusions which in this age are a disgrace to the sex. They knew nothing of anatomy, of the law of proportion or of the curve of beauty, and they misunderstood the language of admiration. The latter I suspect to be at the root of the whole matter. Poets were, as we shall presently see, everlastingly praising small waists, and women fell into the error of supposing that a small waist was, in the abstract, a beauty and an attraction. When or where the mistake originated I cannot tell, but here are the words of praise of probably a fourteenth-century lover: "Middel heo hath menskful smal," or, "She hath a graceful small waist." At a later day Master Wither included in the attractions of her who had left him,
Her wast exceeding small, The fives did fit her shoo; But now, alasse! sh'as left me.
This suits exactly the modern view of a small waist and a No. 5 shoe.
In the well-known Scotch ballad "Edom o' Gordon" the Lady Rodes is represented as being shut up by Gordon in her burning castle. The smoke was suffocating when,
Oh than bespaik her dochter dear: She was baith jimp and sma', etc.
Here it might be said that the evident youth of the girl, who was dropped over the wall and fell on the point of the cruel Gordon's spear, accounts for her being "jimp and sma'." The explanation will not apply to "The Cruel Sister," as given by Sir Walter Scott:
She took her by the middle sma', Binnorie, O Binnorie!
So fascinated was the rhymer by that special feature of her beauty that he returns to it after recounting how the elder sister drowned the younger: