The eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath.
The lines are, however, nonsense, as green-eyed eagles have no
existence; and perhaps the question of the popular prejudice is not
worth arguing about.
If we could leave out the mixed or neutral eyes, which are in a
transitional state—blue eyes with some dark pigment obscuring their
blueness, and making them quite unclassifiable, as no two pairs of eyes
are found alike—then all eyes might be divided into two great natural
orders, those with and those without pigment on the outer surface of
the membrane. They could not be called light and dark eyes, since
many hazel eyes are really lighter than purple and dark grey eyes.
They might, however, be simply called brown and blue eyes, for in all
eyes with the outer pigment there is brown, or something scarcely
distinguishable from brown; and all eyes without pigment, even the
purest greys, have some blueness.
Brown eyes express animal passions rather than intellect, and the
higher moral feelings. They are frequently equalled in their own
peculiar kind of eloquence by the brown or dark eyes in civilised
dogs. In animals there is, in fact, often an exaggerated eloquence of
expression. To judge from their eyes, caged cats and eagles in the
Zoological Gardens are all furred and feathered Bonnivards. Even in
the most intellectual of men the brown eye speaks more of the heart
than of the head. In the inferior creatures the black eye is always
keen and cunning or else soft and mild, as in fawns, doves, aquatic
birds, etc.; and it is remarkable that in man also the black eye—dark
brown iris with large pupil—generally has one or the other of these
predominant expressions. Of course, in highly-civilised communities,
individual exceptions are extremely numerous. Spanish and negro women
have wonderfully soft and loving eyes, while the cunning weasel-like
eye is common everywhere, especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste
Orientals the keen, cunning look has been refined and exalted to an
expression of marvellous subtlety—the finest expression of which the
black eye is capable.
The blue eye—all blues and greys being here included—is, _par
excellence_, the eye of intellectual man; that outer warm-colored
pigment hanging like a cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its
most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite blown away
are we able to look into the soul, forgetting man’s kinship with
the brutes. When one is unaccustomed to it from always living with
dark-eyed races, the blue eye seems like an anomaly in nature, if not a
positive blunder; for its power of expressing the lower and commonest
instincts and passions of our race is comparatively limited; and in
cases where the higher faculties are undeveloped it seems vacant and
meaningless. Add to this that the ethereal blue color is associated
in the mind with atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid matter,
inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the void, expressionless sky; of
shadows on far-off hill and cloud; of water under certain conditions of
the atmosphere, and of the unsubstantial summer haze,
Whose margin fades
Forever and forever as I move.
In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely used in the
quickly-perishing flowers of some frail plants; while a few living
things of free and buoyant motions, like birds and butterflies,
have been touched on the wings with the celestial tint only to make
them more aërial in appearance. Only in man, removed from the gross
materialism of nature, and in whom has been developed the highest
faculties of the mind, do we see the full beauty and significance of
the blue eye—the eye, that is, without the interposing cloud of dark
pigment covering it. In the recently-published biography of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, the author says of him: “His eyes were large, dark blue,
brilliant, and full of varied expression. Bayard Taylor used to say
that they were the only eyes he ever knew to flash fire.... While he
was yet at college, an old gypsy woman, meeting him suddenly in a
woodland path, gazed at him and asked, ‘Are you a man or an angel?’”
Mrs. Hawthorne says in one of her letters quoted in the book: “The
flame of his eyes consumed compliment, cant, sham, and falsehood; while
the most wretched sinners—so many of whom came to confess to him—met in
his glance such a pity and sympathy that they ceased to be afraid of
God and began to return to him.... _I never dared gaze at him, even I,
unless his lids were down_.”
I think we have, most of us, seen eyes like these—eyes which one rather
avoids meeting, because when met one is startled by the sight of a
naked human soul brought so near. One person, at least, I have known
to whom the above description would apply in every particular; a man
whose intellectual and moral nature was of the highest order, and who
perished at the age of thirty, a martyr, like the late Dr. Rabbeth, in
the cause of science and humanity.
How very strange, then, that savage man should have been endowed
with this eye unsuited to express the instincts and passions of
savages, but able to express that intelligent and high moral feeling
which a humane civilisation was, long ages after, to develop in his
torpid brain! A fact like this seems to fit in with that flattering,
fascinating, ingenious hypothesis invented by Mr. Wallace to account
for facts which, according to the theory of natural selection, ought
not to exist. But, alas! that beautiful hypothesis fails to convince.
Even the most degraded races existing on the earth possess a language
and the social state, religion, a moral code, laws, and a species
of civilisation; so that there is a great gulf between them and the
highest ape that lives in the woods. And as far back as we can go this
has been the condition of the human race, the real primitive man having
left no writing on the rocks. In the far dim past he still appears,
naked, standing erect, and with a brain “larger than it need be,”
according to the theory; so that of the oldest pre-historic skull yet
discovered Professor Huxley is able to say that it is a skull which
might have contained the brains of a philosopher or of a savage. We
can only conclude that we are divided by a very thin partition from
those we call savages in our pride; and that if man has continued on
the earth, changing but little, for so vast a period of time, the
reason is, that while the goddess Elaboration has held him by one hand,
endeavoring ever to lead him onwards, the other hand has been clasped
by Degeneration, which may be personified as a beauteous and guileful
nymph whose fascinations have had as much weight with him as the wisdom
of the goddess.—_Gentleman’s Magazine._