JAW, CHIN, AND MOUTH
HANDS VERSUS JAWS
Just as among some male ruminants the growth of horns as a means of defence has apparently led to the disappearance of the canine teeth, so man’s erect attitude, by leaving his hands free to do much of the work which inferior animals do with their jaws and teeth, has gradually modified the appearance of his face, greatly to its advantage. “The early male forefathers of man,” says Darwin, “were probably furnished with great canine teeth; but as they gradually acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws and teeth less and less. In this case the jaws, together with the teeth, would become reduced in size, as we may feel almost sure from innumerable analogous cases.” And in another place he remarks: “As the prodigious difference between the skulls of the two sexes in the orang and gorilla stands in close relation with the development of the immense canine teeth in the males, we may infer that the reduction of the jaws and teeth in the early progenitors of man must have led to a most striking and favourable change in his appearance.”
Why a “favourable” change? No doubt a male gorilla, if it could be taught to pronounce an æsthetic judgment, would indignantly scout the notion that our weak, delicate jaw is preferable to its own massive bones; nor would a prognathous or “forward-jawed” African or Australian admit that he is less beautiful than the orthognathous or “upright-jawed” European. What right, then, have we to claim that we alone have beautiful faces? Must we not admit, with the Jeffrey Alison school, that it is all “a matter of taste,” and that in so far as a heavy, projecting jaw appears beautiful to a gorilla or a savage, it is beautiful to them?
The general answer to such questions as these has already been given in another part of this volume. We need therefore only say in brief résumé that a heavy, projecting, clumsy, brutal jaw probably appears to a gorilla or a Hottentot neither ugly nor beautiful. The æsthetic sense—as we can see among ourselves—is the last and highest product of civilisation. Monkeys are apparently excited by brilliant colours, but to beauty of form neither apes nor the lower races and classes of man appear to be susceptible.
Should a negro, however, on having his attention called to this matter, claim that his prognathous face is more beautiful than our orthognathous face, the retort simple would be that his imagination is not sufficiently educated to understand our more refined and delicate beauty; just as an Esquimaux prefers a rotten egg to a fresh one, a working man a glass of fusil oil to one of tokay—simply because their senses of taste and smell are not sufficiently refined to appreciate or even detect the delicate flavour of a fresh egg and the subtle bouquet of wine.
Of the positive tests of beauty, Delicacy is the one which most emphatically condemns the heavy, prognathous jaw and the accompanying big mouth. Massive bones and clumsy movements are everywhere the signs of excessive toil, fatal to beauty, as may be seen on comparing the angular and almost masculine skeleton of a labouring woman with the delicately-articulated joints of a “society woman”; or the heavy structure of a dray-horse with the fine contours of a race-horse; showing that Delicacy is always associated with the other elements of beauty—Curvature, Gradation, Expression, etc.
On the manner in which the beauty of the mouth is proportioned to its capability for Expression, Mr. Ruskin has made the following interesting observations: “Taking the mouth, another source of expression, we find it ugliest where it has none, as mostly in fish; or perhaps where, without gaining much in expression of any kind, it becomes a formidable destructive instrument, as again in the alligator; and then, by some increase of expression, we arrive at birds’ beaks, wherein there is much obtained by the different ways of setting on the mandibles (compare the bills of the duck and the eagle); and thence we reach the finely-developed lips of the carnivora (which nevertheless lose their beauty in the actions of snarling and biting); and from these we pass to the nobler, because gentler and more sensitive, of the horse, camel, and fawn, and so again up to man: only the principle is less traceable in the mouths of the lower animals, because they are only in slight measure capable of expression, and chiefly used as instruments, and that of low function; whereas in man the mouth is given most definitely as a means of expression, beyond and above its lower functions.... The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral or intellectual virtue expressed by it.”
Shakspere, by the way, seems to differ from Ruskin’s theory implied in this last sentence. According to Ruskin, animals “lose their beauty in the actions of snarling and biting.” But man has an action similar to snarling, namely, what Bell calls “that arching of the lips so expressive of contempt, hatred, and jealousy.” It is to this that Shakspere refers in these lines—
“O what a deal of scorn looks beautiful
In the contempt and anger of his lip.”
But the word “beautiful” is here evidently taken by Shakspere in the wider sense of interesting and characteristic, and not in the special æsthetic sense of formal and emotional beauty.
Delicacy and the capacity for varied and subtle Expression—these, we may conclude, are the chief criteria of beauty in the lower part of the face. Anatomically, it may be well to state here, the word “face” does not include the forehead, but only extends from the chin to the eyebrows. The upper and posterior part is called the cranium or skull. It seems odd at first not to include the forehead in the face, but there are scientific grounds for making such a division, for a discussion of which the reader must be referred to some anatomical text-book (vide Kollmann, pp. 82-85).
To a certain extent the face and the cranium are independent of one another in development and physiognomic significance. And it should be noted that, contrary to the general impression, in estimating the degree of intelligence and refinement, the face is a safer guide than the cranium; for there are many powerful brains in low and even receding foreheads, whereas a large projecting jaw is almost invariably a sign of vulgarity or lack of delicate feeling. We do not find a dog ugly because of his receding forehead; but we do find that the most infallible way of giving a man’s picture a brutal expression is by enlarging the jaw and mouth. It is the deadliest weapon of the caricaturist.
What makes a gorilla so frightfully ugly is the prominence and massive preponderance of his face over his cranium. It is his monstrous jaws, with their “simply brutal armature” of teeth, that give him such a repulsive appearance. The gorilla’s mouth, as Professor Kollmann remarks, is a caricature even from the animal point of view. How much more delicate and refined are a dog’s or cat’s jaws and teeth in comparison! Unfortunately, while man is a savage, or when he relapses into brutal habits, it is the gorilla’s mouth and teeth that his resemble, and not the cat’s or the dog’s.
A small face being therefore a test of refined beauty, we have here another proof of the superiority of feminine over masculine beauty. For although woman has a smaller cranium than man, it is larger than man’s relatively to the face. In other words, women have smaller and less massive faces than men, both absolutely and relatively to their size. Kollmann, who is not an evolutionist, endeavours to account for this difference on the ground that men are more addicted to the pleasures of the table than women. But surely, though women eat less than men, they do not make much less use of their teeth; and for any deficiency in this respect they more than make up by the constant wagging of their jaws in small-talk. It is infinitely more probable that Darwin is right in attributing the massiveness of the masculine jaws to the accumulated, inherited effects of constant use in fighting with enemies and rivals—contests from which the passive females have as a rule been exempt.
It is the assumption by the hands of many of the former functions of the teeth that has led to the decrease in the size of the teeth, and, in consequence, of the jaw-bones to which they are attached. Some writers have even claimed that the wisdom-teeth are becoming rudimentary, and will ultimately disappear, because there will be no room for them in our gradually diminishing jaws. We may feel confident, however, that if this reduction in the size of the jaws tended to go too far, the sense of beauty and Sexual Selection, i.e. Love, would step in to arrest the process, by favouring the survival of those who gave their teeth sufficient exercise to prevent the lower part of the face from becoming too much reduced in size. Our sense of beauty demands that the distance from tip of chin to nose should be about the same as the length of the nose and the height of the forehead. Should these proportions be violated, Love will restore the balance; for no lover would ever select a face in which the chin almost touches the nose, as in infants, whose teeth and jaws are not yet developed, or as in old men and women, in whom the loss of the teeth has led to a collapse of the jaws, resulting in a loss of proportion, clumsy movements, and prognathism.