Part 46

So many books have been written on calisthenics that it is needless to repeat here minute directions for training the muscles of the arm or any other part of the body. One bit of sensible advice may, however, be quoted from the _Ugly Girl Papers_: “Throwing quoits and sweeping are good exercises to develop the arms. There is nothing like three hours of housework a day for giving a woman a good figure, and if she sleep in tight cosmetic gloves, she need not fear that her hands will be spoiled. The time to form the hand is in youth, and with thimbles for the finger-tips, and close gloves lined with cold cream, every mother might secure a good hand for her daughter.”

It is an ill wind that blows no man good. The incessant piano-banging and violin-scraping of thousands of unmusical young ladies has at least one thing to be said in its favour: it helps to round and beautify the arms of these young players.

Active exercise is the surest and quickest way of securing muscular rotundity. But in cases where, owing to some infirmity, long-continued spontaneous exertion is out of the question, _massage_, which has been defined as “passive exercise,” may be resorted to as of calisthenic value. It should only be performed by an expert, and always centripetally, _i.e._ in the direction of the heart. It facilitates the flow of the venous current, which in the arms and lower limbs has to struggle upwards against the force of gravitation; and to this is partly due its refreshing effect. As Americans are the most nervous and sensitive people in the world, it seems probable that the feeling of ease following the facilitating of the venous flow has taught them instinctively to assume that peculiar position, with the feet on a chair or table, which has been so often ridiculed by Europeans.

THE “SECOND FACE”

“The beauty of a youthful hand,” says Winckelmann “consists in a moderate degree of plumpness, and a scarcely observable depression, resembling a soft shadow, over the articulations of the fingers, where, if the hand is plump, there is a dimple. The fingers taper gently towards their extremities, like finely-shaped columns; and, in art, the articulations are not expressed. The fore part of the terminating joint is not bent over, nor are the nails very long, though both are common in the works of modern sculptors.”

Balzac pointed out that “men of superior intellect almost always have beautiful hands, the perfection of which is the distinctive indication of a high destination.... The hand is the despair of sculptors and painters when they wish to express the changing labyrinth of its mysterious lineaments.”

A fine hand is, indeed, a sign of superior intelligence in a much more comprehensive sense than that which Balzac had in mind. The difference between the simian and human faces is hardly greater than the progress from an ape’s hand to a man’s in beauty of outline, smoothness of surface, grace of movement, and varied utility. The ape’s hand is hairy on the upper surface, hard and callous on the lower. Except in climbing, its movements are clumsy. The fingers have adapted themselves to the need of climbing, and have become permanently bent in front, so that when the animal goes on all fours it cannot walk on the palm, but only on the bent knuckles.

A step higher we have the negro’s hands, in which the fingers are less independent and nimble, and the palmar fat-cushions less developed and sensitive, than in our hands. These fat-cushions serve to protect the blood-vessels as well as the delicate nerves, which make the hand the principal organ of touch. The muscles of the hand are more easily and instantaneously obedient to the will than those of any other part of the body, except those of the mouth and eyes; and hence it is that the hands are almost as good an index of a man’s character, habits, and profession as his face, and have been aptly called his “second face.”

Division of labour is the index of progress in the evolution of organs. To the fact that his feet have become exclusively adapted to locomotion, leaving the hands free to serve as tools, man chiefly owes his superiority to other animals. For what would superior intellect avail him without the implements needed to carry out its schemes? Feeling, grasping, handling, writing, sewing, playing an instrument, squeezing, caressing,—these are a few of the innumerable functions of the human hand; while the ape’s is good for little but climbing. The finger language of deaf mutes shows to what subtle intellectual uses the hands can be put; and as for emotional expression, are there any facial muscles which can indicate finer shades of feeling than the infinitely varied touch with which a pianist or violinist gives utterance to every mood and phase of human passion?

No wonder that, just as the face has had its physiognomists and phrenologists, so the hand its chiromancers, who pretended, by looking at its lines, not only to read character, but even to foretell one’s fate. Books on this subject are indeed still published, which shows that the race of fools is in no immediate danger of extinction. Wrinkles in the face do bear some relation to character and experience; but surely no one needs to be told that the palmar lines are purely accidental—caused by the manner in which the skin is folded when we close the hand.

FINGER-NAILS

Our nails are modified claws—modified to their advantage. When properly cared for, they are one of the greatest personal ornaments—beginning and ending as they do with a delicate curve, rounded on the surface, suffused with a gentle blush, and smooth as ivory. They may also serve as a mode of expression and index of nationality, as seen in these remarks by Mr. E. B. Tylor: “In the Southern United States, till slavery was done away a few years ago, the traces of Negro descent were noted with the utmost nicety. Not only were the mixed breeds regularly classed as mulattos, quadroons, and down to octoroons, but even where the mixture was so slight that the untrained eye noticed nothing beyond a brunette complexion, the intruder, who had ventured to sit down at a public dinner-table, was called upon to show his hands, and the African taint detected by the dark tinge at the root of the finger-nails.”

Becker remarks that among the ancient Greeks “it was considered very unseemly to appear with nails unpared”; nor did the Greeks consider it beneath their dignity, like the Romans, to pare their own nails.

The Greeks, being an æsthetic nation, were guided in the treatment of their nails by the sense of beauty. Elsewhere, however, the idiotic notion that laziness is aristocratic led to a different treatment of the nails. Mr. Tylor, in his _Anthropology_, gives an illustration of the hand of a Chinese ascetic whose finger-nails are five or six times as long as his fingers. “Long finger-nails,” he remarks, “are noticed even among ourselves as showing that the owner does no manual labour, and in China and neighbouring countries they are allowed to grow to a monstrous length as a symbol of nobility, ladies wearing silver cases to protect them, or at least as a pretence that they are there.”

Useless hands, with elongated nails, reverting to a clawlike character, as “symbols of nobility!” The study of evolution throws much sarcastic light on the fashionable follies of mankind.

MANICURE SECRETS

According to the New York _Analyst_: “There are not nearly as many secrets in manicure as people imagine. A little ammonia or borax in the water you wash your hands with, and that water just lukewarm, will keep the skin clean and soft. A little oatmeal mixed with the water will whiten the hands. Many people use glycerine on their hands when they go to bed, wearing gloves to keep the bedding clean; but glycerine don’t agree with every one. It makes some skins harsh and red. These people should rub their hands with dry oatmeal and wear gloves in bed. The best preparation for the hands at night is white of egg, with a grain of alum dissolved in it.... The roughest and hardest hands can be made soft and white in a month’s time by doctoring them a little at bedtime, and all the tools you need are a nail-brush (avoid metal), a bottle of ammonia, a box of powdered borax, and a little fine white sand to rub the stains off, or a cut of lemon. Manicures use acids in their shops, but the lemon is quite as good, and isn’t poisonous, while the acids are.”

In the _Ugly Girl Papers_ the following recipes are given:—

“To give a fine colour to the nails, the hands and fingers must be well lathered and washed with scented soap; then the nails must be rubbed with equal parts of cinnabar and emery, followed by oil of bitter almonds. To take white specks from the nails, melt equal parts of pitch and turpentine in a small cup; add to it vinegar and powdered sulphur. Rub this on the nails and the specks will soon disappear. Pitch and myrrh melted together may be used with the same results.”

But, after all, what is the use of beautifying one’s hands as long as ladies bow to the Fashion Fetish, which compels them to conceal them in the skins of animals? To wear gloves on going out, as a protection against rough weather and for the sake of cleanliness, is rational enough; but to wear them at social gatherings is almost as absurd as the compulsory impenetrable veils of Turkish women; for does not the hand rank next to the face as an index of character?

Another stupidity of fashion is our enforced and cultivated right-handedness. Despite the force of inherited habit, children show a natural inclination toward using both their hands equally; but they are constantly scolded and punished, until they have succeeded, like their parents, in reducing one hand to a state of imbecility, so to speak, which is constantly betrayed in awkward, ungraceful action. Practising on a musical instrument, with special attention to the left hand, has a tendency to correct this awkwardness. Indeed, is there any part of the body that music does not benefit? Dancing to a Strauss waltz gives elasticity to the limbs and grace to the gait; singing is the most useful kind of lung-gymnastics, and develops the chest; a musically-trained ear modulates the voice to sweeter expression; while equally skilled and graceful hands are acquired by practice on a musical instrument. So that the word music, though much less comprehensive than among the ancient Greeks, has lost none of the magic, beautifying power they ascribed to it.

Much of the ugliness in the world is due to the neglect of parents in properly supervising the actions of their children, to prevent the formation of bad habits, which ruin beauty irretrievably. As an instance of what can be done in this direction may be cited the following remark by a Philadelphia surgeon: “The school-girl habit of biting the nails must be broken up at once. If in children, rub a little extract of quassia on the finger-tips. This is so bitter that they are careful not to taste it twice. Not only the nails, but the whole finger and hand is often forfeited by neglect in this respect.”

By travelling from the shoulder down to the finger-tips we have apparently interrupted our steady progress from toe to tip of the body. But we shall see in a moment that the interruption is only apparent, for our subject leads naturally “from Hand to Mouth.”

JAW, CHIN, AND MOUTH

HANDS _VERSUS_ JAWS

Just as among some male ruminants the growth of horns as a means of defence has apparently led to the disappearance of the canine teeth, so man’s erect attitude, by leaving his hands free to do much of the work which inferior animals do with their jaws and teeth, has gradually modified the appearance of his face, greatly to its advantage. “The early male forefathers of man,” says Darwin, “were probably furnished with great canine teeth; but as they gradually acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws and teeth less and less. In this case the jaws, together with the teeth, would become reduced in size, as we may feel almost sure from innumerable analogous cases.” And in another place he remarks: “As the prodigious difference between the skulls of the two sexes in the orang and gorilla stands in close relation with the development of the immense canine teeth in the males, we may infer that the reduction of the jaws and teeth in the early progenitors of man must have led to a most striking and favourable change in his appearance.”

Why a “favourable” change? No doubt a male gorilla, if it could be taught to pronounce an æsthetic judgment, would indignantly scout the notion that our weak, delicate jaw is preferable to its own massive bones; nor would a prognathous or “forward-jawed” African or Australian admit that he is less beautiful than the orthognathous or “upright-jawed” European. What right, then, have we to claim that we alone have beautiful faces? Must we not admit, with the Jeffrey Alison school, that it is all “a matter of taste,” and that in so far as a heavy, projecting jaw _appears_ beautiful to a gorilla or a savage, it _is_ beautiful to them?

The general answer to such questions as these has already been given in another part of this volume. We need therefore only say in brief _résumé_ that a heavy, projecting, clumsy, brutal jaw probably appears to a gorilla or a Hottentot _neither ugly nor beautiful_. The æsthetic sense—as we can see among ourselves—is the last and highest product of civilisation. Monkeys are apparently excited by brilliant _colours_, but to beauty of _form_ neither apes nor the lower races and classes of man appear to be susceptible.

Should a negro, however, on having his attention called to this matter, claim that his prognathous face is more beautiful than our orthognathous face, the retort simple would be that his imagination is not sufficiently educated to understand our more refined and delicate beauty; just as an Esquimaux prefers a rotten egg to a fresh one, a working man a glass of fusil oil to one of tokay—simply because their senses of taste and smell are not sufficiently refined to appreciate _or even detect_ the delicate flavour of a fresh egg and the subtle bouquet of wine.

Of the positive tests of beauty, Delicacy is the one which most emphatically condemns the heavy, prognathous jaw and the accompanying big mouth. Massive bones and clumsy movements are everywhere the signs of excessive toil, fatal to beauty, as may be seen on comparing the angular and almost masculine skeleton of a labouring woman with the delicately-articulated joints of a “society woman”; or the heavy structure of a dray-horse with the fine contours of a race-horse; showing that Delicacy is always associated with the other elements of beauty—Curvature, Gradation, Expression, etc.

On the manner in which the beauty of the mouth is proportioned to its capability for Expression, Mr. Ruskin has made the following interesting observations: “Taking the mouth, another source of expression, we find it ugliest where it has none, as mostly in fish; or perhaps where, without gaining much in expression of any kind, it becomes a formidable destructive instrument, as again in the alligator; and then, by some increase of expression, we arrive at birds’ beaks, wherein there is much obtained by the different ways of setting on the mandibles (compare the bills of the duck and the eagle); and thence we reach the finely-developed lips of the carnivora (which nevertheless lose their beauty in the actions of snarling and biting); and from these we pass to the nobler, because gentler and more sensitive, of the horse, camel, and fawn, and so again up to man: only the principle is less traceable in the mouths of the lower animals, because they are only in slight measure capable of expression, and chiefly used as instruments, and that of low function; whereas in man the mouth is given most definitely as a means of expression, beyond and above its lower functions.... The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral or intellectual virtue expressed by it.”

Shakspere, by the way, seems to differ from Ruskin’s theory implied in this last sentence. According to Ruskin, animals “lose their beauty in the actions of snarling and biting.” But man has an action similar to snarling, namely, what Bell calls “that arching of the lips so expressive of contempt, hatred, and jealousy.” It is to this that Shakspere refers in these lines—

“O what a deal of scorn looks beautiful In the contempt and anger of his lip.”

But the word “beautiful” is here evidently taken by Shakspere in the wider sense of interesting and characteristic, and not in the special æsthetic sense of formal and emotional beauty.

Delicacy and the capacity for varied and subtle Expression—these, we may conclude, are the chief criteria of beauty in the lower part of the face. Anatomically, it may be well to state here, the word “face” does not include the forehead, but only extends from the chin to the eyebrows. The upper and posterior part is called the cranium or skull. It seems odd at first not to include the forehead in the face, but there are scientific grounds for making such a division, for a discussion of which the reader must be referred to some anatomical text-book (_vide_ Kollmann, pp. 82-85).

To a certain extent the face and the cranium are independent of one another in development and physiognomic significance. And it should be noted that, contrary to the general impression, in estimating the degree of intelligence and refinement, the face is a safer guide than the cranium; for there are many powerful brains in low and even receding foreheads, whereas a large projecting jaw is almost invariably a sign of vulgarity or lack of delicate feeling. We do not find a dog ugly because of his receding forehead; but we do find that the most infallible way of giving a man’s picture a brutal expression is by enlarging the jaw and mouth. It is the deadliest weapon of the caricaturist.

What makes a gorilla so frightfully ugly is the prominence and massive preponderance of his face over his cranium. It is his monstrous jaws, with their “simply brutal armature” of teeth, that give him such a repulsive appearance. The gorilla’s mouth, as Professor Kollmann remarks, is a caricature even from the animal point of view. How much more delicate and refined are a dog’s or cat’s jaws and teeth in comparison! Unfortunately, while man is a savage, or when he relapses into brutal habits, it is the gorilla’s mouth and teeth that his resemble, and not the cat’s or the dog’s.

A small face being therefore a test of refined beauty, we have here another proof of the superiority of feminine over masculine beauty. For although woman has a smaller cranium than man, it is larger than man’s relatively to the face. In other words, women have smaller and less massive faces than men, both absolutely and relatively to their size. Kollmann, who is not an evolutionist, endeavours to account for this difference on the ground that men are more addicted to the pleasures of the table than women. But surely, though women eat less than men, they do not make much less use of their teeth; and for any deficiency in this respect they more than make up by the constant wagging of their jaws in small-talk. It is infinitely more probable that Darwin is right in attributing the massiveness of the masculine jaws to the accumulated, inherited effects of constant use in fighting with enemies and rivals—contests from which the passive females have as a rule been exempt.

It is the assumption by the hands of many of the former functions of the teeth that has led to the decrease in the size of the teeth, and, in consequence, of the jaw-bones to which they are attached. Some writers have even claimed that the wisdom-teeth are becoming rudimentary, and will ultimately disappear, because there will be no room for them in our gradually diminishing jaws. We may feel confident, however, that if this reduction in the size of the jaws tended to go _too_ far, the sense of beauty and Sexual Selection, _i.e._ Love, would step in to arrest the process, by favouring the survival of those who gave their teeth sufficient exercise to prevent the lower part of the face from becoming too much reduced in size. Our sense of beauty demands that the distance from tip of chin to nose should be about the same as the length of the nose and the height of the forehead. Should these proportions be violated, Love will restore the balance; for no lover would ever select a face in which the chin almost touches the nose, as in infants, whose teeth and jaws are not yet developed, or as in old men and women, in whom the loss of the teeth has led to a collapse of the jaws, resulting in a loss of proportion, clumsy movements, and prognathism.

DIMPLES IN THE CHIN

An oval, well-rounded chin is one of the most important elements of formal beauty, and is a characteristic trait of humanity; for man is the only animal that has a chin. Lavater distinguishes three principal varieties of chin: the receding chin, which is peculiar to lower races and types; the chin which does not project beyond a line dropped from the lips; and the chin which does project beyond that line. Of all parts of the face the chin has the least variety of form and capability of emotional expression. Physiognomists have expended much ingenuity in attempting to trace a connection between various forms of the chin and traits of character; but their generalisations have no scientific value. It is probable that often a very small, weak chin indicates weak desires and a vacillating character, while an energetic chin, like Richard Wagner’s, indicates the iron will of a reformer. But the connection between the development of the brain and special modifications of the bones of the chin is too remote to permit a safe inference in individual cases.

In ancient Egyptian art, as Winckelmann points out, “the chin is always somewhat small and receding, whereby the oval of the face becomes imperfect.”

One of the most essential conditions of beauty in a chin, if we may judge by the descriptions of novelists, is a dimple. Yet it is doubtful whether a dimple can ever be accepted as a special mark of beauty. Temporary dimples (for the production of which there seems to be a special muscle) are interesting as a mode of transient emotional expression. But permanent dimples interrupt the regular gradation of the beauty-curve, and too often indicate that the plump roundness, so fascinating in a woman’s face, has passed the line which indicates corpulence and obliterates the delicate lines of expression.

Dimples occur not only in the chin, but also in the cheek, at the elbow-joints, on the back, and in plump female hands at the knuckles. They are caused by a dense tissue of fibres, blood-vessels, and nerves holding down the skin tightly in one place, and thus preventing such an accumulation of fat between the skin and muscles as is seen in the surrounding parts.

Tommaseo (quoted by Mantegazza) probably had in mind the connection between corpulence and mental indolence when he said that “a dimple in the chin indicates more physical than mental grace.”