As a rule we recognize faces by the modes of expression habitually
worn,--by the usually prevalent character-tones of them,--rather than
by any steady memory of lines. But no face at all moments remains
exactly the same; and in cases of exceptional variability the expression
does not suffice for recognition: we have to look for some fixed
peculiarity, some minute superficial detail independent of physiognomy.
All expression has but a relative permanency: even in faces the
most strongly marked, its variations may defy estimate. Perhaps the
mobility is, within certain limits, in direct ratio to irregularity
of feature;--any approach to ideal beauty being also an approach to
relative fixity. At all events, the more familiar we become with any
common face, the more astonishing the multitude of the transformations
we observe in it,--the more indescribable and bewildering its fugitive
subtleties of expression. And what are these but the ebb and flow of
life ancestral,--under-ripplings in that well-spring unfathomable of
personality whose flood is Soul. Perpetually beneath the fluid tissues
of flesh the dead are moulding and moving--not singly (for in no
phenomenon is there any singleness), but in currents and by surgings.
Sometimes there is an eddying of ghosts of love; and the face dawns as
if a sunrise lighted it. Sometimes there is a billowing up of ghosts of
hate; and the face darkens and distorts like an evil dream,--and we say
to the mind behind it, “You are not now _your better self_.” But that
which we call the self, whether the better or the worse, is a complexity
forever shifting the order of its combinations. According to stimulus of
hope or fear, of joy or pain, there must vibrate within every being, at
differing rhythms, with varying oscillation, incalculable tremulosities
of ancestral life. In the calmest normal existence slumber all the
psychical tones of the past,--from the lurid red of primal sense-impulse
to the violet of spiritual aspiration,--even as all known colours sleep
in white light. And over the sensitive living mask, at each strong
alternation of the psychical currents, flit shadowy resurrections of
dead expression.
Seeing faces and their changes, we learn intuitively the relation to
our own selves of the selves that confront us. In very few cases could
we even try to explain how this knowledge comes,--how we reach those
conclusions called, in common parlance, “first impressions.” Faces
are not _read_. The impressions they give are only _felt_, and have
much of the same vague character as impressions of sound,--making
within us mental states either pleasant or unpleasant or somewhat
of both,--evoking now a sense of danger, now a melting sympathy,
occasionally a gentle sadness. And these impressions, though seldom at
fault, cannot be very well explained in words. The reasons of their
accuracy are likewise the reasons of their mystery,--reasons not to
be discovered in the narrow range of our personal experience,--reasons
very, very much older than we. Could we remember our former lives, we
should know more exactly the meaning of our likes and our dislikes. For
the truth is that they are superindividual. It is not the individual eye
that perceives everything perceived in a face. The dead are the real
seers. But as they remain unable to guide us otherwise than by touching
the chords of mental pleasure or pain, we can feel the relative meaning
of faces only in a dim, though powerful way.
Instinctively, at least, superindividuality is commonly recognized.
Hence such phrases as “force of character,” “moral force,” “personal
fascination,” “personal magnetism,” and others showing that the
influence exerted by man upon man is known to be independent of mere
physical conditions. Very insignificant bodies have that within them by
which formidable bodies are mastered and directed. The flesh-and-blood
man is only the visible end of an invisible column of force reaching
out of the infinite past into the momentary present,--only the material
Symbol of an immaterial host. A contest between even two wills is a
contest of phantom armies. The domination of many personalities by the
simple will of one,--hinting the perception by the compelled of superior
viewless powers behind the compeller,--is never to be interpreted by the
old hypothesis of soul-equality. Only by scientific psychology can the
mystery of certain formidable characters be even partly explained; but
any explanation must rest upon the acceptance, in some form or other,
of the immense evolutional fact of psychical inheritance. And psychical
inheritance signifies the super-individual,--pre-existence revived in
compound personality.
Yet, from our ethical standpoint, that super-individuality which we
thus unconsciously allow in the very language used to express psychical
domination, is a lower manifestation. Though working often for good, the
power in itself is of evil; and the recognition of it by the subjugated
is not a recognition of higher moral energy, but of a higher _mental_
energy signifying larger evolutional experience of wrong, deeper
reserves of aggressive ingenuity, heavier capacities for the giving of
pain. Called by no matter what euphemistic name, such power is brutal
in its origin, and still allied to those malignities and ferocities
shared by man with lower predatory creatures. But the beauty of the
superindividual is revealed in that rarer power which the dead lend the
living to win trust, to inspire ideals, to create love, to brighten
whole circles of existence with the charm and wonder of a personality
never to be described save in the language of light and music.