Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/24

 18 negative elements, are better treated from the positive point of view.

I shall consider herein, primarily, only visible details. Qualities of voice, peculiarities of odor, tactual details, and so on, I shall notice only in so far as they are directly associated with visual characters. This is in accordance with the usual practice which makes beauty essentially a visible phenomenon and only secondarily a phenomenon which appeals to other senses.

1. Signs of race. There are certain negative details of stature, feature, color and movement and habits which are important because they indicate in the first instance a race of species of the human family against which, for reasons which may be instinctive or due to education, there is a prejudice. Facial proportions, for instance, which in themselves have no value, may yet indicate or suggest a branch of the human family against whom we entertain a certain bias. If we despise the Irish, an Irish cast of countenance cannot be beautiful to us. If we have an antipathy to the German or Russian or the French people, the type of face which suggests these people, even though there is no indication of actual blood of the race, is a factor making against beauty. The commonest instance of this