beauty

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>  >> But isn't beauty a function of class anyway?
>
>>Of evolution.
>
>Don't be silly. I'm absolutely agog to hear what kind of Just So Story you
>and the rest of the Dawkinsite gang are going to tell to explain how, to
>take a random example, standards of beauty take such radically different
>approaches to the question of underarm hair on adult women. And so on, and
>so on.
>
>People think that taking this sort of reductionist approach to complicated
>social questions makes them look all cool and clever and "hard sciencey".
>In actual fact, it just makes you look like you buy a lot of pop science
>books at airports.
>
>dd

 From Mark Twain's _Innocents Abroad_, Chapter 50:

*****   This "Fountain of the Virgin" is the one which tradition says 
Mary used to get water from, twenty times a day, when she was a girl, 
and bear it away in a jar upon her head. The water streams through 
faucets in the face of a wall of ancient masonry which stands removed 
from the houses of the village. The young girls of Nazareth still 
collect about it by the dozen and keep up a riotous laughter and 
sky-larking. The Nazarene girls are homely. Some of them have large, 
lustrous eyes, but none of them have pretty faces. These girls wear a 
single garment, usually, and it is loose, shapeless, of undecided 
color; it is generally out of repair, too. They wear, from crown to 
jaw, curious strings of old coins, after the manner of the belles of 
Tiberias, and brass jewelry upon their wrists and in their ears. They 
wear no shoes and stockings. They are the most human girls we have 
found in the country yet, and the best natured. But there is no 
question that these picturesque maidens sadly lack comeliness.

A pilgrim -- the "Enthusiast" -- said: "See that tall, graceful girl! 
look at the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance!"

Another pilgrim came along presently and said: "Observe that tall, 
graceful girl; what queenly Madonna-like gracefulness of beauty is in 
her countenance."

I said: "She is not tall, she is short; she is not beautiful, she is 
homely; she is graceful enough, I grant, but she is rather 
boisterous."

The third and last pilgrim moved by, before long, and he said: "Ah, 
what a tall, graceful girl! what Madonna-like gracefulness of queenly 
beauty!"

The verdicts were all in. It was time, now, to look up the 
authorities for all these opinions. I found this paragraph, which 
follows. Written by whom? Wm. C. Grimes [the pseudonym created by 
Twain, to satirize William C. Prime, the author of _Tent Life in the 
Holy Land_ (1857), one of numerous romantic "Palestine books" written 
in the 19th century during America's "Holy Land craze"):

"After we were in the saddle, we rode down to the spring to have a 
last look at the women of Nazareth, who were, as a class, much the 
prettiest that we had seen in the East. As we approached the crowd a 
tall girl of nineteen advanced toward Miriam and offered her a cup of 
water. Her movement was graceful and queenly. We exclaimed on the 
spot at the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance. Whitely was 
suddenly thirsty, and begged for water, and drank it slowly, with his 
eyes over the top of the cup, fixed on her large black eyes, which 
gazed on him quite as curiously as he on her. Then Moreright wanted 
water. She gave it to him and he managed to spill it so as to ask for 
another cup, and by the time she came to me she saw through the 
operation; her eyes were full of fun as she looked at me. I laughed 
outright, and she joined me in as gay a shout as ever country maiden 
in old Orange county. I wished for a picture of her. A Madonna, whose 
face was a portrait of that beautiful Nazareth girl, would be a 
'thing of beauty' and 'a joy forever.'"

That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from Palestine 
for ages. Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find beauty in the 
Indians, and to Grimes to find it in the Arabs. Arab men are often 
fine looking, but Arab women are not. We can all believe that the 
Virgin Mary was beautiful; it is not natural to think otherwise; but 
does it follow that it is our duty to find beauty in these present 
women of Nazareth?   *****

Cf.  Hilton Obenzinger, _American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the 
Holy Land Mania_, <http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6725.html>.
-- 
Yoshie

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