What is Beauty - Will Durant

The essay is a contemplative perspective about the concept of beauty. The author W.J.Durant is not definitive about the meaning of the concept, instead he believes that the meaning is subjective and can be apparently understood as anything that please a man. The aura of beauty may appeal the beholds at physical, emotional and spiritual levels.
Durant likens the pleasure of beauty to the sublime a couple may desire for each other. In addition, beauty may also lie in the art of love making, the color coordination, dance, music, pottery etc.
The essay in the subsequent paragraphs does a survey of the development of the concept of beauty through age. In the primitive era, in the Australian continent, men had monopolized the art of adorning themselves with ornaments. The men would also point the entire body as some festive occasions. It could be to attract a women or for personal gratification. In some tribes the sailors would paint their nails and teeth too. Some tribal women even carried their dressing cases with them.
The Greeks took the art of adorning the body to a greater extent. They preferred permanence of beautification of the bodies through tattooing. They almost embroidered their skin. Earrings and nose-ring were considered not just as beauty maskers but cultural too.
In fact, the ravage in the part has no concept of nudity. When Darwin gave some tribal’s a piece of cloth to cover their nudity, they tore it into pieces and used it as ornaments. Durant feels that from the beginning both sexes have preferred ornaments to clothing. The obsession for ornaments was such that, at times the weight of the ornaments would tire the Congo women. They hired attendants to far them during such time.
Apart from self-love, the impulse to beauty is reflected in certain other ways like beautifying things. Pottery was the major source for the tribes of South Africa. If some painted pots some painted their huts. They often painted the pictures of animals which they wish to chase down. The Eskimos would carve ivory into figure of animals some paintings would indicate on object of worship or the dead.
The author also touches upon the history of architecture. In fact architecture is nothing but beautifying the house/building. In the part the building would be sublimated in reverence of the dead or gods gradually the concept of beauty got reflected in other cultural factors like song, dance and music. Most festival was celebrated with chanting and dancing. Instrumental music seems to have been triggered by dance. The primitive man eventually developed advanced musical instruments like trumpets and flutes. This lead to the creation of drama and the opera. The dances reflected both sexual expression as well as more serious expressions like mourning.
Thus D wants to say that we own our modern culture to the savages who created the base of it. All nodes of economic life have their origin in the primitive life of man. The primitive man developed language, culture, medicine and literature.
Hence it has been a long journey from the stage of savagery to refinement.