Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/840

822 himself was a little short, though not to such a distressing degree as his master Socrates. Caesar, Trajan, and the Abassides had such noses; also Henri Quatre and the founder of the Hapsburg dynasty. Rudolph von Hapsburg, though a righteous man and of peaceful disposition, so aggravated the German nobility by the size of his nose that his election to the imperial dignity gave general offense, and even men who had favored his nomination on account of his brilliant record were scandalized after meeting him face to face. But the emperor's judicious administration soon made his face so popular that he was besieged by portrait-painters, and once exclaimed in dismay: "God help me! Every fool who can draw a big nose wants to take my likeness!"

The Latins called such men nasones, and Ovid's influential family carried that name as a patronymic. Large hooked noses, according to Cuvier, Lavater, and Pernetti, indicate aggressiveness, love of conquest, and acquisitiveness, and their views are certainly supported by the abnormal development of those propensities among the ancient Romans and modern Jews. "When the aggressive instincts of the ancient Italians were suppressed," says Pernetti, "their noses shrunk to their present dimensions; exceptional individuals who have preserved the martial spirit of our ancestors are also conspicuous for their vigorous noses." The family of Napoleon must have preserved these characteristics in all their pristine vigor; his nose was as aggravating as his policy, and the shape of his chin was a triumph for Winckelmann's theory.

But, after all, such noses are preferable to the other extreme, the blunt hoggish snouts of the Calmucks and Southern Russians. A nez retroussé, a back-turned nose, the great Frederick considered as unpardonable in a soldier or any adult male of the Caucasian race, and was as proud of his own classic profile as of his best campaign. "God made the Roman, and man made the snub," says Dr. Wells, and Lavater demands a straight or down-turned nose as a sine qua non of a good face. "I never can look at a pug-nose without painful emotions," says he; "it makes it so sadly probable that our race has degenerated. I am sure Adam was not cursed with such a feature."

With a flat nose Gall associates sensuality and a groveling disposition; Dr. Redfield, also, want of energy and even of self-respect. But Zopyrus, the Athenian Spurzheim, went so far as to denounce a bulbous nose as a sign of a semi-bestial origin, and informed Socrates that one of his ancestors must have been guilty of an inhuman mésalliance of some sort, and that the shape of his nose "implied a tendency to drunkenness, theft, brutality, and lasciviousness"! It might be interesting to know what Zopyrus would have said about such noses as Gortchakoff's or ex-Senator Morrissey's, or the still greater deformity which made the face of Edward Gibbon a phenomenon.

The portraits of Socrates, in spite of that defect, exhibit a face