THE MIND OF MAN 277 



Female heads devoid of hair are much admired in parts of 

 Africa, as are shaven male heads in some other lands. The 

 Hottentots admire and have developed by selection features 

 in their women which appear monstrous to us. Tattooed 

 skins are regarded with delight in many parts of the world, 

 but are horrifying to strangers. Fatness is considered an 

 important factor of beauty in some places. 1 In a district of 

 East Africa women bore their lower lips and stretch them 

 round large rings of wood. The lower teeth are knocked 

 away. The men behold with sexual transports the exposed 

 tongue ineffectually striving to achieve articulate language 

 " spluttering through a hedge of broken teeth." Elsewhere 

 women bore their ears and noses. Almost as hideous as the 

 East African custom were the crinoline and chignon of the 

 nineteenth century, that era of transcendent bad taste. 

 Presumably our fathers admired them. As one vagary 

 succeeds another we think no one looks " nice " who is not 

 attired in the latest fashion. Clearly, then, sexual love with 

 its accessories, jealousy and admiration of beauty in the 

 opposite sex, is much overlaid and extended by manifest 

 acquirements. 



444. Modesty is supposed to be an instinct, and much has 

 been written on that assumption even in scientific works. 

 But the baby has no trace of it, and apparently would not 

 develop an iota but for his imitative faculty. Various savages 

 have no more modesty than a lower animal. Only those 

 races that wear clothes are modest, at any rate in the 

 Christian or Mahomedan sense. Doubtless clothes were used 

 originally for warmth or ornament. But in time constant 

 concealment of parts of the body led some races to the 

 notion that it was wrong to expose them some races but 

 not all, for the Esquimaux, who wear clothes, freely expose 

 their bodies in their huts. To-day in England many a 

 woman, who perhaps neglects her child or is indifferent to 

 her lover, would rather die than appear naked in public. A 

 manifest tradition, a mere acquirement, modesty has become 



1 As a child I told a native in India that Queen Victoria was 

 extremely beautiful. " Is she very fat ? " said the man with interest. 

 In Honolulu a Kanaka told me that the native queen was most lovely 

 she weighed two hundred pounds. In New Zealand I saw much of a 

 tribe of natives. At first the tattooed faces of the chiefs were displeasing. 

 Later, when I had caught the infection of the fashion, an untattooed 

 native face seemed mean and common. I must confess that no fashion 

 in women's clothes appears in England but for the time being I think 

 it pretty. I have learned to distrust my taste and try to correct it by 

 imagining women, dressed in the fashion, as marble statues. Then the 

 real hideousness of some fashions become apparent. 



