MASKS AND FACES.
IN the May number of Blackwood, Dr. Louie Robinson returns to the subject which he treated thirteen months ago (in the April number of last year), of the mode in which external circumstances (especially professional habits) ter d to mould human countenances into facial expressions Ix hich, very frequently at least, are misleading as to the chief signi- ficance of what they convey to us. For example, the tendency of a compressed lip is to suggest strength of will, whereas what it does really express is the habit of struggling against inclinations and temptations which are apt to be too strong for us ; in other words, it tells, he thinks, rather of weakness than of strength, though of weakness which is training itself to be strong. "It tells of perpetual conflicts in which the reserves are called into the fray." Now, strong wills, says Dr. Robinson, are not agitated into these vehement efforts to accomplish more than they have the strength to accom- plish easily. "The leading members of the medical and legal professions do not display the facial symbols to anything like the same extent as the rank-and-file." In other words, those who are so strong that they do not need to be always spurring themselves on, do not display the signs of effort because they do without effort what inferior men only do with effort. According to Dr. Robinson, expression tells you not so much what a man is, as what he tries to be; and as he tries to be what he is not, we constantly find him wearing a mask which conceals his weakness, though it reveals his aims. The sea-captain whose authority is seldom ques- tioned, exhibits no sign of this constant endeavour to over- rule mutiny, such as is often visible in the face of the usher who cannot control his boys, though he is always endeavouring to do so. So, too, the artist's face grows into the expression of the ideal after which he is always aspiring, not into that which expresses his own strongest qualities. It is the objects on which the endeavours of the man are focussed which mould his expression, not the objects in achieving which he is most successful. That we understand to be Dr. Robinson's general drift. Our countenances are masks on which the habitual attitude of the character is mirrored ; but the habitual attitude of the character is not an index of the greatest strength of the character, but sometimes at least of its greatest weak- ness. It may tell you whether a man is "rowing hard against the stream," or rowing feebly against it, but it does not tell you where the stream would bear him if he did not row at all. We are not quite sure that this is so. Take the various likenesses of Coleridge which are contained in the two volumes of his letters, just published by his grandson. None of them express effort to become what Coleridge failed in becoming, but rather the relaxation of a character which did not struggle in any true sense at all. Whether that is a true or a misleading expression no man can say, for Coleridge's letters are full of weak remorse and hopeless aspirations, or,
as that attitude of character has been finely expressed, of "prayers for peace uttered with more and more mournful earnestness as the vision sinks into the melancholy distance." Whether Coleridge really rowed against the stream, or only gave it up at the first sense of fatigue, we shall never know. But, at any rate, the expression of self-indulgence which is so indelibly impressed on his face, does not represent what he aimed at nearly so much as what he was, a failure in relation to everything that required will and strenuousness. The face of Coleridge certainly was not a mask, but a tell-tale.
At the same time we should never deny that a great many faces do express what misleads, rather than what guides the observer to a true conclusion. Dr. Robinson holds that the faces of the riveters and boiler-smiths in a shipbuilding town entirely mask their bate character, by expressing mainly the muscular effort of the brow to keep the eye closed against the fragments of metal which fly about, and partly the slight deafness which gives them the expression of striving to hear what they cannot easily hear for the din in the midst of which they live. So, too, the " horsey " look which men who are chiefly engaged in training horses acquire, really represents mainly the predominance of the physical effort needed to control the animal, and therefore the obliteration of all the more strictly mental characteristics which underlie that muscular effort. This may very often completely misrepresent the man, and convey only the super- ficial layer of endeavour which overshadows all the leas emphasised aspects of the character. So, again, Dr. Robin- son holds that as the artist, as an artist, succeeds by giving his mind up to the particular mood of feeling which he is most anxious to delineate, he very often disguises his true self by a false appearance of self-indulgence. He does express, and must express, the tendency to enter into various phases of emotion which it is his business to portray in one of the plastic arts, bat it does not at all follow that because he saturates his mind with these phases of emotion in order to be able adequately to express them, he yields his own will to every impulse by which it may be solicited. He may be a perfect master of himself, and yet an adept in entering into the hearts of others. Dr. Robinson regards the true actor's face as almost necessarily a mask, since it takes on the form of so many different emotions in turn that they counteract each other, and leave a kind of neutral expression, such as extinguishes all trace of the habitual bias of the character itself. Indeed, he appears to hold that as actors get the habit of seeming to feel what they do not personally feel, and seeming to feel the most opposite emotions in quick succession, —cruelty and pity, vindictiveness and forgiveness, generosity and avarice,—their faces become the playground of so many attitudes of mind that no record of their own individual preferences can remain engraved indelibly upon them. Thus physical and moral causes exist in abundance to prevent the face from betraying the true mind. In some it betrays only the tendency of the endeavours, not necessarily successful, in some not even that, and in some again nothing but a pre- dominance of some inevitable muscular habit which has no relation at all to the true attitude of the character.
We are persuaded that Dr. Louis Robinson is right in thus warning us of the extreme difficulty of interpreting character truly by the general effect of the countenance. The present writer can answer for it that nothing is commoner than a complete misconstruction of the meaning of certain counte- nances. Some which appear to bear their amiable drift written plain in a genial and kindly smile, are really expressive of nothing but empty good-nature, without a vestige of that thorough-going willingness to serve others which appears to be promised by their superficial sunshine. Other faces which are clouded and melancholy, and appear to convey the expres- sion of covert purposes, are really expressive of high and tenacious ideals which have never had their full satisfaction in practical life, and properly signify much nobler endeavours, though endeavours crowned with far less success, than those of the minds whose frank and genial surface covers a shallow and commonplace nature. As a rule, we believe that the ear tells more of the character of others than the eye. The ear eveals anything like sincerity or insincerity with far more certainty than the eye. The blind are often far better judges of character than the quick-sighted. It is almost impossible to conceal the hollowness of purpose with which professions are made, if you listen attentively to the accent of those who
make them. And though a merely professional blandness may excite a great deal more distrust than it ought to excite to the ear of an unpractised listener, yet with a very little training it will learn to distinguish even in the "bland physician's" courtly voice the accent of genuineness which is more than half merged in that of persuasive and sympathetic warning. Faces are often effectual, and what is more, perfectly unintentional masks,—where voices are the plainest tell-tales.
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