SAVAGE NOTIONS OF BEAUTY
In all the preceding remarks concerning the connection between mental and physical beauty, the assumption has been made tacitly that what we consider beautiful is so in reality; and that our taste is a safe guide to follow. Yet this assumption may be challenged, and has, indeed, been often challenged. Every nation, every savage tribe, has its own standard of Beauty; what right, therefore, have we to claim dogmatically that we are infallible judges?
Ask the devil, says Voltaire, what is the meaning of το καλὸν—the Beautiful—and he will tell you “Le beau est une paire de comes, quatre griffes, et une queue”—a couple of horns, four claws, and a tail. Ask a North American Indian, says Hearne, what is Beauty, he will answer: “A broad, flat face, small eyes, high cheek-bones, three or four broad black lines across each cheek, a low forehead, a large, broad chin, a clumsy hook-nose, a tawny hide, and breasts hanging down to the belt.” In the Chinese empire “those women are preferred who have ... a broad face, high cheek-bones, very broad noses, and enormous ears.” “One of the titles of the Zulu king,” says Darwin (who gives many other instances à propos in chapter xix. of the Descent of Man), “is ‘You who are black.’ Mr. Galton, in speaking to me about the natives of South Africa, remarked that their ideas of beauty seem very different from ours; for in one tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls were not admired by the natives.”
Darwin himself appears to have been staggered and puzzled by this diversity of taste, and to have partly inclined to the theory that Beauty is relative to the human mind (though elsewhere he repudiates it)—a theory which Jeffrey has so boldly formulated in the assertion that “All tastes are equally just and true, in as far as concerns the individual whose taste is in question; and what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful is beautiful to him, whatever other people may think of it.”
Fiddlesticks! The Alison-Jeffrey school of Scotch æstheticians, having been among the first in the field, have done more to confuse the English mind on the subject of Beauty than several generations of other clever writers will be able to clear up again.
There are about half a dozen sound, square, solid, scientific reasons why we have a better right to our opinion concerning the nature of Beauty than a Hottentot or a North American Indian.