To describe the character of Wellington, is to reverse that of Napoleon. Napoleon was shrewd, artful, and deceitful; Wellington open-hearted, strong-sensed, candid, and sincere. Napoleon a clever statesman; Wellington obtuse in politics. Napoleon a great strategist; Wellington short-sighted, though daring in the field. Napoleon a lover and patron of arts; Wellington a despiser of them. Napoleon said to be personally timid; Wellington constitutionally brave. Napoleon’s cruelties were acts of cool calculation and state-policy; Wellington’s of military fury. Napoleon poisoned his sick troops because he did not know what else to do with them, and murdered the Duke d’Enghien to produce “an effect” in Europe; Wellington’s cruelties were the necessary consequences of war energetically carried on, and were never the result of cold-blooded predetermination.[[21]]
Before closing this section, we would request the reader’s attention to the strong proof of the truth of the hypothesis derivable from the fact that like Noses, with like circumstances (cæteris paribus, as the phrenologists say), produce like characters: for instance, Wolsey, Richelieu, Ximenes, Lorenzo di Medici, Alfred:—Sidney, Raleigh:—Alexander, Napoleon.
CHAPTER III.
OF THE GREEK NOSE.
Class II.—The Greek, or straight Nose, is perfectly straight; any deviation from a right line must be strictly noticed. If the deviation tend to convexity, it approaches the Roman, and the character is improved by an accession of energy; on the other hand, when the deviation is towards concavity, it partakes of the Celestial, and the character is weakened. It should be fine, and well chiselled, but not sharp.
It indicates Refinement of character; love for the Fine Arts, and Belles-Lettres; astuteness, craft, and a preference for indirect rather than direct action. Its owner is not without some energy in pursuit of that which is agreeable to his tastes; but, unlike the owner of the Roman Nose, he cannot exert himself in opposition to his tastes. When associated with the Roman Nose, and distended slightly at the end by the Cogitative, it indicates the most useful and intellectual of characters, and is the highest and most beautiful form which the organ can assume.
This Nose, like the Roman, takes its name from the people of whom it was most characteristic—physically and mentally. On these two parallel facts (with others of a like kind) much stress maybe justly laid, although they are old and trite. But this very triteness is the proof of their truth. It proves that the hypothesis which attributes certain mental characteristics, well known to belong to the Romans, to the Roman Nose,—and so of the Greeks to the Greek Nose, and of the Jews to the Jewish Nose,—is founded in nature; and, so far from being a fanciful invention, is a fact long recognized, and as old as the creation of the human proboscis.
Requesting the reader to bear in mind the form of the Greek Nose and its indications, we would remark how exactly the latter correspond with the character of the ancient Greeks as a nation. It is unnecessary to expatiate on their high excellence in art, their lofty philosophy, their acute reasoning, or their poetical inspiration—these are known to every school-boy. Their craftiness, their political falsehood, and shrewd deceitfulness, were celebrated in ancient days as now, and “Græcia mendax,” “Danaûm insidiæ,” were epithets as true and as commonly applied in the time of Augustus, as at the present hour by modern travellers. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!” exclaims the cautious Priest of Troy, referring to the well-known character of the treacherous enemy. And what a contrast to anything recorded in Roman warfare does the Trojan War itself exhibit! The Romans would have battered down the walls with their furious engines; the wily Greeks invent a stratagem by which the enemy pull down their own walls. If we may credit Homer—and, if not for the facts, we may for his fine portraitures of Grecian character—there was a vast deal more talking than fighting during the ten years’ siege. There was plenty of the morale, but very little of the physique, as a Frenchman would say. In truth, the contrast between the Romans and the Greeks was as great in the latter as in the former.
The Greeks were no nation of hardy warriors, though they were always quarrelling among themselves in petty battles which have won an undeserved celebrity by the talents of their historians. Were it not for the writings of Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War would rank no higher than the border skirmishes of the Scots and Northumbrians, or the expeditions of the Sioux and Pawnees. A simple geographical fact is sufficient to prove this against all the moral power of the most glowing and eloquent historian. Greece is about one-fourth less than Scotland, and its recorded population was about the same. Is it possible that, in such a corner, a war of seven-and-twenty years’ duration could have been more than a series of skirmishes and predatory expeditions? More than that must, in a much briefer space, have annihilated the whole population. More than that, and at the end of twenty-seven years the States of Greece must have been in the condition of the celebrated Kilkenny cats, which fought till only the tip of the tail of one of them was left. The battles of Marathon, Thermopylæ, &c., against foreign foes, rank higher, because they were fought and won under a high intellectual inspiration, entirely consistent with Class II.—the love of country. But with these battles the war ended; the Greeks did not, as the Romans would have done, follow up the defeat of the enemy with a counter-incursion into his country and an attempt at foreign conquest. He was driven from their territory; their hearths were secure; their gods replaced on their pedestals; their temples re-purified, and that satisfied their ambition. The Greeks made no foreign conquests; boasted no extended empire. The wars of Alexander seem the only exception; but of that Monarch himself we have already treated, and of his battles it may be said, that they were not fought by Peloponnesian Greeks (of whom we are now speaking) but by Macedonians and Asiatic mercenaries; who were, in all probability—though it would demand a volume on ethnography to prove it—a wholly different race.
But, if we were only prepared to substantiate our hypothesis by these general facts of national characteristics, it would be very unsatisfactory; as it is obvious that nothing could be easier than to manufacture and support a theory by moulding it to a single general fact. It is by the multiplicity of isolated individual cases that the hypothesis must stand or fall. And we are happily in a position again to adduce these in its favour.
The following persons will, on an examination of their portraits, be found to have possessed Greek Noses:—