When we look at a Mongolian, the flat nose and oblique eyes at once
attract our attention, but hardly to such a degree as his high and
prominent cheek-bones. The North American Indians, who are probably the
descendants of Mongolians, resemble them in their prominent cheek-bones;
and the Esquimaux likewise possess these in a most exaggerated form.
“The Siamese,” says Darwin, “have small noses with divergent nostrils, a
wide mouth, rather thick lips, a remarkably large face, with very high
and broad cheek-bones. It is therefore not wonderful that ‘beauty,
according to our notion, is a stranger to them. Yet they consider their
own females to be much more beautiful than those of Europe.’”
Here is another “matter of taste,” which is decided in our favour by the
general laws of Beauty, positive and negative.
High, prominent cheek-bones are ugly, in the first place, because they
interfere with the regularly gradated oval of the face. Secondly,
because, like projecting bones and angles in any other part of the body,
they interrupt the regular curve of Beauty. Thirdly, because they are
coarse and inelegant, offending the sense of delicacy and grace, like
big, clumsy ankles and wrists. Fourthly, because they suggest the
decrepitude of old age and disease. In the healthy cheek of youth and
beauty there is a large amount of adipose tissue, both under the skin
and between the subjacent muscles. When age or disease makes fatal
inroads on the body, this fat disappears and leaves the impression of
starvation. “Famine is in thy cheeks,” exclaims Shakspere; and again—
“Meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones.”
When the malar bones are too high, the fleshy cheeks, instead of
including them in a plump curve, are made by contrast to appear hollow,
thus simulating and suggesting the appearance of disease to those whose
imagination is sufficiently awake to notice such suggestions. And
besides emaciation, hollow cheeks suggest another sign of age and
decrepitude—the loss of the teeth, which on the sides of the jaws help
to give youthful cheeks their plump outlines.
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.
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.