¶ … Price Beauty?
'For though beauty is seen and confessed by all, yet, from the many fruitless attempts to account for the cause of its being so, enquiries on this head have almost been given up"
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, (1753)
Not very encouraging words, but if the great artist William Hogarth felt himself up to the task, we can attempt at least to follow his lead. That beauty is enigmatic goes almost without saying. Different ages, different cultures, and even different individuals, will have their own definitions of "beauty." The problem is more than skin deep. Any term that can be so widely and irregularly employed is bound to trap the casual researcher ... Or reader ... Or viewer ... Or for that matter, any other human being who attempts to define what is and what is not "beauty." People, places, things -- even ideas dreams -- can all be beautiful. Each can be beautiful for a different reason. Sometimes beauty is a kind of code word for "harmonious," or "slim," or "profound." It all depends on the context, and on your point-of-view. A man of the Eighteenth Century, like Daniel Defoe, would likely have had a very different conception of beauty from a woman of the Twenty-First Century. On the surface, Defoe's ideas about beauty might appear very similar to our own. Or, we might not even think that they could be different. We might read Defoe's descriptions of Roxana, and think that she is fortunate because she is beautiful, and that we understand her beauty in exactly the same way as did her creator nearly three centuries ago. Yet much has changed since Daniel Defoe penned Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress -- the way we light our homes, the kinds of entertainment we enjoy, and very possibly, even our ideas of beauty. Beauty was a central and determining factor throughout the fictional Roxana's life. Her beauty conditioned how others saw her, and treated her. You might even say that Roxana's beauty was Roxana's fate ... Or as others might put it -- her fortune. Yet what exactly was the fortune of a beautiful woman in Defoe's day?
Much of the Eighteenth Century's understanding of beauty was based on age-old norms and assumptions. Beauty -- in the physical sense -- was derived from the largely classical notions of form and proportion that had held sway for centuries among Europe's educated elite. Thinkers like Vitruvius and Alberti had defined beauty in an architectural and artistic sense. Their kind of beauty could be reduced to mathematical formulae, to a rigid canon of what was acceptable and what was not. A Corinthian column could only be so tall in relation to its diameter. An ionic capital must have volutes. An ornate frieze does not fit with the Doric order. Their conception of beauty amounted to a canon -- a set of rules and regulations that must be followed. Eccentricity and individuality were not valued if they conflicted with the general precepts. Conformity and obedience were the handmaids of beauty. These ideas applied in other ways too. Long before Defoe's time, other great minds had turned their thoughts to creating the rules of other disciplines. They also had decided what was beautiful and what was not. Music, literature, painting -- even conversation -- possessed their proper forms and techniques. The accomplished individual was exactly that -- one who had completed the study of what could and could not be done. What was "right" was also "natural" in so much as it conformed to God's laws and to the laws of nature. The natural laws were God's laws, and like any other laws they could be recorded; their infractions punished. Human beings, too, conformed to "natural" laws.
The Eighteenth Century held time-honored views of morality and on humanity's place and role in the universe. Just as people were entirely different from, and superior to, all other forms of life -- the male and the female of the human species were intrinsically different one from the other. The world -- and human society -- such as it existed was founded upon divine laws. In accordance with these still essential medieval beliefs, it was held that,
Human beings were created by God to love and serve Him forever. Thus, each of them has a purpose or function. In the same sense in which it is true of John's heart that its function is to pump blood, it is true of John that his function is to love and serve God forever. But, unlike a heart, which has no choice about whether to pump blood, a human being has free will and can refuse to do the thing for which it was made. What we call human history is nothing more than the working out...
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