IX
Men’s Faces
“COME in, come in,” said Professor Maturin, as I was shown to the door of his study. “I am very well, indeed, thank you—‘pursuing the even terror of my way,’ as the proofreader said. I have just been trying,” he continued, taking some papers from his writing-table, “to triangulate Shakespeare’s nose according to Sir Francis Galton’s plan for classifying profiles. But it appears that the shape of Shakespeare’s nose is as uncertain as the spelling of his name. Here in the Ely House portrait it is long and rounded, in the Droeshout it is rather flattened, in the Zoust quite irregular, in the Trinity Church monument a very vile nose indeed. You may observe, moreover, among these plates, a similar disagreement concerning every one of his features, although the general expression is like enough. All of which was renewing in my mind, as you came in, certain observations concerning men’s faces.
“If you were to go over with me my collection of literary portraits here,—I have about two thousand,—you would note immense differences in line and mass, light and shade, depth and delicacy. The prints are from all sorts and conditions of statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs; taken at all sorts of angles from profile to full face, and at various elevations. The actual color and texture of the originals, to say nothing of the artists’ ideas of them, would make the variation much greater. And yet I believe you will agree that, in spite of all detractions, almost every plate gives a surprisingly expressive and individual characterization.”
Professor Maturin waited in silence while I looked over enough of the portraits to convince myself of the justice of his observation. Then he continued: “While possessed of that idea I amused myself by picking out doubles. Here are some surprising similarities in the faces of most dissimilar persons—Tolstoy and Verlaine, Bishop Heber and Byron, Ronsard and Lincoln. All of these portraits of Spenser make him look like Mephistopheles, and Seneca here is the exact counterpart of our friend the sporting editor. In general, however, a resemblance in appearance—like that, for example, between Shakespeare and Calderon—represents a considerable correspondence in nature. Sometimes this may be attributed to identity of race and nationality, as in the cases of Renan and Sainte-Beuve, Taine and Zola. But most often the resemblance shows true to temperament and character in spite of race, time, and circumstance. Notice, for example, these prints of Horace and Herrick, Bürger and Burns, Heine and Chopin, Maurice Jokai and George W. Cable. Such resemblances hold even between very unusual faces, such as those of Uhland and Goldsmith, and there are sometimes triplets like Fouqué, Hoffmann and Poe. It appears, decidedly, that appearances are not deceptive.
“Personality cannot, of course, entirely transcend all rules: Dumas père shows unequivocally his negroid blood; you can generalize concerning the bent Russian head, the arched Spanish brows, the full German nose, the common irregularity of English features. Accident broke Thackeray’s nose, cost Camoens an eye, and at least threatened De Foe’s ears. Distress left its mark on Cervantes and on Poe. Lamb said, you remember, that Coleridge looked like an archangel, a little damaged. Pope and De Quincey show their imperfect health. The posture and the pose of occupation leave traces, like the knitted brows of philosophers and men of action, the narrowed eyes of historians and explorers, the open nostril of the naturalist, the worn mouth of the orator. But these are minor matters—the general expression remains.
“The character of this general expression is perhaps most determined by the size and shape of the head. These vary enormously—as one may see in the Hutton collection of masks at Princeton—all the way from the greatness of Thackeray’s to the smallness of Byron’s, from the shortness and breadth of Luther’s to the narrowness and length of Lope de Vega’s, from Darwin’s deep sloping dome to Scott’s ‘Peveril of the Peak.’
“A single feature frequently dominates, like Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘imperial head with fair, large front,’ or Jean Paul Richter’s strangely bulging forehead. The eye is often the most striking feature. Scott said, literally, that the eyes of Burns glowed; the same thing was said about Keats and Hawthorne. Scientists are notable for eager eyes, mystics for dreamy ones. I have noticed that stylists, like Flaubert, Catulle Mendès, d’Annunzio, John La Farge, and Charles Eliot Norton, are heavy-lidded. Large noses connote power, if we may judge from the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans; from Dante and Savonarola, Wordsworth and Newman. We have the testimony of Lowell that Emerson’s nose was so large that it cast a shadow. Socrates and Plato, Herbert Spencer and Dr. Holmes, however, were but illy favored in this respect. Satirists’ noses are long, and, as we might expect, often pointed,—witness Erasmus, Swift, and Voltaire.
“Mouths are only less expressive than eyes. Sterne’s mouth shows him a satyr, De Quincey’s marks him an imp. In general the mouths of authors, and of clergymen, too often show self-importance or complacency. Julius Caesar’s square jaw and Bismarck’s thick neck are also full of meaning, although such features and the always significant poise of the head are often obscured by the countless forms of ruff, band, stock, or collar that men have affected from time to time.
“The hair and beard are even greater transformers. Personally, I like somewhat wayward hair such as Scott’s, Hazlitt’s, and Tennyson’s. All red-haired writers from Ben Jonson to Bulwer-Lytton attract me, while I am repelled by Byron’s glossy and Shelley’s silky hair. Many heads are improved by the thinning of their thatch, although Emerson’s was not; some, like Irving’s, are enhanced by a wig. But in general wigs are great levellers,—imagine Dr. Johnson in Addison’s! Alexander Hamilton’s queue makes a fine balance for his profile, and a tonsure is not always unbecoming. One may say the same for beards: Fitzgerald always objected to Tennyson’s, but Bryant and Longfellow and Ruskin were all bettered by theirs, the last immensely so. Freeman, however, rather overdid it, and Flaubert’s walrus moustache was a monstrous thing in such a stylist. Baudelaire’s beard and Swinburne’s are to me much more shocking than anything in their verses. But the doctrine of beards is really very subtle. Mr. Henry James’s removal of his apparently reacted upon his style.
“After conspicuous single features, arrangement most influences expression, and it is surprising to note how irregular this is. Such correlation and symmetry as that of George Meredith is quite exceptional. There are disagreements in color even between eyes—one of Lamb’s was hazel, the other gray. The eyes and brows of Chatterton, Balzac, and Douglas Jerrold are on a different plane, back of the rest of their features. The right side of Thoreau’s face and of Whitman’s is lower than the other, while the left side of Poe’s face is smaller. Disproportion in mass is most frequent, the lower half of the face being often too large for the remainder. Alexander von Humboldt and Matthew Arnold are the only examples I have noted of disproportionally large brows and eyes. The chins of Hegel, Gray, and Pater, on the other hand, are at least one size too large; the nose and mouth of Tyndall and Emerson are certainly two sizes too large; Hans Christian Andersen displays an even greater lack of harmony. Dr. Johnson combined a fine head and eyes with a coarse nose and mouth; Landor’s mouth was as weak as his head was powerful. Goldsmith presented the extraordinary combination of a low, bulging forehead, with almost no head behind the ears, handsome eyes and nose, a swollen upper lip, and a receding chin—all much pitted with smallpox. Goldsmith is a striking example, for in spite of his singularly unfortunate appearance, his intrinsic charm is yet obvious.
“Thus, while the details of men’s faces are a source of curious interest, their greatest significance is the way in which a general expression transpires through them. We are not in the least repelled by the ugliness of Aesop and Socrates, the ‘dumb-ox’ look of Thomas Aquinas, or what Edward Lear called ‘Wordsworth’s desire for milk appearance.’ When Petrarch appears cheerful and Montaigne sad, Smollett mournful and Spinoza merry, we yet feel that there is more than meets the eye. I believe, Tennyson to the contrary notwithstanding, that a man’s character is usually clear in his countenance; here I take up at random Confucius and Calvin, Cicero and Franklin, Rabelais and Chaucer—who could misjudge them? It is as Hazlitt said—you get from a great number of details a general impression which is true and well founded, although you may not be able to analyze or explain it.”
“It is certainly most interesting,” I said, as Professor Maturin put his portraits into their cabinet. “I wonder why the subject has not been investigated more fully and scientifically.”
“It has been thought about a good deal,” replied Professor Maturin, “ever since the Greeks. Renaissance rulers thought it of use in selecting their courtiers. Goethe kept a painter busy recording faces that interested him. About a century ago Lavater devoted a score of handsome folios, with splendid plates, to the study of faces, but his treatment was very desultory—discussions of ‘deep, designing, envious villains as represented by Raphael,’ and so on. Some of his successors went to the opposite extreme of definiteness, concluding that long noses denote courage, high cheek-bones honesty, large lips sociability, and the like. There have been, however, various scientific studies, such as Darwin’s on the expression of the emotions, Galton’s composite photography, and Bertillon’s accurate system of measurement and classification. Yet for some reason the subject still remains one of those that bibliographers catalogue as merely ‘curious.’ I like to dip into it now and then because of its general human interest, and always find it a stimulus to freshness and directness of observation; a caution, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, against distrusting imagination and feeling in favor of ‘narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories.’”
I remained silent while Professor Maturin looked over his cases for a book, and then stood leafing through it, until he found his place, and said: “Hazlitt sums the matter up in his essay ‘On the Knowledge of Character’ with these words: ‘There are various ways of getting at a knowledge of character—by looks, words, actions. The first of these, which seems the most superficial, is perhaps the safest, and least liable to deceive:... A man’s look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay more, by the hand of nature.... This sort of prima facie evidence shows what a man is, better than what he says or does.’”