The Gothic has been subjected to so many varying circumstances that it is now perhaps impossible to assert, with confidence, its original natural form. Where a uniform dull system of despotism, political and religious, has for centuries bound down these nations in abject servitude, the Nose is sharp, devoid of Cogitativeness, and Romano-Greek in profile.
This is the case with the Spanish Goths and with those of France and Italy. These nations were so long held in mental thraldom that they ceased to cultivate cogitative powers which it was dangerous to use. Where espionage and _Lettres de Cachet_, the Inquisition and Monachism dog and punish men’s secret thoughts, and forbid the expression of any sentiment breathing a spirit opposed to the powers that be, or demonstrative of a disposition to inquire into the why and wherefore of political and religious dogmas, the mind, by an instinct of self-preservation, must cease to think. Where to think is a death-warrant, where a look of reflection or an aspect of discontent may be followed by the axe of the executioner, or the more fearful incarceration by the gaoler, the mind has no alternative but to forget itself and live in bestial oblivion, to “sit down to eat and drink and rise up to play.” With the cessation of the Cogitative powers, the Cogitativeness of the features will disappear, and the Nose will become defective in breadth, thin and sharp. To this want of reflection succeeds, in the naturally higher and more energetic nations, animal passion; and if ever the pressure is removed from the national mind and it obtain the upper hand of its keepers, fearful retribution and sanguinary revenge inevitably ensue. They who lived the animal life of a caged wild beast in apparent ease and quietude, well fed and perhaps, sensually, better provided for than if left to their native freedom, will, when let loose from confinement, fearfully vindicate the natural law of liberty, and with an insane instinct tear in pieces the keepers who have fed them for their own purposes and nurtured them for their own pleasure and profit, reckless of the natural social rights of man.
It is for this reason that the sharp, thin unthinking Nose appears symbolical likewise of cruelty; not so much because the natural disposition is cruel, as because the mind, when unchained, acts from animal impulse and not from sage reflection; and animal revenge is always wild and cruel.