[Illustration]
I
I wonder why the emblematical significance of the Composite Photograph
has been so little considered by the philosophers of evolution. In
the blending and coalescing of the shadows that make it, is there no
suggestion of that bioplasmic chemistry which, out of the intermingling
of innumerable lives, crystallizes the composite of personality? Has the
superimposition of images upon the sensitized plate no likeness to those
endless superimpositions of heredity out of which every individuality
must shape itself?... Surely it is a very weird thing, this Composite
Photograph,--and hints of things weirder.
* * * * *
Every human face is a living composite of countless faces,--generations
and generations of faces superimposed upon the sensitive film of Life
for the great cosmic developing process. And any living face, well
watched by love or by hate, will reveal the fact. The face of friend
or sweetheart has a hundred different aspects; and you know that you
want, when his or her “likeness” is taken, to insist upon the reflection
of the dearest of these. The face of your enemy,--no matter what
antipathy it may excite,--is not invariably hateful in itself: you must
acknowledge, to yourself at least, having observed in it moments of an
expression the reverse of unworthy.
Probably the ancestral types that try to reproduce themselves in
the modulations of facial expression, are nearly always the more
recent;--the very ancient having become metamorphosed, under weight of
superimposition, into a blank underlying vagueness,--a mere protoplasmic
background out of which, except in rare and monstrous cases, no
outline can detach itself. But in every normal face whole generations
of types do certainly, by turns of mood, make flitting apparition.
Any mother knows this. Studying day by day the features of her child,
she finds in them variations not to be explained by simple growth.
Sometimes there is a likeness to one parent or grandparent; sometimes
a likeness to another, or to remoter kindred; and at rarer intervals
may appear peculiarities of expression that no member of the family can
account for. (Thus, in darker centuries, the ghastly superstition of
the “changeling,” was not only possible, but in a certain sense quite
natural.) Through youth and manhood and far into old age these mutations
continue,--though always more slowly and faintly,--even while the
general characteristics steadily accentuate; and death itself may bring
into the countenance some strange expression never noticed during life.