The piglet ran to his mother in tears
Mother asked, “why are you sad, my cutie!
“I just saw the owlet baby so brown!
Mother, why can’t it be as beautiful as me!”
One of the biggest comfort half lie half truth we all have said either to ourselves or someone else or our children is, “Beauty lies in the eyes of the Beholder!”. This is one of the most commonly used saying in different ways especially in the soap operas or tear jerker movies! There was one poster I still remember which was hung in a Pub (The teetotaler in me went for the music and mocktails!); which said, “Beauty is in the eyes of the Beer Holder!!” This version or ‘meme’ is now known as the Beer Goggles! Which is when you find someone attractive when you are drunk!
Even in the famous scene from the original Planet of the Apes when Chalten Heston request the ape for a kiss! The ape says, “But you are so ugly!”
Imagine how the situation is changed there! Like how we say that even the mother of a monkey would find her child to be beautiful! Then again those are the Maternal Eyes!
But I am sure that the most ugly creature according to the human may actually find a human ugly! So the Phrase is very true after all!
Coming back to the original phrase, when you look into history this and similar saying has been used for ages!
It has often been attributed to Shakespeare and yes! the phrase was not used by him or in any of his plays though a similar sentiment was used in “Love’s Labours Lost” which read, “Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye.”
Which roughly translates of course to the same thing!
The concept that each individual has a different inclination of what is beautiful first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek. According to Plato, the sense of beauty is itself transient in nature. So, a thing beautiful for one might not be beautiful for the other!
Only philosophers take this path of inner beauty and this has been going on especially in plays and books!
In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly, in his Euphues and his England, wrote:
“…as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote.” (Now frankly even I did not understand this very well but it has been said that this is close to the phrase!)
Benjamin Franklin paralleled the sentiment in Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1741, writing:
“Beauty, like supreme dominion
Is but supported by opinion”
Then another version penned by David Hume;
“Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”
Now these are the versions! But who was the person who coined the proper phrase we use now!? well, the the modern-day version of the expression is believed to have first appeared in English in the 19th century.
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton) is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form. Hungerford wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of ‘The Duchess’. In the 1878 novel Molly Bawn, there’s the line “It is an old axiom, and well said, that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
The phrase has stood the test of time which reminds me of another famous quote by birthday celebrity Balakrishna Menon aka Swami Chinmayananda Saraswati, ““The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts”! The Bhagavad Geeta authored by him is an inspiration!
Now get your Beauty sleep!
Shubh ratri!
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