Beauty!

By Emmanuelle

YOUR friends call you Beauty or Ganda, but your boyfiend’s former girlfriend and her barkada tartly describe you as Pangit or Bruha. Who is the more believable harbinger of truth?

Makes for more material behind the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, di ba? That one person’s aesthetic sensibilities may differ from another. Or simply put, all people do not see alike. Or feel alike.

There is no clear source of the precise formulation of the saying but in 1670, an English collection of proverbs which looked back to the farm for a fitter expression of popular thoughts, quoted: An ass is beautiful to an ass, and a pig to a pig. (Author’s Note: Not to dare the censor’s scissors, an ass is an animal resembling a horse but with longer ears.)

In 1731, almost a century later, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Poor Richard’s Almanack: Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion. The same view will be expressed in 1742 by the philosopher David Hume: Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them

Over many centuries then, the tradition continued. Henry Moore, perhaps one of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors, would speak out authoritatively: Too many people say “beautiful” when they really mean “pretty”. To me, a hippopotamus is beautiful. I much prefer them to swans!

And just after you had finally been persuaded to agree that beauty is relative rather than absolute, you are confronted with another saying of almost the same genre: Beauty is only skin deep.

Two of the earliest recorded references to beauty being only skin deep is somehow connected to Sir Thomas Overbury, who is credited with the first recorded uses of proverbs in his writings. In his poem A Wife, which he wrote in 1613 but was published posthumously in 1614, he pointed out to all and sundry: All the carnal beauty of my wife is but skin-deep . . .

Sir Thomas was imprisoned in the tower of London for speaking out against the forthcoming marriage of his patron, the future Earl of Somerset, to the Countess of Essex. The Countess later arranged to have him slowly poisoned. In 1616, three years after his murder, poet John Davies wrote in A Select Second Husband For Sir Thomas Overburie’s Wife: Beauty’s but skin-deep; nay, it is not so; It floates but on the skin beneath the skin . . .

That wife must have been so insufferably, disgustingly beautiful albeit skin-deep.

But if beauty is only skin-deep, what lies beneath the skin? Contrasting the beautiful externals with the internals, Thomas Fuller recorded the sentiments of the early Church Fathers in Gnomologia, 1732: Beauty is but Skin deep; within is Filth and Putrefaction. No surprise here.

A Leicestershire proverb in the form of an old jingle voiced the same message: Beauty is but skin deep, ugly lies the bone; Beauty dies and fades away, but ugly holds its own. To which a Moroccan proverb echoed a rejoinder: My daughter-in-law is beautiful! But don’t look any deeper.

Many perceive the truth in these sayings, but wiser are the others who see behind the truth of these sayings.

That these are none other than weapons to replenish the armory of the plain-in-features or those who are pretty but are rendered insecure by those with more beauty.

An observation to which Jean Kerr acidly arches her brows in The Snake Has All The Lines (1960): I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want – an adorable pancreas?

(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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