Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/55

Rh evidence of this capacity poise, and read it in the individual’s activities all the way from such commonplace processes as walking and talking, to the most complicated reactions under social conditions. Proper muscular tonicity is of course a necessary condition for poise, although it is but part of the total. In all its details, however, poise takes us over from mere anatomy to action.

Without poise, beauty is the beauty of the marble statue and the painted canvas. In the competition for mates, poise undoubtedly plays a very large and entirely worthy rôle. Singularly enough, in one of the institutions in which poise should always be considered essential: in the stage beauty-show: poise has in some recent instances been very much neglected, with results which strikingly demonstrate the importance of this attribute. I shall refer to this further on.

Although our survey is far from complete, it has proceeded far enough to show us clearly in what beauty consists. It is the sign and the expression of the potentiality of the individual; not what he has done or is doing, but what he is capable of doing; not what he is capable of doing for his own interests, but what he is capable of doing for the species. Put in the plainest of terms, the most beautiful woman, the handsomest man, are the persons we would choose to be coparents of