WHY THE HUMAN NOSE HAS A WESTERN EXPOSURE

WHEN Bishop Berkeley had the good luck to write,

Westward the course of empire takes it way,

he suggested a question which has not, to my knowledge, been adequately answered: Why? Why do all the world’s peoples that move at all move ever toward the west, a human tide, obedient to the suasion of some mysterious power, setting up new “empires” superior to those enfeebled by time, as is the fate of empires? Many a thoughtful observer has confessed himself unable to name the law at the back or front of the movement. Yet a law there must be: things of that kind do not come about by accident.

A natural law is one thing, a cause is another, and the cause of this universal tendency to “go West” may not lie too deep for discovery. May it not be that the glory of the sunset has something to do with it?—has all to do with it, for that matter. In civilization sunsets count for little—we know too much. We know that the magical landscapes of the sunset are “airy nothings”—optical illusions. But we inherit instincts from primitive ancestors to whom they were less unreal. The savage is a poet who

Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,

reading into the visible aspects of nature many a meaning which in the light of exact knowledge we have read out of them. Not a Grecian of the whole imaginative race that had sight of Proteus rising from the sea and heard old Triton blow his wreathèd horn could beat him at that. He knows that beyond the mountains that he dares not scale, and beyond the sea-horizon that he has not the means to transgress, lies a land wherein are all beauty and possibilities of happiness. To him the crimson lakes, purple promontories, golden coasts and happy isles of cloudland are veritable presentments of actual regions below. He never bothers his shaggy pate with the question “Can such things be?”—his eyes tell him that they are. Why should he not have ever in heart the wish to reach and occupy the delectable realm to which the sun daily points the way and sometimes discloses? That is the way he feels about it and his forefathers felt about it, as is shown in the myths and legends of many tribes. And because they so felt we have from them the wanderlust that lures us ever a-west.

To this hypothesis it may be objected that the cloudscapes of the sunrise ought, logically, to offset the others, giving the race a divided urge. But the primitive ancestor was not an early riser; he was a notorious sluggard, as is the savage of to-day, and seldom saw the sunrise—so seldom that its fascination did not get into the blood of him and from his into ours. Even when he did see the cloudlands of the dawn he was not in a frame of mind to observe them, being engrossed in rounding up the early cave-bear or preparing an astonishment for his sleeping enemy. But the chromatic glories of the country reflected in the sunset sky took his attention when it was most alert. Moreover, those of the dawn are distinctly inferior, as we are assured by credible witnesses who have observed them, through the happy chance of having been up all night companioning the katydids and whip-poor-wills.

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