Only a wag or a fool, again, would argue that a Fijian has
just as much right as we have to his opinions on medical matters, or
on the morality of polygamy, infanticide, and cannibalism. Yet when we
come across a dirty, malodorous savage, so stupid that he cannot count
ten, who mutilates every part of his body till he has lost nearly all
semblance to a human being, we are soberly asked to look upon this as
merely a "difference in the standard of esthetic taste," and to admit
that the savage has "as much right to his taste," as we have. The more
I think of it, the more I am amazed at this unjust and idiotic
discrimination against the esthetic faculty--a discrimination for
which I can find no other explanation than the fact already referred
to, that most men of science know so much less about matters of beauty
than about everything else in the world. They labor under the delusion
that the sense of beauty is one of the earliest products of mental
evolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painful
proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that
a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an
African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot
is beautiful because she pleases a drunken libertine.
What makes the traditional attitude of scientific men in this matter
the less pardonable is that--as we have seen--there is always a
simple, practical explanation for the predilections of these savages,
so that there is no necessity whatever for assuming the existence of
so paradoxical and impossible a thing as an esthetic admiration of
these hideous deformities.
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