Frostburg mining journal. [volume] (Frostburg, Md.) 1871-1913, 1891-09-19
Responsibility for Our Looks.


the face is always an interesting one and
not soon to be settled. According to a
newspaper story now in circulation, a
well known United SlItes Senator decided
it off hand, " in the case of witness be-
fore an investigating committee. The
witness in question was SO forbidding in
countenance that it was said his looks
ought to hang him." This elected the
usual defense in such cases-that man
is not responsible for his looks-to which
the Senator replied: But man of 50
years is responsible for his looks. In a
series of articles appearing in the Chap
erone magazine w. II. Little takes some
what the same view. The face to him is
soul picture, where the mind eX-
presses itself in permanent lines. The
idea is highly poetical and Hood has cX-
pressed it in his beautiful fragment, The
Sea of Death"
And there were neighbor brows Scared by the
brunt
OF strife and Borrowing. where Care had set
His crooked autograph and married the jet
OF glossy locks; with hollow eyes iorlorn
And lips thit curled ia bitterness and scorn
And so bequeathed it IL the world again.
While the poeticel imagination far out
strips exact science, it nearly always leads
the way in science. In illustrating his
own theories of the effect of the mind on
the face. Mr. Little incidentally illus
trates this by choosing the face of Morse,
the inventor of the telegraph, as a study.
Morse invented the telegraph because he
was poet and a painter; because he had
trained his imagination so highly that
when he put aside pen and brush as
means of expression he was capable eN-
pressing thought in the greatest inven-
ton of any age. For the poetic magma
ton all questions of the influence of the
mind on the face are settled. To poetical
insight the face is the reflex of the mind
on which care and passion leave their
CROOKED autograph" SO that in this
view "a man of 80 is responsible
for his looks" But in the poetical
mind, as in the conmon mind, the idea
of 1.-The good and the beautiful are
so closely associated that much of
the value of poetical insight is here lost
for science. 1t is true in general but not
always in particular, that essential good
ness manfests itself physically in the
beautiful and pleasing, yet our common
sense takes that for granted as invariably
true. In our pictures the angels are
made as beautiful as possible, while the
idea of evil is expressed in deformity and
ugliness. In Durer's extraordinarily
ugly devils and in Raphael's ideally
beautifully cherubs, the poetic imagi-
nation has expressed an idea in which
the common sense of the civilized world
has cOncurred for generation after gen
eration-in which it still concurs. But
though poetry and common sense agree
here as they do not always, they fall
short of science. They leave uncon-
sdered too many conditions. Science
may grant that a pure life of either
positive goodness or negative innOCency
will result in face expressive of these
mental characteristics, and, moreover.
that such a face will always express the
beautiful or the pleasing. But this with
a proviso that such a life must be I'M
troubled and comfortable. Self sacr-
fee, the struggle for mastery of pa
sion, the self devotion of men who take
on themselves the trouble of others, will
leave on the face lines of ugliness under
the same law which makes callosities on
the hand of the laborer. Poverty, de-
privation, hardship, whether endured
voluntarily or involuntarily, leave their
marks on the face in lines which, if not
repulsive, are at least ugly. Remove
such conditions: substitute for them con-
iitions of positive comfort, and the face
changes accordingly to a closer approx
nation to the beautiful-if not in one
general n, then in the next This is
constantly observable in European immi-
grants to this country and in their chill
dren 1t is never to be forgotten by sci
pnce, Though poetry must forget it, that
the stomach has as much influence on
the face as the soul. If the face is soul
picture it is also stomach picture. One of
the most cherubic countenances that
man ever possessed is that of pro-
fessional American politician with Il
national reputation as the most unscru-
pulous of an INSCRIPTIONS class Every
line of it speaks of mind at peace, of
good will to men, of all angelic qualities
Its owner may have no conscience at all
certainly not enough to interfere with
stomach that is perfect in its operations.
Observing such phenomena as this, the
wise ancients made the stomach the seat
of the soul. No matter where we locate
it, it is always to be remembered that in
attempting to read the soul in the face
we may be reading only the stomach
ST. Louis Republic.