Why does he prefer his painted, clumsy, coarse-featured squaw to a civilised woman with delicate contours, refined features, graceful gait? Because he does not understand the beauty of the latter. It is too subtle for his coarse nerves, his feeble imagination. The smiles and manifold expressions that chase one another across her lovely features, like the subtly-interwoven melodies in a symphonic poem, are the visible signs of thoughts and emotions which he has never experienced, and therefore cannot understand. It is like giving him a page of Sanskrit to read.
It is for this reason that a negro never falls in love with a white woman, and that a peasant prefers his plump, crude country-girl to the fair, delicate city visitor. He requires more vigorous arms, broader features, than the city girl possesses, to make an impression on his callous nerves of touch and sight. And it is fortunate for the peasant girl that her lover does lack taste, else she would soon find him a fickle deserter.
The savage, in a word, prefers his style of “beauty” to ours for the same reason that he prefers a piece of raw liver and a glass of oil to the subtle flavours of French cookery and French wines. His senses are too coarse, his mind too vulgar, to perceive the poetry of refined features. Everything must be loud and exaggerated to make an impression on him—loud music, loud and glaring red and yellow colours, loud and coarse features.
This doctrine that differences of taste are merely due to differences in the degree of æsthetic culture, and that there is such a thing as an absolute standard of human beauty, derives further support from the facts (1) that the ideal of beauty set up by the æsthetic Greeks two thousand years ago corresponds so remarkably with that of modern artistic minds; (2) that e.g. a Japanese student in the United States soon learns to prefer American female beauty to the Japanese variety; (3) that an English, Italian, or American audience who at first admire Norma and find Lohengrin tiresome, can in a few seasons be so educated as to prefer Lohengrin and actually scorn Norma; but not vice versâ, in either case (2) or (3).
Mr. Ruskin takes a similar view regarding differences of taste when he says that “respecting what has been asserted of negro nations looking with disgust on the white face, no importance whatever is to be attached to the opinions of races who have never received any ideas of beauty whatsoever (these ideas being only received by minds under some certain degree of cultivation), and whose disgust arises naturally from what they suppose to be a sign of weakness or ill-health.”
That this consideration of health does affect the negro’s judgment regarding the beauty of the white complexion, is also shown by what Mr. Winwood Reade told Mr. Darwin, namely, that the negro’s “horror of whiteness may be attributed ... partly to the belief held by most negroes that demons and spirits are white, and partly to their thinking it a sign of ill-health.”
But of all the theoretical truths emphasised in the Modern Painters none is so important as this: “That not only changes of opinion take place in consequence of experience, but that those changes are from variation of opinion to unity of opinion,—that whatever may be the difference of estimate among unpractised or uncultivated tastes, there will be unity of taste among the experienced; and that, therefore, the result of repeated trial and experience is to arrive at principles of preference in some sort common to all, and which are part of our nature.”
Let us now see what are those principles of Beauty that may be considered independent of a more or less crude and undeveloped taste. Some are negative, some positive.
NEGATIVE TESTS OF BEAUTY
(a) Animals.—"It has been argued," says Darwin (by Schaffhausen), “that ugliness consists in an approach to the structure of the lower animals, and no doubt this is partly true with the more civilised nations, in which intellect is highly appreciated; but this explanation will hardly apply to all forms of ugliness.”