If I were to be born into this world again and had the choice of my
endowments I should arrange very carefully about my smile. There is
nothing so irresistible as the right sort of smile. It is better
than the silver spoon in the mouth. It will carry you anywhere and
win you anything, including the silver spoon. It disarms your
enemies and makes them forget that they have a grudge against you.
"I have a great many reasons for disliking you," said a well-known
public man to a friend of mine the other day, "but when I am with you
I can never remember what they are." It was the flash of sunshine
that did for him. He could not preserve his hostility in the
presence of the other's disarming smile and gay good-humour. He just
yielded up his sword and sunned himself in the pleasant weather that
the other carried with him like an atmosphere.
At the Bar, of course, a pleasant address is worth a fortune. I
suppose there has been no more successful figure in the law courts in
our time than Rufus Isaacs, but I fancy he won as many of his
victories by the debonair smile with which he irradiated the courts
as by his law. You could see the judge on the bench and the jury in
the box basking in the warmth that he shed around them. The weather
might be as harsh as it liked outside; but here the sky was clear and
the sun was shining genially. It was a fine day and the only blot on
the landscape was the unhappy counsel for the other side, who thumped
the table and got red in the face as he saw his client's case melting
away like snow before a south wind.
And among politicians it is notorious that a popular smile is the
shortest cut to the great heart of democracy. In an estimate of the
qualities that have contributed to Mr. Lloyd George's amazing success
a high place would have to be given to the twinkling smile, so merry
and mischievous, so engagingly frank and so essentially secret and
calculating, with which, by the help of the photographer, he has
irradiated his generation. If Mr. Asquith had learned how to smile
for public consumption, the history of English politics, and even of
the world, would have been vastly different; but Mr. Asquith's smile
is private and intellectual and has no pictorial value, and I doubt
whether anyone ever heard him laugh outright. He was born without
the chief equipment of the politician in a democratic age. No one
knew the value of that equipment more than Theodore Roosevelt. He
was the most idolised public man America has produced for half a
century, and he owed his popularity more to his enormous smile than
to any other quality. It was like a baron of beef. You could cut
and come again. There was no end to it. It seemed to stretch across
the Continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and when it burst
into laughter it shook the land like a merry earthquake. There was
not much behind the smile, but it was the genuine article, the
expression of a companionable spirit and a healthy enjoyment of life,
and it knocked the Americans "all of a heap." Woodrow Wilson's smile
was almost as spacious as Roosevelt's, but it was less infectious,
for it was thoughtful and reflective; came from the mind rather than
the feelings, and never burst into laughter. It was the smile of the
schoolmaster, while Roosevelt's was the smile of the uproarious
schoolboy who was having no end of "a bully time."
Really first-rate smiles are rare. For the most part our smiles add
little to our self-expression. If we are dull, they are dull. If we
are sinister, they are only a little more sinister. If we are smug,
they only emphasise our smugness. If, like the Lord High Everything
Else, we were born sneering, our smile is apt to be a sneer, too. If
we are terrible, like Swift, we shall have his "terrible smile."
Only rarely do we light upon the smile that is a revelation. Harry
Lauder's smile is like a national institution or a natural element.
It is plentiful enough to fill the world. It is a continual and
abundant feast that requires neither words nor chorus, and when he
laughs you can no more help feeling happy than he can. Lord
Balfour's smile is famous in another way. It has the untroubled
sweetness of a child's, and there are few who can resist its charm;
but it is elusive and seems too much like a mask that has little to
do with the real man. You feel that he would send you to the
scaffold with the same seraphic sweetness with which he would pass
you the sugar. It is not an emanation of the man like that abundant
smile, at once good-humoured and sardonic, with which Mr. Birrell
sets the company aglow.
The most memorable smiles are those which have the quality of the
unexpected. A smile that is habitual rarely pleases, for it suggests
policy, and the essence of a smile is its spontaneity and lack of
deliberation. Archbishop Temple said he hated people who were always
smiling, and then, looking across the luncheon table at the vicar who
had been doing his best to ingratiate himself with the terrible
prelate, added: "Look at the vicar there--_he's_ always smiling." It
was a cruel affront, but the smile that has the quality of an
artifice is hard to bear. It was so in the case of Mrs. Barbauld, of
whom it was said that she wore such an habitual smile that it made
your face ache to look at her. One would almost prefer the other
melancholy extreme, illustrated by that gloomy fanatic, Philip II.,
who is said to have laughed only once in his life, and that on
receiving the merry news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The
smiles that dwell in the mind most are those that break suddenly like
sunshine from unexpected places. That was the quality of the
curiously wistful smile that played over the ascetic features of Lord
Morley in conversation. You could forgive all his asperities when he
smiled. But the most delightful example of the unexpected smile that
I know is that of the pianist, Frederic Lamond. The intensity of his
countenance forbids the suggestion of a smile, and at the piano he
seems to descend into unfathomable depths of gravity and spiritual
remoteness. But when the piece is over and the house breaks out into
thunders of applause, he emerges from the depths with a smile that
suggests that the Land of Beulah has broken on his sight. It is so
sudden a transition that you almost seem to catch a glimpse of the
Land of Beulah yourself.
But it is no use for those of us who have only humdrum smiles to
attempt to set up a smile that is an incantation. Smiles, like
poets, are born, not made. If they are made, they are not smiles,
but grimaces, and convict us on the spot. They are simply an attempt
to circulate false news. There is no remedy for us of the negligible
smile, but to be born again and to be born different, not outside but
within, for the smile is only the publication of the inward spirit.