CHAPTER 79
The Prairie
To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
yet undertaken.
Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have
scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have
mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that
famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but
also attentively studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and
dwells in detail upon the modifications of expression discernible therein.
Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints
touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man.
Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of
these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things;
I achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.
He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most
conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally
controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire
absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect the countenance
of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or
tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the
scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated
open-work belfry of the nose.
Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!
Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions
are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were
hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to
the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage
you sail round his vast head in your jollyboat, your noble conceptions of
him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A
pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when
beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect
is sublime.
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
morning.
In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a touch of the
grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the elephant’s brow
is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal
affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees. It signifies—”God: done
this day by my hand.” But in most creatures, nay in man himself, very often
the brow is but a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few
are the foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high,
and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless
mountain lakes; and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to
track the antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland
hunters track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this
high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely
amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and
the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living
nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is
revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper;
nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles;
dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in
profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed its
grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive
that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle, which,
in a man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever
written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his
doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their
child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the
crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is
so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any
highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry
May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now
egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s
high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s
face.
Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If
then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the
simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how
may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm
Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read if it if you can.
