REFINED LIPS
Whereas the beauty of the chin is purely physical, its neighbour, the mouth, has the emotional charm of expression besides the formal beauty of outline. When we come to speak of the ears we shall find that some animals have five times as many muscles as man, wherewith they can execute expressive movements with those organs. But in the number and delicacy of the muscles of the mouth no animal approaches man, in whom they are more numerous even than those which serve for the varied expression of the eyes. Great as is the difference between an animal’s forefoot and man’s hand, it is not so great as the difference between an animal’s and a man’s mouth. Chewing and sucking are almost the only functions of the animal’s mouth, while man moulds his lips into a thousand shapes in singing, whistling, pouting, blowing, speaking, smiling, kissing, etc. From being a mere mechanism for masticating food, it has become the most delicate instrument for intellectual and emotional expression.
Sir Charles Bell’s testimony that “the lips are, of all the features, the most susceptible of action, and the most direct index of the feelings,” has already been quoted in the chapter on Kissing. Could Rubinstein himself express a wider range of emotions, by subtle variations of pianistic touch, than our lips can express degrees and varieties of affection in the family, friendly, conjugal, and love kisses? And can we find, even in the music of Chopin and Wagner, harmonic changes more infinitely varied than the countless subtle modulations of the human lips, as revealed in the fact that deaf mutes can be taught to understand what we say to them merely by watching the movements of our lips?
“The mouth, which is the end of love” (Dante), is also the seat of Love’s smiles; “and in her smile Love’s image you may see.” We often read of smiling eyes, and the eyes do partake in the expression of smiling, by increased brightness and the wrinkling of the surrounding muscles. But that the mouth is a more important factor in this expression can be shown by painting the face of a man with a sad expression, and then pasting on a smiling mouth, which will give the man at once a happy expression, notwithstanding the unchanged eyes. In life the muscles of the mouth and eyes execute certain movements in harmony. “In all exhilarating emotions,” says Bell, “the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nostril, and the angle of the mouth are raised. In the depressing emotions it is the reverse.”
For the execution of these diverse movements, which make it the most expressive organ of the body, the mouth employs more than a dozen important groups of muscles, some of which originate in the chin, some in the cheeks, some in the lips themselves, enabling them to execute independent movements.
While surpassing the eyes in expressiveness, the mouth rivals them in beauty of form and colour. “The lips answer the purpose of displaying a more brilliant red than is to be seen elsewhere,” says Winckelmann. “The under lips should be fuller than the upper.” In Greek divinities the lips are not always closed: “and this is especially the case with Venus, in order that her countenance may express the languishing softness of desire and love.” At the same time, “very few of the figures which have been represented laughing, as some Satyrs or Fauns are, show the teeth.” This is natural enough, for the long-continued exposure of the teeth would only result in a grimace. It is only in the transient smile that the teeth may peep forth; and then what a charming contrast their ivory curve and lustrous colour presents to the full-blooded, soft, pink lips!
“Lilies married to the rose,
Have made her cheek the nuptial bed;
Her lips betray their virgin red,
As they only blushed for this,
That they one another kiss.”
Health, Beauty, and Love—everywhere we see them inseparably associated. Who could ever fall in love with a pair of thin, pallid lips that have lost their pink and plump loveliness through anæmic indolence, or disease, or tight lacing? The very teeth, though the hardest substance of the body, lose their natural colour and beauty in ill-health. Not only do they decay and become blackish, but “in bilious people they become yellow, and in consumptive patients they show occasionally an unnaturally pearly and translucent whiteness” (Brinton and Napheys).
Negroes have, normally, teeth of a dazzling whiteness, which is often regarded as a racial peculiarity, but is due, according to Waitz, to the use of chalk or vegetal fibres. But various savages are dissatisfied with the natural form and colour of their teeth, and disfigure them in various ways. “In different countries the teeth are stained black, red, blue, etc., and in the Malay Archipelago it is thought shameful to have teeth like those of a dog” (Darwin).
“In Macassar the women spend a part of the day in painting their teeth red and yellow, in such a way that a red tooth follows a yellow one, and alternately.” In Japan, Fashion compels married women to blacken their teeth, not, however, as an ornament, but to make them ugly and save them from temptation.
Some African tribes knock out two or more of their front teeth, on the ground that they do not wish to look like brutes. The Batokas “think the presence of incisors most unsightly, and on beholding some Europeans, cried out, ‘Look at the great teeth!’... In various parts of Africa, and in the Malay Archipelago, the natives file the incisors into points like those of a saw, or pierce them with holes, into which they insert studs.”
In case of the lips, primitive Fashion prescribes still more atrocious mutilations. One would think that a negro’s swollen lips were ugly enough to suit even a devotee of African Fashion; but no! Her lips being naturally large, the fashionable negro belle considers it incumbent on her to exaggerate them into additional hideousness, just as European and American fashionable women exaggerate the slight and beautiful natural curve of their waist into the atrocious hour-glass shape.
“Among the Babines, who live north of the Columbia River,” says Sir John Lubbock, “the size of the under lip is the standard of female beauty. A hole is made in the under lip of the infant, in which a small bone is inserted; from time to time the bone is replaced by a larger one, until at last a piece of wood, three inches long and an inch and a half wide, is inserted in the orifice, which makes the lip protrude to a frightful extent. The process appears to be very painful.”
“In Central Africa,” says Darwin, “the women perforate the lower lip and wear a crystal, which, from the movement of the tongue, has ‘a wriggling motion, indescribably ludicrous during conversation.’ The wife of the chief of Latooka told Sir S. Baker that Lady Baker ‘would be much improved if she would extract her four front teeth from the lower jaw, and wear the long pointed polished crystal in her under lip.’ Further south, with the Makalolo, the upper lip is perforated, and a large metal and bamboo ring, called a pelelé, is worn in the hole. This caused the lip to project in one point two inches beyond the tip of the nose; and when the lady smiled, the contraction of the muscles elevated it over the eyes. ‘Why do the women wear these things?’ the venerable chief Chinsurdi was asked. Evidently surprised at such a stupid question, he replied, ‘For beauty! They are the only beautiful things women have; men have beards, women have none. What kind of a person would she be without a pelelé? She would not be a woman at all, with a mouth like a man but no beard.’”
In New Zealand, according to Tylor, “it was considered shameful for a woman not to have her mouth tattooed, for people would say with disgust, ‘She has red lips.’”
Compare these two pictures for a moment: on the one side, the protuberant mouth-borders of the negro woman, swollen as by disease or an insect’s sting, enlarged, in smiling, to the very ears, and showing not only the teeth but the gums, the tongue and the unæsthetic œsophagus; on the other side, the full but delicate cherry lips of civilised woman, capable of an infinite variety of subtle, graceful movements, a keyboard on which the whole gamut of human feelings finds expression, and revealing, in a smile, only the tips of the pearly, undeformed teeth. Shall we say, with Alison and Jeffrey, that it is all a matter of taste, and that the negro has as much right to his taste as we have to ours? Or have we not plentiful reasons for claiming that Personal Beauty is a fine art, and that the reason why the negro prefers his coarse mouth to our refined lips is because he does not understand our highly-developed and specialised Beauty?
There are cogent scientific reasons for believing that, just as the skull has been modified and developed from the upper part of the spinal column, and the brain from its contents, so the facial muscles are all developed from the broad muscle of the neck. In the orang, according to Professor Owen, we find already all the important facial muscles which man uses to express emotions. But, as Darwin remarks, “distinct uses, independently of expression, can ... be assigned with much probability for almost all the facial muscles.”
On the other hand, the facial muscles “are, as is admitted by every one who has written on the subject, very variable in structure; and Moreau remarks that they are hardly alike in half a dozen subjects. They are also variable in function. Thus the power of uncovering the canine tooth on one side differs much in different persons. The power of raising the wings of the nostrils is also, according to Dr. Piderit, variable in a remarkable degree; and other such cases could be given.”
The facts that the facial muscles blend so much together that their number has been variously estimated at from nineteen to fifty-five, and that they vary so much in details of structure and function in individuals, are of extreme significance. For, in the first place, this variableness allows Love—or Sexual Selection—to favour the survival of those modifications of the features which are most in harmony with the laws of Beauty; and, secondly, it affords the means of further specialisation and increased accuracy in the modes of emotional expression.
When we see a friend reading a letter, we fancy his face a perfect mirror, reflecting every mood touched upon in its contents. Yet many of our expressions are vague, and there is much room for improvement in definiteness. Darwin, in the introduction to his work on the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, has remarked how difficult it often is to name the exact emotion intended to be expressed in a picture of a man, unless we regard the accessories by which the painter illustrates the situation; and how apt people are to disagree in naming the emotions expressed by a series of physiognomic portraits. With monkeys, he says, “the expression of slight pain, or of any painful emotion, such as grief, vexation, jealousy, etc., is not easily distinguished from that of moderate anger.”
Savages, as we saw in a previous chapter, are strangers to many of the tender emotions which enter into our daily life; hence it would be absurd to look for muscles specially trained to express them. And even with Europeans the refined emotions are of such recent development that, as just stated, they are capable of much further specialisation. To take only one case: it is probable that, whereas in the present stage of human evolution, it is almost impossible, without accessories, to distinguish the facial expression of feminine Romantic Love from that of maternal love, future generations will have specially modified muscles for those modes of expression. Duchenne has pointed out on the side of the nose a series of transient folds expressive of amorous desire. As Romantic Love displaces coarse passion, may not these or another set of muscles be pressed into the special service of refined Love as a sign of encouragement to lovers about to propose? Coquettes, of course, would immediately cultivate this expression, as a new wile or “wrinkle.”
Between the facial muscles that are thus utilised for the expression of emotions and other muscles of the body, there is one difference which is of the utmost importance from the point of view of Personal Beauty. The function of ordinary muscles is to move bones, whereas the muscles of expression in the face are only concerned with the movements of the skin. Hence they do not enlarge the bones of the face, which would destroy its delicacy. Their exercise gives elasticity and plump roundness to the outlines of the face; and as they are subtly subdivided in function, they cannot easily become too plump from exercise.
Individual peculiarities of expression are of course due to the frequent exercise of certain sets of muscles, leading gradually to a fixed physiognomic aspect; for form is merely crystallised expression. Hence no one can be beautiful without being good. Vice soon destroys Personal Beauty. If the muscles of anger, envy, jealousy, spite, cruelty, etc., are too frequently called into exercise, the result is a face on which the word vicious is written as legibly and in as many corners as the numerals X and 10 are printed on a United States banknote.
One of the reasons why Fashion encourages the blasé, nil admirari attitude, and the stolid suppression of emotional expression, is to hide these signs of moral and hygienic sins.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, anatomist and poet, says of Emerson that he had “that look of refinement centring about the lips which is rarely found in the male New Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied thoughts and complex emotions, as well as the sensuous and nutritive port of entry.”
Dr. Holmes need not have limited his generalisation to “male New Englanders.” Refined mouths are rare in every country, among women as well as among men. As a writer in the Victoria Magazine exclaims: “It is wonderful how far more common good foreheads and eyes are amongst us than good mouths and chins.” Yet there is a special reason for singling out the average male New Englander as a “warning example.” He inherits the thin, famished, pale, stern, forbidding lips of his Puritan ancestors, whose sins are thus visited on later generations. Sins? Yes, sins against health. Without cheerfulness there can be no sound health, and the Puritans made the systematic pursuit of unhappiness the chief object of their life. They made cruel war on all those innocent pursuits and amusements which bring the bloom of health and beauty to the youthful cheek, and exercise the lips in the expression of refined æsthetic emotion. Even music, the most innocent of the arts, was included in their fanatic ostracism, to which historians also trace the rarity of musical taste of the highest order in England.
There is reason to believe that it is especially æsthetic culture which betrays itself in the refined contours and expression of the lips. Men of genius, though their cast of features is not always handsome, commonly have finely-cut mouths. Among German women addicted to music and love of nature, though beauty is comparatively rare—owing to causes which will be considered in a later chapter—good mouths are more common than in some other countries which boast a higher general average of Personal Beauty. Among Americans in general, all the features are apt to be finely cut, hence the lips also partake of this advantage.
But it is among Spanish maidens that perhaps the most inviting, full-blooded yet delicate, soft, and refined lips are to be sought. True, the Spanish maiden seems to lack refined feelings when she goes, as commonly supposed, to be thrilled by a bull fight. Yet it is well known that the upper classes of women in Spain do not commonly attend these spectacles; and if they did, would they be more cruel than our fashionable women? Which is the more glaring evidence of callous emotions, to voluntarily witness the slaughter of an infuriated, dangerous beast, or to wear on one’s hat the painted corpses of innocent song-birds?
The following passage in one of Washington Irving’s works shows that the Spanish have genuine æsthetic feeling and taste:—
“‘How near the Sierra looks this evening!’ said Mateo; ‘it seems as if you could touch it with your hand, and yet it is many leagues off.’ While he was speaking a star appeared over the snowy summit of the mountain, the only one yet visible in the heavens, and so pure, so large, so bright and beautiful as to call forth ejaculations of delight from honest Mateo.
”‘Que lucero hermoso!—que clara y limpio es!—no pueda ser lucero mas brillante.’ (What a beautiful star! how clear and lucid!—no star could be more brilliant!)
“I have often remarked this sensibility of the common people of Spain to the charms of natural objects. The lustre of a star—the beauty or fragrance of a flower—the crystal purity of a fountain, will inspire them with a kind of poetical delight—and then what euphonious words their magnificent language affords with which to give utterance to their transports!”
Possibly the constant pronouncing of these “euphonious words” is one of the causes of the beauty of Spanish lips. But one need not go into such subtle details for an explanation of the phenomenon. Sexual Selection accounts for it sufficiently. The admiration of Beauty is the strongest factor in Romantic Love. The Spaniard’s sense of Beauty is refined through his love of Beauty in natural objects. Hence in Sexual Selection he is guided by a taste which abhors equally the coarse, protuberant lips suggestive of mere animality, and the leathery, lifeless lips indicating neglect of the laws of health and a lack of lusty vitality. For true labial refinement consists not in ascetic elimination of sensuous fulness, but in æsthetic harmony between sense and intellect. The lips, like all other parts of the body, are naturally plump and full-blooded in Southern nations, saturated with sunshine and fresh air; and when this plumpness is checked by mental refinement and the exigencies of varied expression, then it is that lips become ideally beautiful.
It is with the lips as with Love, of which they are the perch. Neither Zola nor Dante are the true painters of the romantic passion, but Shakspere, who pays respect to flesh and blood as well as to emotion and intellect.