On the other hand, bearded races admire and greatly value their beards; among the Anglo-Saxons every part of the body, according to their laws, had a recognised value; “the loss of the beard being estimated at twenty shillings, while the breaking of a thigh was fixed at only twelve.”[436] In the East men swear solemnly by their beards. We have seen that Chinsurdi, the chief of the Makalolo in Africa, evidently thought that beards were a great ornament. With the Fijians in the Pacific the beard is “profuse and bushy, and is his greatest pride;” whilst the inhabitants of the adjacent archipelagoes of Tonga and Samoa are “beardless, and abhor a rough chin.” In one island alone of the Ellice group “the men are heavily bearded, and not a little proud thereof.”[437]
We thus see how widely the different races of man differ in their taste for the beautiful. In every nation sufficiently advanced to have made effigies of their gods or of their deified rulers, the sculptors no doubt have endeavoured to express their highest ideal of beauty and grandeur.[438] Under this point of view it is well to compare in our mind the Jupiter or Apollo of the Greeks with the Egyptian or Assyrian statues; and these with the hideous bas-reliefs on the ruined buildings of Central America.
I have met with very few statements opposed to the above conclusion. Mr. Winwood Reade, however, who has had ample opportunities for observation, not only with the negroes of the West Coast of Africa, but with those of the interior who have never associated with Europeans, is convinced that their ideas of beauty are on the whole the same as ours. He has repeatedly found that he agreed with negroes in their estimation of the beauty of the native girls; and that their appreciation of the beauty of European women corresponded with ours. They admire long hair, and use artificial means to make it appear abundant; they admire also a beard, though themselves very scantily provided. Mr. Reade feels doubtful what kind of nose is most appreciated: a girl has been heard to say, “I do not want to marry him, he has got no nose;” and this shews that a very flat nose is not an object of admiration. We should, however, bear in mind that the depressed and very broad noses and projecting jaws of the negroes of the West Coast are exceptional types with the inhabitants of Africa. Notwithstanding the foregoing statements, Mr. Reade does not think it probable that negroes would ever prefer the “most beautiful European woman, on the mere grounds of physical admiration, to a good-looking negress.”[439]
The truth of the principle, long ago insisted on by Humboldt,[440] that man admires and often tries to exaggerate whatever characters nature may have given him, is shewn in many ways. The practice of beardless races extirpating every trace of a beard, and generally all the hairs on the body, offers one illustration. The skull has been greatly modified during ancient and modern times by many nations; and there can be little doubt that this has been practised, especially in N. and S. America, in order to exaggerate some natural and admired peculiarity. Many American Indians are known to admire a head flattened to such an extreme degree as to appear to us like that of an idiot. The natives on the nort-hwestern coast compress the head into a pointed cone; and it is their constant practice to gather the hair into a knot on the top of the head, for the sake, as Dr. Wilson remarks, “of increasing the apparent elevation of the favourite conoid form.” The inhabitants of Arakhan “admire a broad, smooth forehead, and in order to produce it, they fasten a plate of lead on the heads of the newborn children.” On the other hand, “a broad, well-rounded occiput is considered a great beauty” by the natives of the Fiji islands.[441]
As with the skull, so with the nose; the ancient Huns during the age of Attila were accustomed to flatten the noses of their infants with bandages, “for the sake of exaggerating a natural conformation.” With the Tahitians, to be called, long-nose is considered as an insult, and they compress the noses and foreheads of their children for the sake of beauty. So it is with the Malays of Sumatra, the Hottentots, certain Negroes, and the natives of Brazil.[442] The Chinese have by nature unusually small feet;[443] and it is well known that the women of the upper classes distort their feet to make them still smaller. Lastly, Humboldt thinks that the American Indians prefer colouring their bodies with red paint in order to exaggerate their natural tint; and until recently European women added to their naturally bright colours by rouge and white cosmetics; but I doubt whether many barbarous nations have had any such intention in painting themselves.
In the fashions of our own dress we see exactly the same principle and the same desire to carry every point to an extreme; we exhibit, also, the same spirit of emulation. But the fashions of savages are far more permanent than ours; and whenever their bodies are artificially modified this is necessarily the case. The Arab women of the Upper Nile occupy about three days in dressing their hair; they never imitate other tribes, “but simply vie with each other in the superlativeness of their own style.” Dr. Wilson, in speaking of the compressed skulls of various American races, adds, “such usages are among the least eradicable, and long survive the shock of revolutions that change dynasties and efface more important national peculiarities.”[444] The same principle comes largely into play in the art of selection; and we can thus understand, as I have elsewhere explained,[445] the wonderful development of all the races of animals and plants which are kept merely for ornament. Fanciers always wish each character to be somewhat increased; they do not admire a medium standard; they certainly do not desire any great and abrupt change in the character of their breeds; they admire solely what they are accustomed to behold, but they ardently desire to see each characteristic feature a little more developed.
No doubt the perceptive powers of man and the lower animals are so constituted that brilliant colours and certain forms, as well as harmonious and rhythmical sounds, give pleasure and are called beautiful; but why this should be so, we know no more than why certain bodily sensations are agreeable and others disagreeable. It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body. It is, however, possible that certain tastes may in the course of time become inherited, though I know of no evidence in favour of this belief; and if so, each race would possess its own innate ideal standard of beauty. It has been argued[446] that ugliness consists in an approach to the structure of the lower animals, and this no doubt is true with the more civilised nations, in which intellect is highly appreciated; but a nose twice as prominent, or eyes twice as large as usual, would not be an approach in structure to any of the lower animals, and yet would be utterly hideous. The men of each race prefer what they are accustomed to behold; they cannot endure any great change; but they like variety, and admire each characteristic point carried to a moderate extreme.[447] Men accustomed to a nearly oval face, to straight and regular features, and to bright colours, admire, as we Europeans know, these points when strongly developed. On the other hand, men accustomed to a broad face, with high cheek-bones, a depressed nose, and a black skin, admire these points strongly developed. No doubt characters of all kinds may easily be too much developed for beauty. Hence a perfect beauty, which implies many characters modified in a particular manner, will in every race be a prodigy. As the great anatomist Bichat long ago said, if every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.