Must we then, in view of the vast number of opposing facts advanced so
far in this long chapter, assume that savages and barbarians have no
esthetic sense at all, not even a germ of it? Not necessarily. I
believe that the germ of a sense of visible beauty _may_ exist even
among savages as well as the germ of a musical sense; but that it is
little more than a childish pleasure in bright and lustrous shells and
other objects of various colors, especially red and yellow, everything
beyond that being usually found to belong to the region of utility
(language of signs, desire to attract attention, etc.) and not to
_esthetics_--that is, _the love of beauty for its own sake._ Such a
germ of esthetic pleasure we find in our infants _years before they
have the faintest conception of what is meant by personal beauty;_ and
this brings me to the pith of my argument. Had the facts warranted it,
I might have freely conceded that savages decorate themselves for the
sake of gaining an advantage in courtship without thereby in the least
yielding the main thesis of this chapter, which is that the admiration
of personal beauty is not one of the motives which induce a savage to
marry a particular girl or man; for most of the "decorations"
described in the preceding pages are not elements of _personal_ beauty
at all, but are either external appendages to that beauty, or
mutilations of it. I have shown by a superabundance of facts that
these "decorations" do not serve the purpose of exciting the amorous
passion and preference of the opposite sex, except non-esthetically
and indirectly, in some cases, through their standing as marks of
rank, wealth, distinction in war, etc. I shall now proceed to show,
much more briefly, that still less does personal beauty proper serve
among the lower races as a stimulant of sexual passion. This we should
expect naturally, since in the race as in the child the pleasure in
bright baubles must long precede the pleasure in beautiful faces or
figures. Every one who has been among Indians or other savages knows
that nature produces among them fine figures and sometimes even pretty
faces; but these are not appreciated. Galton told Darwin that he saw
in one South African tribe two slim, slight, and pretty girls, but
they were not attractive to the natives. Zöller saw at least one
beautiful negress; Wallace describes the superb figures of some of the
Brazilian Indians and the Aru Islanders in the Malay Archipelago
(354); and Barrow says that some of the Hottentot girls have beautiful
figures when young--every joint and limb well turned. But as we shall
see presently, the criterion of personal charm among Hottentots, as
among savages in general, is fat, not what we call beauty. Ugliness,
whether natural or inflicted by fashion, does not among these races
act as a bar to marriage. "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex,"
we read regarding the Creeks in Schoolcraft (V., 272): "It is
strength or agility that recommends the young man to his mistress; and
to be a skilful or swift hunter is the highest merit with the woman he
may choose for a wife." Belden found that the squaws were valued "only
for their strength and ability to work, and no account whatever is
taken of their personal beauty," etc., etc. Nor can the fact that
savages kill deformed children be taken as an indication of a regard
for personal beauty. Such children are put out of the way for the
simple reason that they may not become a burden to the family or the
tribe.
Advocates of the sexual selection theory make much ado over the fact
that in all countries the natives prefer their own peculiar color and
features--black, red, or yellow, flat noses, high cheek bones, thick
lips, etc.--and dislike what we consider beautiful. But the likes of
these races regarding personal appearance have no more to do with a
sense of beauty than their dislikes. It is merely a question of habit.
They like their own faces because they are used to them, and dislike
ours because they are strange. In their aversion to our faces they are
actuated by the same motive that makes a European child cry out and
run away in terror at sight of a negro--not because he is ugly, for he
may be good-looking, but because he is strange.
Far from admiring such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower
races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or
mutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain
tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave
nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has
escaped the uglifying process. "Nothing is too absurd or hideous to
please them," writes Cameron. The Eskimos afford a striking
illustration of the fact that a germ of taste for ornamentation in
general is an earlier manifestation of the esthetic faculty than the
appreciation of personal beauty; for while displaying considerable
skill and ingenuity in the decorations of their clothes, canoes, and
weapons, they mutilate their persons in various ways and allow them to
be foul and malodorous with the filth of years. One of the most
disgusting mutilations on record is that practised by the Indians of
British Columbia, who insert a piece of bone in the lower lip, which,
gradually enlarged, makes it at last project three inches. Bancroft
(I., 98) devotes three pages to the lip mutilation indulged in by the
Thlinkeet females. When the operation is completed and the block is
withdrawn "the lip drops down upon the chin like a piece of leather,
displaying the teeth, and presenting altogether a ghastly spectacle."
The lower teeth and gum, says one witness, are left quite naked;
another says that the plug "distorts every feature in the lower part
of the face"; a third that an old woman, the wife of a chief, had a
lip "ornament" so large "that by a peculiar motion of her under-lip
she could almost conceal her whole face with it"; and a fourth gives a
description of this "abominably revolting spectacle," which is too
nauseating to quote.