THE NOSE

Evening Star, Issue 21905, 17 December 1934, Page 1

THE NOSE

MAKES OR MARS A FACE " It is fitting that the country which produced Edmund Rostand should promote a competition to discover the possessors of the ‘most perfect’ and the ‘most beautiful ’ masculine noses, it only for the reason that Cyrano de Bergerac, with an organ the antithesis of perfect or beautiful, has become, since Rostand resurrected him, as synonymous to most of us for hugeness of nose as Punch,” writes “ J.W.,” in the Birmingham ‘ Post.’ “ The truth appears to be that the nose cannot seemingly be taken seriously. To poets, as to most of us, it is, and always has been, life’s fundamental jest. “ The fraction of a curve amiss, and the Comic Spirit claims it, A smut, a speck on it, and all one’s efforts to present a careful, well-wrought front are negatived. Its mark in literature is the comic mark, its place in life the comedian’s. “ Its virtues are concealed, its capacity for mischief immense and irresponsible. Sidney Smith, indeed, observing that ‘it was put in man’s face originally as a constant reminder of the humour of things,' expressed a point of view with something more than mere wit to commend it.

“Yet if the nose per se is not to‘be taken seriously, its potentialities are grave enough if one agrees with Pascal that the face of the world really would have been altered had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter. The nose, after all, does make or mar a face. Us power in this respect is absolute. “ It counts for everything in first impressions, too. If Arietta, the tanner’s daughter in eleventh-century Falaise, had had a crooked nose. Robert. Duke of Normandy, would probably have passed her by as she sat bathing _ her pretty feet in the local river, in which case Wililam I. would not - have been horn, there would have been no Norman invasion of England, no British Empire even, and a host of less important tilings besides. Matters far less reasonable than noses, after all, have changed a nation’s story more than once. “Wo shall laugh at. them, however, as generations before us have laughed. For the humour of the nose after all is perennial. He. is a. poor wight indeed in whom it cannot raise the semblance of a smile.”