POPE, II. xiv. 256.
Although people in general are more capable of judging right of beauty, at least in some parts of it, than they are of most other things; yet there are a great many causes apt to mislead the generality in their judgments of beauty. Thus if the affection is entirely engaged by any one object, a man is apt to allow all perfections to that person, and very little in comparison to any body else; or if they ever commend others highly, it is for some circumstance in which they bear some resemblance to their favourite object.
Again, people are very often misled in their judgments, by a similitude either of their own temper or personage in others. It is hence that a person of a mild temper is more apt to be pleased with the gentler passions in the face of his mistress; and one of a very lively turn would choose more of spirit and vivacity in his: that little people are inclined to prefer pretty women, and larger people majestic ones; and so on in a great variety of instances. This may be called falling in love with ourselves at second hand; and self-love (whatever other love may be) is sometimes so false-sighted, that it may make the most plain, and even the most disagreeable things, seem beautiful and pleasing.
Sometimes an idea of usefulness may give a turn to our ideas of beauty; as the very same things are rec-
Beauty. koned beauties in a coach horse which would be so many blemishes in a race horse.
But the greatest and most general misleader of our judgments, in relation to beauty, is custom, or the different national tastes for beauty, which turn chiefly on the two lower parts of it, colour and form.
It was from the most common shape of his countrywomen, that Rubens, in his pictures, delights so much in plumpness; not to give it a worse name. Whenever he was to represent the most beautiful women, he is sure it give them a good share of corpulence. It seems as if nobody could be a beauty with him under two hundred weight. His very Graces are all fat.
But this may go much farther than mere bulk; it will reach even to very great deformities, which sometimes grow into beauties, where they are habitual and general. One of our own countrymen (who was a particularly handsome man) in his travelling over the Alps, was detained by a fever in one of those villages, where every grown person has that sort of swellings in the neck which they call goitres; and of which some are very near as big as their heads. The first Sunday that he was able, he went to their church (for he was a Roman catholic) to return thanks to heaven for his recovery. A man of so good a figure, and so well dressed, had probably never before been within the walls of that chapel. Every body's eyes were fixed upon him: and as they went out, they cried out loud enough for him to hear them, "O how completely handsome would that man be, if he had but a goitre!"
In some of the most military nations of Africa, no man is reckoned handsome that has not five or six scars in his face. This custom might possibly at first be introduced among them to make them less afraid of wounds in that part in battle: but however that was, it grew at last to have so great a share in their idea of beauty, that they now cut and slash the faces of their poor little infants, in order to give them those graces, when they are grown up, which are so necessary to win the hearts of their mistresses; and which, with the assistance of some jewels or ingots of gold in their noses, ears, and lips, must certainly be irresistible to the ladies of that country.
The covering each cheek all over with a burning sort of red colour, has long been looked upon in a neighbouring country to be as necessary to render a fine lady's face completely beautiful, as these scars are for the beaux in Africa.
The natural complexion of the Italian ladies is of a higher glow than ours usually are; and yet Mr Addison is very just, in making a Numidian call the ladies of the same country pale unripened beauties.
The glowing dames of Zama's royal court
Have faces flusht with more exalted charms:
The sun, that rolls his chariot o'er their heads,
Works up more fire and colour in their cheeks:
Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget
The pale unripen'd beauties of the north!
Syphax to Juba: in Cato, act i. scene 4.
The prince of Anamaboo, who had been so long and latterly so much used to the European complexion, yet said of a certain lady a little before he left London, "That she would be the most charming woman in the world if she was but a negro."
In an account of some of the farthest travels that any of our people have made up the river Gambia, we are informed, that when they came to some villages where probably no Europeans had ever been before, the women ran frightened and screaming from them, on taking them to be devils, merely on account of the whiteness of their complexion.
We cannot avoid observing, however, that heaven is very good and merciful to mankind, even in making us capable of all this variety of mistakes. If every person judged exactly right of beauty, every man that was in love in such a district, would be in love with the same woman. The superior beauty of each hamlet would be the object of the hate and malice of all the rest of her own sex in it, and the cause of dissension and murders among all of the other. If this would hold in one town, it would hold for the same reasons in every other town or district; and of course there would be nothing more wanting than this universal right judgment of beauty, to render the whole world one continued scene of blood and misery.
But now that fancy has perhaps more to do with beauty than judgment, there is an infinity of tastes, and consequently an infinity of beauty; for to the mind of the lover, supposed beauty is full as good as real. Every body may now choose out what happens to hit his own turn and cast. This increases the extent of beauty vastly, and makes it in a manner universal: for there are but few people in comparison that are truly beautiful; but every body may be beautiful in the imagination of some one or other. Some may delight themselves in a black skin, and others in a white; some in a gentle natural rosiness of complexion, others in a high exalted artificial red; some nations in waists disproportionately large, and others in waists as disproportionately small. In short, the most opposite things imaginable may each be looked upon as beautiful in whole different countries, or by different people in the same country.
We should perhaps make a distinction here again, as to the two former parts of beauty and the two latter. Fancy has much more to do in the articles of form and colour than in those of the passions and grace. The good passions, as they are visible on the face, are apparent goodness; and that must be generally amiable: and true grace, wherever it appears to any degree, one should think must be pleasing to every human creature; or perhaps this may never appear in the women of any nation, where the men are grown so savage and brutal as to have lost all taste of it.
Yet even as to grace itself, under the notion of pleasingness, it may become almost universal, and be as subject to the dominion of fancy as any of the less significant parts of beauty. A parent can see gentleness in the most awkward child perhaps that ever was born; and a person who is truly in love, will be pleased with every motion and air of the person beloved; which is the most distinguishing character that belongs to grace. See this subject more fully considered in the article BEAUTY in the SUPPLEMENT.