Finally, prominent cheek-bones are objectionable because they are concomitants of the large, clumsy, brutal jaws which characterise savages and apes. To the cheek-bones the upper jaw-bone is directly attached; hence the larger the teeth are, and the more vigorously they are exercised in fighting and picking bones, the more massive must be the cheek-bones, to prevent the upper jaw from being pushed out of position. Moreover, there is attached to the cheek-bones a powerful muscle which connects it with the lower jaw, and by its contraction brings the two jaws together; and this is a second way in which violent exercise of the jaws tends to enlarge the cheek-bones, for all bones become enlarged if the muscles attached to them are much exercised.
At a recent meeting of the British Association, Sir George Campbell advanced the theory that the Aryan race, to which we belong, originally had prominent cheek-bones, like those of lower races. On general evolutionary grounds this is indeed a foregone conclusion; as is the corollary that our cheek-bones have become smaller, for the same reason that our jaws have become more delicate; viz. because we no longer use them to fight and tear our food like wild beasts, but to masticate soft cooked food, to talk, etc. Thus does the progress of civilisation enhance our Personal Beauty.
An excessive diminution in the size of the cheek-bones, as of the jaws, will be prevented by Romantic Love (Sexual Selection), which ever aims at establishing and preserving those proportions and outlines of the features which are most in harmony with the general laws of beauty.
Among the lower animals cruel Natural Selection eliminates those individuals who are ugly, i.e. unnatural, unhealthy, clumsy. With mankind charity and pity have checked the operation of this cruel though beneficial law, and progress in the direction of refinement and Beauty would therefore be fatally impeded were it not that Sexual Selection, or Love guided by the sense of Beauty, steps in to eliminate the ill-favoured, who bear in their countenance too conspicuously the marks of their savage and animal ancestry. Perhaps Mr. Wallace had some such thought in his mind when he anticipated the time when man’s selection shall have supplanted natural selection.[selection.]
Yet there are thousands of good people who still profess to believe that “beauty is only skin deep,” and that Romantic Love and æsthetic culture are of no practical importance, but mere gaudy soap-bubbles to delight our vision for a transient moment!
In future ages, when æsthetic refinement will be more common, and Romantic Love, its offspring, less impeded by those considerations of rank and money and imaginary “prudence” which lead parents to sacrifice the physique and wellbeing of their grand-children to the illusive comfort of their sons and daughters (in “marriages of reason”)—what an impetus will then be given to the development of Personal Beauty! Refined mouths and noses, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, plump and graceful healthy figures, now so lamentably rare, will then become as plentiful as blackberries in the autumn.
COLOUR AND BLUSHES
Although the heart’s warm blood is not carried to the cheeks in so dense a network of arteries, nor so near the surface as in the lips, yet the cheeks come next to the lips in delicate sensibility—a fact which Love has discovered instinctively; for a kiss on the cheeks is still a kiss of love, whereas a kiss on the forehead or eyelids indicates less ecstatic forms of affection or esteem.
What makes the cheeks so sensitive is the great delicacy of their transparent skin, which readily allows the colour of the blood to be seen as through a veil, not only in blushing, but in the natural rosy aspect of youth and health.
Though the cheeks may not vie with the lips and teeth, the hair and the eyes, in lustrous depth of colour, they have an advantage in their chamæleonic variety and changes of tint, and their delicious gradations. Even the delicate blushes on an apple or a peach, caused by the warm and loving glances of the sun,—what are they compared to the luscious, mellow tints on a maiden’s ripe cheeks? Nor is it possible to find in the leaves of an autumnal American forest more endless individual nuances and shades of red and rose and pink than in the cheeks of lovely girls—unless indolence or other sins against health have painted them with ghastly repulsive pallor, or the hideous Hottentot habit of bedaubing them with brutal paint has ruined their translucent delicacy.