THE TRUANT MIND.
"rrIHAT is quite right now, Madam," said a photographer to a 1 lady sitter, " quite right as to attitude, Madam, but do not let the mind recede from the face." The exhortation calla up many pictures. Some beautiful faces are enchanting to look at even when the mind recedes, and some plain people look better in the dullest repose than in animation. Speaking generally, however, men and women look their best when they are what is called " pay- ing attention." A crowd which is amused or interested offers a delightful study in physiognomy ; a crowd of tired faces is, except to the born student of character, a very dull sight. The present writer has often watched a number of ordinary people listening to music, and he believes that music has some extraordinary effect iu composing the lines of the face and bringing out what is character- istic in it. Acting reflects itself on the countenances of the audience, and eloquence and the drama are both apt to transform those engaged by them and make them look unlike themselves. The face takes an impress from without and is not controlled by the mind. Logically, perhaps this should be true of listening to music, but the present waiter thinks it is not.
It is often something of a shock to see the mind of an interlocutor " recede." Have we not all begun to pour out our hearts to a friend and seen with dismay that his mind has turned away from us ? Sometimes we continue to talk to him in the vain hope that he will look less preoccupied, and perhaps we may at last see his soul return to his eyes. Well-mannered people learn easily to say the right thing, but to look the right thing is very difficult, and few Englishmen and not many Englishwomen trouble to keep the fact that they are bored out of their faces. The snub which is delivered by the eyes is a wound no one repents inflicting in this country. Frenchmen and Americans are better able to keep the soul at its windows, or at any rate to set up some sort of dummy there who is like enough to deceive the majority. We wonder sometimes whether they keep up this effort in the bosom of their families, or if it is a mere social device. Certain self-conscious people, of course, in every class and country, never allow their apparent attention to flag. They are too much occupied in im- pressing their friends to let their minds ever slip away from the shop window, so to speak, but they are craving attention rather than paying it.
There are men and women who never perceive that they are boring their friends—or rather they do not perceive it from their looks. One of the most impenetrable of class barriers rests upon the fact that people born in far distant strata of society cannot read one another's faces and do not know when they weary each other. The uneducated man cannot see that he should cut his narrative short ; the educate-I does not perceive that his disjointed sentences and questions create no interest whatever in his neighbour, to whom also his laughter at nothing seems idiotic. The humour of the cultivated is a complete shibboleth. The mind of the one recedes before the stream; the mind of the other absents itself to avoid tho dryasdust fragments of talk and meaningless fun.
Oddly enough, the power to read character does not always accompany the power to read mood. Very tactful people who never bore any one do not always know much about the innermost soul of those whom they constantly and successfully placate. The bore sometimes knows more. ' Many a tiresome woman is a shrewd judge of moral quality. It is a great social asset to be able to read mood in the face ; at the same time, it is often in a man's favour to have a face which tells nothing. There are certain faces from which the mind seems never to be absent, yet we cannot read it. We find this peculiarity most often among actors and in certain very beautiful women. It belongs to a type which has attracted portrait-painters, who do not try to interpret the face but to reproduce the puzzle. It is curiously attractive, this enigmatic expression, though it must be admitted that there is something meretricious about it. It is sad that the old and the young are so often at cross-purposes. The mind of one generation may be said constantly to recede before the conversation of the next. Ways of talk are very ephemeral. There is a sense in which a man cannot learn two languages in a lifetime. He may know the character of his son through and through, but they are not likely to speak the same tongue. Again, the mind of one age recedes before the preoccupations of another. Questions which rent society in the past become purely academic. We cannot " keep our minds to them," as we say. The world is weary of their discussion and refuses again to think about them. They have never been settled—they are simply extinct.
When the mind is absent without leave, when we are bored and yield to the temptation of truancy, our thoughts do not as a rule travel very far.. In the intervals of forced attention we either worry or ride our hobbies. Instead of listening, we find ourselves thinking about expenses, or going round a golf course in our very best form, walking across a moor, eating, or sewing, or gardening,
or planning a dress, or playing the pianola, as the case may be. The efforts we make to hear what. is said and at the same time to
carry on our imaginary pastime sometimes result in ari actual 'pain in the head. Half the absurd stories told of ignorant mistakes
have their origin in these moments of mental truancy. The persons who delight their critics and make for themselves lasting reputations as ignoramuses are, as a rule, simply thinking of something else and replying at random. A woman who is planning her clothes, whose mind is at the dressmaker's while her eyes are fixed upon her friend, is quite capable of asking, as we once heard a woman ask, whether the members of an expedition to the South Pole suffered much from the heat. Something about an adventurous journey together with the word " South " was all her distant mind had grasped, though she realized that some expression of sympathetic interest was necessary. Real absence of mind is a different thing from mental truancy. Where does the mind go to when it is absent, with full permission of the will The answer to that question is the key to character. What do we " dwell on " when distraction fails 1 The expression of most faces when the mind has receded purposely and without fear of interruption is not one of emptiness. The habitual expression of the face in repose tells sometimes more about the person even than its play of feature, because in repose we see the inherited, which means the natural, character. A great number of minds obviously repose upon their grievances. Others repose—or should we say fuss ?—upon anxiety when not otherwise occupied. The lines of the face are drawn by care often before middle age has well begun. The favourite phrase of the factory girl, " It's a shame," is the succinct inter- pretation of many a mean face. Judged by looks, some minds during " absence " are simply amusing themselves. They turn their backs upon the moment to watch the drama of the past, and they find in it only what can entertain. A look of inward peace, which can come of nothing but real goodness and happiness, is not so uncommon as cynics would have us imagine. Anyhow, it is commoner by far than the soulless animalism expressed by a few repellent countenances when superficial distractions are removed. There is no doubt that many absent minds retire to an innocent and happy place about which they probably forget when they are called back. This is where children come from when we offer th em a penny for their thoughts.
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