Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

The yellow and black races, who naturally have flat noses, consider it fashionable to have them very flat. The same is true with our modern Fashion regarding wasp-waists and feet. But in regard to the face the white races—including even the women—have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fashionable exaggeration. Hence, though we admire prominent noses, we do not admire them more and more in proportion to their size. On the contrary, every one looks upon the very large Jewish nose as ugly. The reason is that in judging of the face Fashion has been displaced by æsthetic Taste, whose motto is Moderation, and which is based on a knowledge of the cosmic laws of beauty. Savages have Fashion but no Taste. We have both; but Taste is gradually demolishing Fashion, like other relics of barbarism.

Sometimes our estimate of the nose, as of other features, may be influenced by non-æsthetic considerations—by prejudices of race, aristocracy, etc. “In Italy,” says Mantegazza, “we call a long nose aristocratic (especially if it is aquiline) perhaps because conquerors with long noses, Greeks and Romans, have subjected the indigenous small-nosed inhabitants.” But the Italians are not the only people who, if asked to choose between a nose too large or one too small, would ask for the former. And the cause of this preference is suggested very forcibly in these remarks of Grose: “Convex faces, prominent features, and large aquiline noses, though differing much from beauty, still give an air of dignity to their owners; whereas concave faces, flat, snub, or broken noses, always stamp a meanness and vulgarity. The one seems to have passed through the limits of beauty, the other never to have arrived at them.”

EVOLUTION OF THE NOSE

The flat, irregular nose of savages and semi-civilised peoples, with its visible nostrils and imperfectly developed bridge, being intermediate between the ape’s nose and our own, we are naturally led to infer that the nose has been gradually developed into the shape now regarded as most perfect by good judges of Beauty. To what are we indebted for this favourable change—to Natural or to Sexual Selection? In other words, is the present perfected shape of the nose of any use to us, or is it purely ornamental?

It appears that both these laws have acted in subtle combination to improve our nasal organ. The nose is a sort of funnel for warming the air on its way to the sensitive lungs. In cold latitudes a long nose would therefore be an advantage favoured by Natural Selection; and it is noteworthy that in general the flat-nosed peoples live in warm climes. There are exceptions, however, notably the Esquimaux, showing that this hypothesis does not entirely cover the facts.

Let us examine, therefore, the second function of the nasal organ. The external nose is a sort of filter for keeping organic impurities out of the lungs. At the entrance of the nostrils there are a number of fine hairs which serve to keep out the dust. If any particles manage to get beyond this first fortress, they are liable to be arrested by the rows of more minute, microscopic hairs, or cilia, which line the mucous membrane and keep up a constant downward movement, by means of which dusty intruders are expelled and the air filtered. Esquimaux living in snowfields, and savages in the forests and grass-carpeted meadows, do not need these filters so much as we do in our dusty cities and along dusty country roads; hence their noses have remained more like those of the arboreal apes, while ours have grown larger, so as to yield a larger surface of sifting hairs and cilia. When we think of the dusty American prairies and the African and Asian deserts, can we wonder, accordingly, that the American Indians, as well as the nomadic Arabs and Jews, have such immense noses? The theory seems fanciful, if not grotesque; but perhaps there is more in it than appears at first sight.

Even if both these hypotheses should prove untenable, there is a third consideration which alone suffices to account for the development of the European nose. The nose has a most important musico-philological function. The language of savages often consists of only a few hundred words, while ours is so complicated that it requires the co-operation of the vocal cords, and the cavities of the mouth and the nose to produce the countless modifications of speech and song which make us listen with so much pleasure to an eloquent speaker or a great singer. The subject is far too complicated with anatomical details to be fully explained here, and the reader must be referred to a full discussion (not from the evolutionary point of view, however) to Professor Georg Hermann von Meyer’s elaborate treatise on The Organs of Speech, chap. iii.

A few points, however, must be noted here. The nasal air-passage, “with its two narrow openings and intermediate greater width, possesses the general form of a resonator, and there can be no doubt but that it has a corresponding influence, and that the tones with which the air passing through it vibrates are strengthened by its resonance. The larger the nasal cavity the more powerful the resonance, and, consequently, the reinforcement experienced by the tone.... In consequence of the peculiarity of the walls of the nasal cavity, it appears that sounds uttered with the nasal resonance, particularly the nasal vowels, are fuller and more ample than the same sounds when strengthened by the resonance of the cavity of the mouth. The general impression of fulness and richness conveyed by the French language arises from its wealth in nasal vowels; and it is for this reason that second-rate tragic actors like to give a nasal resonance to all the vowels in the pathetic speeches of their heroic parts.”

Further, it is of great importance to bear in mind “that the resonance of the nasal cavity also plays a part in the formation of non-nasal articulate sounds,” appearing here as a mere reinforcement of the resonance of the cavity of the mouth, and free from the nasal twang. Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, an infallible way to make our speech sound “nasal” is to keep the air out of the nose by clasping it tightly; whereas if the nasal passage remains open the nasal twang is replaced by an agreeable resonance. What could more forcibly illustrate the importance of a well-developed nose?

Now there are several groups of muscles attached to the lower cartilages of the nose,—parts which are imperfectly developed in apes and negroes. The constant exercise of these, during many generations, in the service of speech, in expressing several emotions, and in heavy breathing, suffice to account, on accepted physiological principles, for the gradual enlargement of the resonant tube which we call the nose.