ANATOMIES AND ARTISTS.
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Much as the canons of scientific criticism have been changed in the course of the last century, it may be doubted whether the prevailing tone of art criticism has not altered more. From Lionardo to Hogarth, the beautiful was handled as something positive and objective, a matter of rules and principles, proportions and formulae ; while the scientific imagination was still allowed to run rampant amongst quiddities and qualities; appetites and faculties, amongst laws of nature as elastic as the precepts of art were precise. Now, on the contrary, science is almost afraid to trust its own collections of facts, when they seem most significant, lest an unlawful fragment of inference should be at the bottom of their unwonted intelligibility; and art, to complete the contrast, breaking away from its backboards and calisthenic exercises, tends to resolve its precepts into a series of sugared epithets and ecstatic imagery. Thus the sister Muses have still too little in common for Mr. Darwin's overtures to meet with much response oven, from painters, if any such there be, who aim consciously at anatomical consistency in drawing a face as wall as a limb or torso. Yet the disappointment which he seems to have felt at not finding more confirmation for his theories of expression in the masterpieces of art will be shared by all who hoped his researches might throw a little reflex light upon the origin and nature of what is called Taste, the only and very uncertain guide left us in the search after actual and ideal beauty. He says:
"Fourthly,
I had hoped to derive much aid from the great masters in painting and sculpture,
who are such close observers. Accordingly I have looked at photographs and
engravings of many well-known works, but, with few exceptions, have not thus
profited. The reason no doubt is, that in works of art beauty is the chief
object, and strongly contracted facial muscles destroy beauty. The story of the
composition is generally told with wonderful force and truth by skilfully given
accessories."
But
there are two points to be considered in connection with this paragraph, which,
though lying partly outside Mr. Darwin's main purpose, may help to explain the
cause of his and our disappointment. In
works of art beauty is a chief object, but it is not always the chief
object; and though strongly contracted facial muscles destroy beauty, Mr. Darwin
nowhere proves that such contraction is an essential part of all
expression of the emotions; and the fact that such close observers as the great
masters in painting attempt to represent expression without it is almost fatal
to the assumption.. [End Page
222] It is true that the pursuit of positive beauty of type is seldom
combined with a strong feeling for the secondary and relative beauties of
expression, and the highest perfection of the two may perhaps be
incompatible. The Apollo and Venus of Greek art are divinely incapable of
human passion, divinely indifferent to human sympathy; and the only modern
master whose works will bear comparison in
this respect with those of antiquity--the artist of the Sistine Chapel--suggests,
indeed, indefinite possibilities of passion, but does not particularize any one
emotion in his most classically beautiful figures.
There may be passions of any degree of strength behind the shell, but
ideal physical perfection of type presupposes them all to be in equilibrium, or
temporary repose. But there are long ages in the history of art in which no such
type of human beauty is recognised and it is obvious that, when this conception
is wanting, art, if it is to live at all, must live either by idealising
something besides physical beauty, or by reproducing the beauties of nature
literally, or by representing natural objects which are. not beautiful. Nearly.
all the best Christian art is of the first kind,. which ranks the portraiture of
the soul above that of the body, and would, if the choice were inevitable,
prefer to sacrifice some portion of material grace rather than a particle of
spiritual truth. While Italian art was religious, it was never reduced to these
alternatives, and the questions discussed in Lessing's Laocoon did not
force themselves into consideration until the latter days of the Renaissance,
when Pagan, and Catholic art were empty and insipid to about an equal degree. It
is hard to conceive a sound theory of expression, which should fail to draw
confirmation and illustration from the great dramatic paintings produced before
that time; but Mr. Darwin's face is set in an opposite direction to that of the
idealists whose works he interrogates in vain.
While he is looking backwards to distinguish causes, they aim forwards at
divining tendencies. He wishes to know when and why the first human animal drew
back its lip, knit its brow, screwed up its eye, or wrinkled its cheek. They try
to imagine angelic, diabolical, or heroic emotions showing through the features
of a more or less ordinary man. If their inspiration is sound, the result is
true prophetically, and the spiritual life tends to modify the physical type
in the direction they indicate ; but they are only of use to the
naturalist in so far as the modifications they represent are presumably a
continuation of the line previously followed. We can understand
a physician or an anatomist being interested in the splendid beauty of a
Greek statue, and it is probable that almost every technical inaccuracy their
fuller knowledge might detect could be excused or accounted for on some
quasi‑physiological pretext, of which the artist himself was most likely
unconscious. Idealism is truthful so long as it observes the laws of nature
while recombining her facts. But an artist with a sense of beauty naturally
idealizes the normal state of a [End Page 223] subject, not its
distortions, and all expression would be distortion of human beauty if it were
the effect of surviving apeishness. If
Italian painting throws as little light upon the origin of expression as Greek
sculpture does, the reason must be very different. The play of features is not
yet made an end in itself, but it is freely admitted as an instrument in the
main endeavour to represent idealized passions. It cannot be said that Michel
Angelo's "Three Fates" are expressionless, still less that they were
made so in obedience to a theory of feminine beauty, and yet "so much
subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry
or clock-face for it," * that there would be something wanting to the
painting if Atropos' complacently malicious leer were the work of any
determinable cluster of muscles. The muscles of the face are few, the thoughts
they serve to express many; ideal depth and range of expression cannot be
obtained by heightening the muscular action, because, within so limited a
surface as the human face, one contraction would fall foul of another, and the
result be grotesque as well as false. Even
an ordinary face often expresses composite emotions which cannot, so far as we
see, be reduced to their physical elements. We know as a matter of reason that
every effect must have a cause, and that when a face which has conveyed one idea
to us ceases to do so, or conveys a different one, the face has undergone some
sensible alteration. But the complexity of the effect produced gives a
presumption against the simplicity
of the cause. An infinite number of infinitely small modifications of form and
colour, are the physical tokens of .motion ; and when, by some legerdemain, an artist with merely finite
resources yet succeeds in
suggesting more than even nature is wont to express, we
should certainly expect his illustration of her laws to be an aid in
deciphering their purport and origin. But idealism naturally dwells on
the specific characteristics of the type to be idealized.
Man is an emotional intelligence as well as an erect, bimanous mammal,
and it is in the former character
that the Italian masters choose to paint him;
whence Mr. Darwin's disappointment, for the development of the spiritual side of
humanity reacts upon and disturbs the physical type.
Yet the development is perfectly normal, and the subtler shades of
feeling represented by a skilful brush will find their place at a later
stage of the study of facial anatomy, supposing the natural history of
expression ever to proceed beyond the most elementary knowledge.
The
first point is to recognise the composite nature of man as made up of "l'ame
et la bete," for the two have such very different emotions to express that
it is scarcely possible for the same characters to serve for both. The human
animal, like a dog or an ape, has appetites and impulses of which the
gratification is necessarily pleasurable, and the reverse disagreeable. But to
express a list of the passions after
Middlemarch,
p. 6. [End Page 224]
Collins,
or any ordinary moralist, requires resources much more varied than la bete
has at command. Every animal, man included, can look glad or sorry, friendly or
irate, but the limits of physical expression are indicated by the incongruity
which strikes us at the thought of an angry sheep, a pensive goose, a candid
fox, or an affectionate tiger. These
animals vary as much in feature as the men of one race; but the moral or
intellectual character of the species is regarded as fixed, and the cast of
countenance that goes with it is often used as a type or standard of the
expression natural to such a disposition. Mr. Darwin takes no account of
association as affecting the interpretation of expression, as well as its
origin, though, as there is an element of convention in every language, it is
important to distinguish between signs
which it is natural to make, and the influences naturally drawn
from any given sign. The natural language of what may be called
the animal passions, includes all varieties of gesture ; a dog's tail is
at least as sure an index to his feelings as his face, and all simple primitive
emotions express themselves in attitude, as well as in grimace. It is not till
the state of nature has been left behind that it becomes at once possible and
necessary to judge of states of mind from the expression of the face alone. But
when men are so far sophisticated as to check or conceal their natural
gesticulations as undignified or dangerous self-betrayal, we can no longer be
certain that even the muscles of their faces contract and relax in a perfectly
natural manner. These muscles are less easily controlled than those of the body,
but within certain limits they obey the will, and their habitual movements are
even subjected to the fickle influence of fashion, as, for instance, the
abnormal activity of the lachrymal glands in memoirs and romances of the
eighteenth century, or the curl of the upper lip affected more recently by
Byronic youths who were far from desiring to
bite or rend anybody in real life.
For
this reason Mr. Darwin was no doubt right in thinking that
expression can be most instructively studied in subjects who rarely fir,
pose for effect, i. e., infants, the lower animals, the insane, and
savages. But here a fresh difficulty meets us. Except in the case of the insane,
whose passions are of course biassed by their infirmity or eccentricity of mind,
the faces that are capable of telling a true story may, unfortunately, like the
needy knife‑grinder, have no story to tell. Children laugh and cry with
more abandon than adults ; savages
betray anger or astonishment more frankly than civilized travellers ; but the
more elaborate, profound, and distinctively human emotions can scarcely be
expressed in the faces of beings incapable of experiencing them, unless indeed
the vocabulary of expression be more limited than is commonly thought, and
tragic passions leave the same mark
upon the features as brutish appetites. This is difficult to believe, and yet
hard to disprove, because, in the first place, tragic passions are not common in
real life and in the second place, all the [End Page 225] habits of
civilized society are calculated to restrain their full and free expression, so
that even when they prove too strong for restraint we cannot tell that their
expression may not have been modified by the mere fact of having to overcome an
artificial obstacle. The popular conception of such expressions as intense
grief, horror, agony, hatred, despair, is, if not exactly conventional, derived
from tradition, reaching back, perhaps, to an early state of civilization, when
profound emotions were allowed free
vent, but now preserved chiefly in the theatre and is the works of the old
masters. Everyone knows what, for faces lop gun's drawings of the passions are
meant to represent, but very few are in a position to criticise the moral and
anatomical truth of his delineation. It is impossible not to suspect that the
amateur jury, empannelled by Mr. Darwin to pronounce upon Dr. Duchenne's
photographs of galvanized muscles, really made prints of this kind their
standard. Lawyers and doctors of wide experience might be able to speak from
observation and knowledge, but the general public does not see the working of
deep feeling often enough to verify the traditional representation of its
effects in the face. Even artists, whose instincts ought to be our surest
guides, have to choose their models much as Lo Brun selected his illustrations,
taking faces that even in repose, have something the look of the passion to be
represented; for he does not give the effect of different emotions on
the same face, which might have been an instructive study; but
Mr. Darwin’s volume will be generally thought to have given the coup de grace to the old-fashioned human vanity which led even Charles Bell to admire the adaptation of the eye and mouth to the uses of the painter, and to account for the flexible beauty of their lines as an end in itself, or at most an end in conjunction with, the further purpose of expressing the more delicate shades of emotion. Indeed it may be doubted whether any really natural and primitive expression owns its origin to its use as a means of communication. The cry of pain is not consciously a call for help, and extreme pain is scarcely common enough to give rise to a habit of crying out under it, because the pry might sometimes be serviceable in bringing help. The natural, visible, or audible effect of any emotion comes to be recognised as its sign, and is called its expression, as if the subject of the emotion were consciously or voluntarily working the muscles that are really stirred, as it were, accidentally, in consequence of their dependence on whatever organ is directly affected. But the association is first discerned by the spectator, and cannot obviously be discerned until it is established as a tolerably universal fact. A kind of natural selection no doubt determines the survival of some grimaces [End Page 226] out of the infinite variety of which children, monkeys, and rustics are capable, and especially of those which are most easily made, recognised, and imitated; but this is only another way of saying that those muscles which, from the nature of the organism, act moat readily, tend to preserve and perpetuate their activity: Education, by introducing a fresh feeling of personal dignity, and developing a reluctance to display emotion on what may, on reflection, be thought insufficient grounds, checks the natural tendency of expression to become more varied with the development of new mental sensations, and thus the muscular movements continue to be most distinctly marked in animals and classes where they are really least expressive: This fact does not in the least interfere with the physical origin of all expression; but it allows us to conjecture that the expression of passions belonging to a late stage in the development of man's spiritual nature will be determined by other causes than possible, utility. All the muscles are full-grown, and their habits of action. are formed before they can be called onto mould the features of a Mater Dolorosa, a St. Catherine, or a St. John. New composite emotions may be expressed with the old muscles, without the emotion being, on that account, a lineal descendant of the animal impulse that first caused them to vibrate. And this is so much the case, that the most trustworthy idealized representations of passion seldom heighten the facial contractions ; shading and colour, and the all-important expression of the eye are the instruments--not "skilfully given accessories "--by which great artists can make the same face, tell one story or another. Generally the soul is added by the painter, for not one in a thousand lights, like Guido, upon an embodied tragedy, and in a mere portrait gives us Beatrice Cenci.
The best models for the physical side of expression are taken from the
uncultivated classes, who allow their muscles to work uncontrolled ; but unless
the artist can add an ideal depth, of soul to the skeleton outline thence
derived, he must either turn realist or fall into melodrama. To caricature a
violent passion is comparatively easy, and implies only an ordinary knowledge of
the anatomy of expression ; but it is not given to all would-be realists to be
commonplace with Dutch fidelity, or to make fine art of observation: The best of
the Dutch masters could see a common face exactly as it
was, and were not afraid to paint it without an incongruous depth of
expression ; accordingly their cooks and housewives have just as mach
individuality as belongs to ordinary features, and instead of sham animation,
are proved to be alive by the unmistakably real look of half vacant absorption
with which they pursue their trifling avocations. The secret of the great humorists is to take a dozen
different unsophisticated faces and show in each one the working of the same
The
normal expression of the average human face when it is neither glad nor sorry,
varies between one of placid unconcern and eager interest, but in both states of
mind the lines are nearly unchanged; it is the commonplace soul breathing life
into the commonplace body with the minimum expenditure of pure spiritual energy,
and in proportion to the inactivity of the mind is the stability, the vis
inertioe of the material flesh and blood. It is with this last element,
then, that a true realist would have to begin, and without prejudging the
question whether the finer emotions ever lodge in a vulgarized shell, he would
soon find in practice that all the eloquence of which an ordinary face is
capable goes to express its everyday thoughts and feelings, so that it has
nothing left to spare for sensational emergencies. It is related of Cooks the
actor that his " snarling muscles," wore peculiarly powerful, which
enabled him to assume a more thatn ordinarily bloodthirsty expression; but the
modern life-preserver is not wielded with the teeth, and there is therefore no
reason, in the [End Page 228] nature of things, why a London burglar
should have a murderous-looking countenance, except, indeed, as far as the
habitual conduct resets upon the bodily frame. An observer like Hogarth, who,
according to Sir Charles Bell, represents in his drunkards all the
physical symptoms of confirmed intemperance, would, no doubt, succeed in
catching the brutal stolidity or animal ferocity which
characterizes a typical member of the criminal classes. But a murder
committed by accident, and in the way of business, would not permanently affect
the features of a naturally pleasant or intelligent face, and though it might
for a time banish everything but a look of
selfish concern, that would not, under ordinary circumstances, be
distinguishable from the excitement of a costermonger quarrelling for a farthing
change. Similarly, the nearest female relative of our supposed criminal, if he
were being tried for his life, would no doubt "await the verdict" in
anxious suspense, but it does not follow that her face would wear an expression
of more intense gravity than that of a modest housekeeper bargaining for stale
greens on Saturday night. If this
way of putting the case seems a little too strong we can allow something for the
purely physical effects of serious excitement or terror in quickening the breath
or driving the blood from the face, which the French so well indicate in the
phrase, “ses traits s'alterent.”
But this form of expression varies much with the individual constitution,
and though such affections supply the first hint for a physiognomical
transcript of the finer emotions, they have a much narrower range than even the
primary, passions, and stop short long before the complexities of civilised
sentiment are attained. As has been said, the instincts of a tragic actor, and
the imagination of great painters, are almost our only guides to the natural
language of rare and intense passion, and it is about as reasonable to expect
the persona casually implicated in a vulgar modern melodrama to display a sudden
mastery of this language as to expect every aged pauper with undutiful
children to talk like King Lear.
`We
are far from wishing to maintain that the realist is not to paint expression; on
the contrary, our argument tends to call in question the primitiveness of such
expression as does not fall within his province. To control the muscles of the
face is a part of modern education, and it is because the lesson is so well
learnt as to make models scarce, that the passive vacancy of the Dutch school is
nearly the only expression that finds a true artistic utterance between the two
extremes of impassioned ideal humanity and unrestrained animal spirits. The
chief exception to the rule is one which helps to prove it. As Sir Charles Bell
pointed out, it was an incalculable advantage to the artists of Italy and Spain
to have the simple devotion of the peasants in both countries always before
their eyes, so that they were able, as it were, to treat the religious.
sentiment realistically. But this sentiment is an acquired one in the first
instance, and a long [End Page 229] course of unbroken, traditional
supremacy is needed for it to grow, into the second nature of a whole class and'
overrule or absorb the personal idiosyncracies of its most sensitive members. In
later times tend northern countries we have nothing equivalent to this resource,
for the derivative, pre-eminently civilized expression produced by voluntary
restraint put upon the muscular movements of the face is not a suitable subject
for artistic treatment. It may be a sign of
much hidden meaning, but the meaning, is intentionally hidden, and it is
plainly absurd to try and represent at once the act of concealment and the thing
concealed. And yet this is what scenes of domestic life, with titles like a
three-volume novel, in nine cases out of ten, attempt to do for us under
"realistic" treatment.
When civilized children arc carefully instructed not “to make faces,”
as it is called, the indulgence of the propensity becomes associated with the
idea of vulgarity; and if we consider further that the three primitive emotions
which the fate of the human animal
seems especially destined to express--mirth, grief, and, astonishment--appear
ridiculous when indulged in upon inadequate provocation, and that less
provocation is required by the uneducated than by the critical mind, no further
explanation is needed to prove that modern, realistic art is virtually
restricted to the treatment of lowlife and comedy. Our first tendency perhaps is to suspect the great comic
painters of exaggeration, but Teniers and Ostade are realists; in spite of the
animation which makes their works so rich, in illustrations of “strongly contracted facial muscles.” Hogarth's observation, though quite as scrupulous and perhaps
more varied, is less serviceable in this respect, because each picture, as a
book in some satiric epos, had to tell a longer story than there was room for in
the faces alone, so that; in his case it is true that much of the wonderful
variety of expression is helped out by “skilfully chosen accessories.”
.Nothing of course can be more truthful than such figures as the boy crying in
his Noon, or the attention of the little student of the ¼ d. Post.
The Midnight Conversation again is an admirable caricature, or
scarcely a caricature of the expression of human beings who have mislaid their
minds in a punch-bowl; but he was hardly psychologist enough to trace the
slighter physical signs of moral degradation in a countenance still young and
handsome. He was more successful in finding or inventing features of which the
mere outline is humorous, like the projecting underlip of the bear leader in
Hudibras, which, expresses comical remonstrance and defiance excellently, and
could never be made to express anything else. In fact, feature, rather than
expression, is the natural province of caricature ; an exaggerated expression
turns to burlesque, and changes its nature in the process; but the humorous
element in political or other personal caricatures, consists in giving
disproportionate weight to some real characteristic, in developing some [End
Page 230] faint resemblance to an absurd prototype, in seizing and
accentuating a laughable or damaging analogy.
Callot's works ought to be of much service to the student of expression,
but that great master of grotesque is too imaginative to be overtaken as yet by
halting scientific inductions. We
interpret ordinary gesture language too laxly not to miss, some of the
significance of his caricatures of it, but there is no mistaking his unrivalled
skill in giving a comic incongruity to mere attitude the fact that fluttering
garments or brandished hats may make an integral part of the general effect,
goes to show that what strikes us as expressive, often does so as a suggestion
or reminder of same quaint analogy, rather than by any real or apparent show of
purpose. This is the only way of accounting for the expressiveness of a whole
composition position, which is as remarkable in some of Callot's prints as in
the most elaborate finished pictures. He has the art of making a group, as such,
express a single feeling as well as an individual face might; his squares of
infantry, advancing armies, or winding processions,
have all a strictly individual character. The grotesques strictly so
called, seem to owe their comic power to the success with which they parody the
structure of real organisms ; he makes a quaint chariot
look somehow as if it were alive; his griffins bark like dogs, and his a
salamanders swim as comfortably through the flames as a duck in a pond ; we feel
se non a vero, a ben trovato, but the monsters are all the time so very
monstrous that it adds to the humour of the representation for them to look as
much at home as if they were perfectly natural and orderly items in the scale of
creation.. We appreciate him best by comparing him with a predecessor of
considerable merit in the same
line, the elder Breughel, surnamed le drole; Callot has the spirit,
Breughel only the bodily elements of drollery; one creates, the other merely
compiles; and the difference in the effort produced proves the impossibility of
giving a true or plausible rendering of any particular expression without a
previous conception and reproduction of the individual character as a whole.
Even a goblin has a spiritual nature which determines the ensemble of his
grimaces. Callot's fine sense of
the significance of attitudes makes him a reliable guide when, as riot
unfrequently happens, he draws an unmistakably expressive face, the expression
of which we should nevertheless be very likely to interpret wrongly if the face
were separated from its surroundings. Thus,
is a small print of St. Thomas Aquinas praying, the head, taken by itself, might
pass for an illustration of fears, as understood by Le Bran. In another series the strenuous exertion of men drawing a gun
is very truly represented, but the facet alone would seem to represent pain, as
may often be noticed in real life with swimmers, even when not conscious of
making any painful effort. Chronic
or prolonged distress gives a more pitiable expression than mere pain; while
fear, unless accompanied by pain, is often evidenced [End Page 231] by
gestures of avoidance without any facial contraction. It is indeed a question
whether the shrinking, the wish to avoid some present or expected danger, which
is an essential element of fear, does not always, when the expression is natural
and uncontrolled, betray itself, in the attitude as well as in the face ; and
then the subject would obviously be incomplete unless the connection, or
correlation between the movements of the bodily and facial muscles had been
determined The fact is there are two kinds of fear; fear lest evil should
come, which is altogether mental, and only directly affects the nerves, while
the expression of merely animal dread of an approaching injury cannot but be
influenced by the kind of danger and the direction from which it seems to, come.
This is well illustrated in one of Brauwer's tavern quarrels, where two very
distinct and life-like pictures of fear--not pain--are presented by two men, one
being throttled by a friend, and the other vigorously grasped by the hair; the
same desire to escape from an unpleasant predicament has to be differently
expressed, because the danger comes from different quarters. Talk about
expression in the abstract must always be rather unsatisfactory, for a really
expressive illustration of fear, or anything else, will always have to express
fear of some particular danger by some particular individual. The importance of
attitude to the true representation of anger is nearly the same, as appears, to
keep still to Callot, in one of his battle-pieces, where a terrible Turk is
dealing a mortal blow with great naturalness and goodwill, though his turbaned
head, divorced from its natural support, would be taken at most to express
bright-eyed attention.
The muscular contractions
attendant upon laughter are of course amply illustrated by the Dutch painters
from Teniers and Ostade downwards; but we are not obliged to depend so much on
their assistance here, which is the more fortunate, as an affection which
consists in recurring changes can be much better studied from the living model
than from the most faithful sketch, which can only fix the appearance of a
single moment. Grave as the world is growing, a natural laugh may still be met
with often enough for its expression to be universally recognisable; and if the
habits of observation, which Mr. Darwin seems to succeed in developing amongst
his acquaintances, are. extended to his readers, there will soon be no lack of
theories of laughter as valuable as the following variation upon Mr. Darwin's,
which, to be quite candid, was suggested, by the smile of a single infant in
arms casually met in Kensington Gardens. Mr. Darwin considers laughter. in
children as a sign of mere joy or good spirits, which, according to his
principle of antithesis, vents itself in a sort of relaxation or rebound from
every state or action associated with the sense of pain, and may also, as
suggested by Mr. Spencer, naturally carry off its surplus unemployed energies
along those muscular, channels which yield readily to the slightest pressure.
Mr. Darwin [End Page 232] admits the difficulty of connecting this
account of the primitive affection with such a complex subject as the causes of
laughter in adults. "Something incongruous or unaccountable, exciting
surprise and some sense of superiority in the laugher, who must be in a happy,
frame of mind, seems to be the commonest cause." But surely this is a much
better account than the first of the laughter of children. If we consider for a
moment that the first things at which a baby laughs are the antics performed by
its seniors for its supposed entertainment, the accuracy of the description
appears complete. When a fond parent tickles an infant's cheek, or makes some
strange sound or grotesque grimace, the first expression evoked is one of
surprise or wonder what so irrational a proceeding may portend ; the
astonishment is at first not unmixed with alarm, but the discerning infant
speedily perceives that no injury is intended, and the tension of the expectant
muscles thereupon relates, with an impetus that carries them pendulum-wise past
the point of placid repose. The act of relaxation is pleasurable in two ways, as
associated with the feeling of relief that what began by exciting surprise did
not proceed to excite tears, and also with the feeling of complacency in the
triumphant exercise of penetration which discovered the object under
consideration to be nothing worse than ridiculous. The iteration in laughter
might be explained partly by a voluntary attempt to reproduce a pleasant
experience, partly by the tendency of the pendulum to swing a second time when
it has swung a first, while the convulsion of the diaphragm and the cachinnatory
sounds would follow from the tendency to hold the breath at the moment of
astonishment and to regulate the subsequent gasps of, amused relief. According
to this view, infants and the most cultivated philosophers would have the same
sense of humour: older children and the half-educated laugh from habit,
nervousness, imitation, or fashion, on occasions which it is impossible to
explain by any consistent theory of the ridiculous.
It
would probably be difficult to exaggerate the influence of imitation in fixing
and perpetuating the forms of facial expression, whether in smiles, frowns, or
any other apparently more arbitrary signs.
In children it is very often impossible to distinguish between the
effects of imitation and inheritance, though there is no mistaking the result
when the two act together. Unconscious, instinctive imitation is happily
illustrated in more than one of Ostade's works, as where an elder sister
reproduces the grimace of a baby who is declining a spoonful of broth ; and
still more unmistakably in a scene where a boor is reading the newspaper with
evident difficulty, and the faces of the. listeners all reflect his mixed
expression of deep attention and amused pride in his own success. But imitation
can only influence what may be called active, or positive expressions; when the
muscles are neutral, and the eye only seems to speak, the expression is apt to
be uncertain, and, especially in the case of children, the spectator often [End
Page 233] adds irrelevant associations of his own. Thus the pathetic look of
Sir Joshua Reynolds's little " Strawberry Girl" is due to her brown
liquid eyes, which are large enough and pretty enough to tell the whole story of
a woman's love, sorrow, or anything else, though the tiny maiden was not
necessarily melancholy because she was born with one beauty full grown. On the
other hand, the precocious air of deep reflection with which some babies wrinkle
their foreheads and screw up their eyes, while others, reclining in their
perambulators, view creation with a placid; penetrative gaze, as if they were
deep in metaphysical problems, may, after all, be only a fair index to the mind
within; for it is a question worthy the attention of philosophers whether what
we pall innate ideas and necessary forms of thought are not really the result of
these infant meditations; the first fruits of inductive experience, condemned to
solve, as it can, the problem of thinking without words. It is in half
conventional signs and gestures that imitation has most scope, and a very
trifling, natural impulse enough to account for the origin of most easy and
significant grimaces; the muscles of the face, as we see in monkeys, world
rather be uselessly employed than left altogether idle.
In man, moreover, as a gregarious animal, there seems to be an
involuntary tendency to share the emotions witnessed, as well as merely to
reproduce their expression. As Mr. Darwin once observed, a child's instinct is
to cry when it thinks its nurse is going to do so; and this habit of feeling and
acting in. flocks has, probably, had more to do with the development of specific
varieties of expression than their, in any case, slight and remote utility. A
truly consistent utilitarian is the last triumph of evolution, and there is no
reason to suppose that even monkeys came much nearer to that high ideal than
ordinary men, who agree to this day in living the same lives, talking the same
talk, eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, building the same houses,
though many of them are perfectly convinced that the lives are useless, the talk
dull, the food unwholesome, the clothes ugly, the houses inconvenient, it is a
comparatively small matter that they should make the same faces ; but it is
contrary to all analogy to suppose that their fashions in that solitary
particular were the work of sound, practical reasoning.
H.
Lawrenny.