Real rage, unfortunately, is frequent. The body is carried erect or
thrown forward, the limbs become stiff, mouth and teeth closely press
together, the voice becomes very loud or dies away or grows hoarse, the
forehead is wrinkled and the pupil of the eye contracted; in addition
one should count the change of color, the flush or deep pallor. An
opportunity to simulate real rage is rare, and anyway the
characteristics are so significant that a mistake in recognition can
hardly be made. Darwin says that the conviction of one’s own guilt is
from time to time expressed through a sparkling of the eyes, and through
an undefinable affectation. The last is well known to every penologist
and explicable in general psychological terms. Whoever knows himself to
be guiltless behaves according to his condition, naturally and without
constraint: hence the notion that naïve people are such as represent
matters as they are. They do not find anything suspicious in them
because they do not know about suspicious matters. But persons who know
themselves guilty and try not to show it, must attain their end through
artifice and imitation, and when this is not well done the affectation
is obvious.
There is also something in the guilty sparkle of the eye. The sparkle in
the eyes of beauty, the glance of joy, of enthusiasm, of rapture, is not
so poetical as it seems, inasmuch as it is no more than intensified
secretion of tears. The latter gets its increase through nervous
excitation, so that the guilty sparkle should also be of the same
nature. This may be considered as in some degree a flow of tears in its
first stages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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