On Noses

‘SOME time,’ I had long promised myself, ‘I will write my reminiscences on Noses.’

‘Some time,’ I had still longer promised myself, ‘I will read Tristram Shandy.'

Yesterday, the horizon of some time grew nearer: ‘To-morrow, I will indulge in Noses; and to-night, apropos of this package of new books, I will read Tristram Shandy.'

At the end of the fifteenth chapter — pray what little hobgoblin attends to such coincidences? —began a Shandean skit on noses: Tristram’s own nose, his great-grandfather’s nose, his father’s system of noses, his Uncle Toby’s dictum on noses, the tale of the Strassburger who at the Promontory of Noses had taken such a noble specimen for his own. The Nose having thus served as a frigate to launch Sterne into the gulf of a new digression, he sailed before the wind. In my case it brings me back to terra firma.

The triangular pyramid projecting from the centre of the face has always had peculiar interest for me. In infancy I used it as a pocket, stowing therein an occasional bean filched from the cook’s store; and I remember the stir one such instance occasioned in the household as well as in me, when a canny country doctor put his open mouth to mine and with a mighty blast persuaded the bean to stand not upon the order of its exit. Later, a coasting accident left me with some nasal vacuity and the ability to run a grass blade up one nostril and down the other. Thus I became persona grata at juvenile circuses, the price of admission for my performance going all the way up from five pins to three cents, my profits invariably being paid in pins, the distaff side, I suppose, very properly.

The next landmark of my theme was that, literally. Mumble-the-peg for all comers frequently resulted in my doing the mumbling. Down the vista of the years, memory still sings the fashioning of the peg, its unnecessary brevity and point, its smoothness to resist all friction of a sympathetic earth. I hear the thumps on its head of the handle of the jack-knife — three knocks each with your eyes shut and three with them open. It never failed to be driven in to the head; and to enable me to pull it out with my teeth the resourceful boys dug a hole in the ground for my nose. Once started on the run, I was safe enough, for I was fleet, and the peg dropped into the big myrtle bed was seldom recovered for re-pegging.

About this time, I seem to recall, I was initiated into the idiom of the subject. I learned to count noses, ‘Ena, Meena, Mina, Mo’; to follow my nose; to be led by the nose; to have my nose put out of joint; to thrust my nose into; to turn my nose up at, — the latter precipitated by the arrogance of city children in clothes too fine to paddle in the brook, but with abysmal ignorance of how to climb a tree. I did not need a Horace to tell me in delectable Latin that it is the common way to turn up your nose at what you yourself do not know: I knew it already.

About this time the literature of the nose dawned above my horizon. There was the wish for the yard of black pudding, its dramatic attachment to the French housewife’s nose, and the decent moral precipitated by its fall; and there was the elephant’s child whose nose grew longer and longer with each pull till it ‘hurt him hijjis,' followed by the consoling bit of philosophy: ‘Vantage number one — you could n’t have hit the fly with a mere smear nose’; and about then childhood bloomed into adolescence.

Now I began to regard my nose in the looking-glass, with results that led to clothes-pin experiments in sleeping hours; and fingers anxiously pressing down knobosities as I sought to solve why X plus Y made Z. Being told that a liberal diet of carrots would reduce color in the complexion, I showed a craving for those hitherto despised vegetables; and hearing that lemon juice was a panacea for nose-freckles, threemiles-from-a-lemon was no hindrance. At this period, also, thanks to numismatics, I mastered the distinction between the Roman nose and the Grecian; the derivation of the word aquiline, and the accentuating or reducing effects of styles of coiffures and hatbrims. Being in the conundrum stage of humor, I used to propound an involved interrogation to which I was always given the privilege of answering myself, — ‘No nose can be more than eleven inches long because if it were it would be a foot.’

Then I saw Mansfield play Cyrano de Bergerac. ‘His nose terrifying,’ read the stage direction. His own mother had thought him unflattering, and he himself fostered no illusions: ‘Sometimes in the violet dusk I yield to dreamy mood and think of love. With my great devil of a nose I sniff the April. I forget. I kindle; and then suddenly I see the shadow of my profile upon the garden wall!’ To the world, however, Cyrano was proud, proud of such an appendage, inasmuch as an enormous nose is the index of a kindly, courteous, witty, liberal, and brave man. Many were the sprightly pleasantries which Cyrano’s fertile fancy showered upon his nose, — aggressive, amicable, descriptive, inquisitive, mincing, blunt, anxious, tender, learned, offhand, dramatic, deferent, rustic, military, — the sum total ‘ not a quarter of the tenth part of the beginning of the first’ of what might be said. And how we adored him! It was not a handsome nose he reared aloft; it was his soul he held erect; and at that age we, too, were soulful.

Now the girl began to experience the curious truth known to all practiced in life, that interest in a subject forces it to spring up on all sides. She was taken to a picture-gallery, and Ghirlandaio’s portrait of the old man with the great nose and the lovely smile and the adoring grandchild beckoned from the nearest wall. She paused before the portrait of Thackeray and noticed for the first time that he had a broken nose. She dipped into Don Quixote only to find new light on the écuyer du bachelier, Samson Carrasco, whose colossal nose frightened Sancho. In Westminster Abbey she learned that American vandals were especially fond of snapping off the nose from the tablet erected in memory of Major Andre, the spy. Her first visit at Oxford was to Brasenose College, the brass-nose knocker of which had been lately returned to Oxford after an absence of five and a half centuries.

No list of my reminiscences can ignore the fact that much of my omnivorous reading was due to the recurring hope of becoming more nosey-wise. Socrates first attracted me because he claimed to be able to turn his prominent eyes inward till they gazed full into each other across the narrow bridge of his nose. Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Marston became human for me when I heard them sentenced to have their noses mutilated by the public hangman for some imaginary insult to the Scot in Eastward Ho, which they had written in collaboration. The spirit of liberty in Dante’s day revealed its wild tenor when I read that his friend Recoverino de Cerchi had his nose cut off in a ballroom. I followed many of Brougham’s speeches, trying to discern just where he used to punctuate his sentences with his nose, turning it up at the end of a long parenthesis, which served to mark the change of subject better than a printed mark. I ran down a French pastor who, Diderot said, praised with his nose, blamed with his nose, decided and prophesied with that expressive member; and of whom Grimm said that whoever understood the pastor’s nose had read a great moral treatise. I learned to distinguish the portraits of the whole Kemble family by the eagle beak which ran through that talented tribe, and I laughed over Gainsborough’s baffled ejaculation to Mrs. Siddons, as he threw down his brush, ‘Damn it, madame, there is no end to your nose!’ Shandy père had prophetic vision when he opined that six or seven long and jolly noses would hoist a family into the best vacancies in the kingdom.

My theme seems of adequate antiquity. Two thousand years ago the poet Vyasa described his hero, Battlestrong, as ‘ possessed of slender height, a monstrous nose and enormous eyes.’ The Rig Veda refers contemptuously to ‘foes with no noses,’ as opposed to those gods gifted with good noses. Another Hindu describes his heroine thus: ‘She has fair hair and fair is her nose.’ One wishes he had particularized in what the fairness of her nose consisted. We know that Lavater hated ‘an authoritative nose’ in women. It was rare, he admitted, and stood for rare qualities, all of them bad. It suggested to him the ‘ wretched pride of their silence.’ Does such a nose turn up or down? Lavater does not say. Goethe, in referring to this great physiognomist of the eighteenth century, says it was his duty as minister, on Sundays after the sermon, to hold the little velvet bag toward those going out, and to receive the donations with a blessing. One Sunday he set himself the task of looking at no one, but of taking note only of hands and construing their shape. Not only did he observe the forms of the fingers, — the very expression of them as they dropped in the gift did not escape his attention. I wonder just how he carried out his observations on women’s noses, to decide which were authoritative. Were they beguiled to smell a rose in his presence, or to sit for a silhouette, or to remark a fresh fashion on a rival belle?

Montaigne would have delighted in such studies. He himself wrote a chapter on Thumbs, though it was elsewhere that he recorded that his father, at the age of sixty, could go round the dinner table on his thumbs. Whenever this essayist found the horizon distant and its objects vague, he ‘looked at his feet and at things in reach of his hand.’ Noses, oddly enough, seem to have escaped him. No doubt, however, about his flair. He had it for the minutest things of this passing show, perfuming even the violet, as did that unknown writer in the Greek Anthology: ‘I send thee sweet perfume, giving grace to the perfume, not to thee; for thyself thou canst perfume even the perfume.’ Or, like Catullus sending to his friend Fabullus, ‘perfume which the Venuses and Loves gave to my lady; and when you snuff its fragrance you will pray the gods to make you nothing but nose.’ I have always liked the oriental legend of Azrael holding to the nostril of the elect an apple from the tree of life. In the physical sense, delicacy of nostril was once a matter of life and death to our ancestors, as it is to hosts of creatures to-day. At a dinner party not long ago my neighbor commented on the beauty of the roses, regretting that he could not smell them, and it turned out that five of the twelve guests had lost the sense of smell. Dean Stanley once, at mention of such a catastrophe, vehemently tapped his own nose, exclaiming, ‘Here, here!’

Coleridge, who always had an excuse for any of his own bad habits and behavior, told Proctor that perhaps snuff was the final cause of the human nose. Must one conclude that with the failing keenness of the sense of smell man’s nose will shrink to the proportions of those deliberately crushed down in Crim Tartary, or those that Pantagruel found on the island of Enuasin, shaped like the ace of clubs? Would conservatives then depend for the upkeep of noses upon the surgeon and the physicist, or upon such an expert as the German chemist whose name was Nose? Would the character change in arithmetical proportion to the exterior changes of the face’s promontory?

The Earl of Chat ham used to bow so low when he met a Bishop that his nose could be seen between his knees. Such suavity is more appalling than the most exalted nose on any young ‘rye.’ The common French phrase is ‘lifting the nose’ rather than the eyes, granting it thus a more independent personality. A modern novelist goes further in speculative subtlety and ambidexterity of argumentation when he practically argues that instead of saying, ‘That little squinting, humpbacked snub-nose has a splendid soul,’ we might put it, ‘That splendid soul has a little squinting, humpbacked snubnose.’ Certainly we all know souls whose noses do not express them. Madame de Sévigné went to the root of the matter when she said of the Dauphine that ‘her face became her ill: her wit perfectly.’

Physically beautiful men, the glory of the race when it was young, are almost an anachronism now. Will it happen, militant and feminist autosuggested, that physically beautiful women may become an anachronism likewise? Shall the hidden, inner character be made incarnate in the way of Balzac’s hundreds of delineative noses, where was a certain play of expression which revealed the workings of the mind? After Burne-Jones painted his attenuated figures and Rossetti his haunting faces, such figures and faces became common on London streets. Can we argue with Shandy that the excellence of the nose is in direct proportion to the excellence of the wearer’s or of the artist’s fancy? Or that instead of the fancy begetting the nose, the nose begot the fancy? This mystic and allegorical scent has led me far, and I am fain to follow the example of Doctor McCosh when a teasing student stopped him to inquire about some intricate process of the mind, — pull my long nose and walk off, leaving you planté là, unanswered.