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.