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THE AUGUSTAN NOSE PHILIP STEVICK At one point in the Characteristics, Shaftesbury describes the source of that part of his moral sense which compels him to be decent. "Should one," he writes, "who had the countenance of a gentleman ask me 'Why I would avoid being nasty, when nobody was present?' In the first place I should be fully satisfied that he himself was a very nasty gentleman who could ask this question, and that it would be a hard matter for me to make him ever conceive what true cleanliness was. However, I might, notwithstanding this, be contented to give him a slight answer, and say "twas because I had a nose.'" Shaftesbury continues: even if he could neither see nor smell, his nature "would rise at the thought of what was sordid." But his initial response to his problem, that he is not "nasty" because if he were he could not stand his own smell, far from being a "slight answer," is a response representative of a frequent mode of the eighteenth-century imagination. For dozens of writers in the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the image of man smelling (in both the transitive and intransitive senses) is a polemical and satirical weapon, an image capable of carrying great descriptive intimacy, great ingenuity of wit and comic virtuosity, and capable, in others as in Shaftesbury, of suggesting man's very humanness. In Smollett, who, it is worth recalling, appears as Smelfungus in Sterne's Sentimental Journey, smells are never very long absent: of cooking food, of tobacco smoke, of country air, of London coal smoke, of fish, even of bear grease, and above all of dung. Melford, in Humphry Clinker, describes a conversation with a learned doctor, occasioned by the smell of mud at low tide. "Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink." The doctor's remarks follow and before long the "company began to hold their noses." In Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Beau Didapper enters the chamber of the inn where he expects to find Fanny but where Mrs. Slipslop lies instead. "A savour now invaded his nostrils which he did not expect in the room of so sweet a young creature, and which might have probably had no good effect on a cooler lover." Dryden directs his invective thus, in a mOment of displeasure with his publisher, Jacob Tonson: "With leering-look, bull-faced, and Volume XXXIV, Number 2, January, 1965 THE AUGUSTAN NOSE 111 freckled fair, / With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair, / And frowsy pores, that taint the ambient air." For Swift, one of the omens that foretells a city shower is that "you'll find the sink / Strike your offended sense with double stink." Although the smell of the flood is almost overpowering, it is still capable of analysis: "Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell / What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell." And Steele, in To the Mirrour of British Knighthood, engages in one of those scatological assaults so characteristic of the period: "In vain thou wouds't thy Name, dull Pedant, hide, / There's not a Line but smells of thy Cheapside." The reaSOns for this flourishing of the imagery of stink lie in an intellectual and psychological gestalt of some complexity. Indirectly related to the olfactory impulse, however, is the cluster of associations which the eighteenth century brought to the very mention of the nose and the act of smelling. First of all, the absence of a nose, attributable to syphilis, was, if one can accept the testimony of Ned Ward in The History of London Clubs, fairly commonplace. "A merry Gentleman who had often hazarded his own Boltspit, by steering a Vitious Course among the Rocks of Venus, having observed in his walks through our English Sodom, that abundance of both Sexes had sacrificed to the God Priapus, & had unluckily fallen into .iEthiopian Fashion of Flat-Faces, pleased himself with an opinion, it must prove a comical Sight for so many maim'd leachers, sniflling old Stallions, young unfortunate whoremasters , poor scarify'd Bawds; & salivated Whetstones, to shew their...

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