Sanitary and Social Lectures and EssaysKingsley, Charles
Science
Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays
Kingsley, Charles
Essays; Social problems
Ah well—there was once a science called Physiognomy. The Greeks, from
what I can learn, knew more of it than any people since: though the
Italian painters and sculptors must have known much; far more than we.
In a more scientific civilisation there will be such a science once more:
but its laws, though still in the empiric stage, are not altogether
forgotten by some. Little children have often a fine and clear instinct
of them. Many cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clear
instinct of them likewise. And some such would tell us that there is
intellect in plenty in the modern Nausicaa: but not of the quality which
they desire for their country’s future good. Self-consciousness,
eagerness, volubility, petulance in countenance, in gesture, and in
voice—which last is too often most harsh and artificial, the breath being
sent forth through the closed teeth, and almost entirely at the corners
of the mouth—and, with all this, a weariness often about the wrinkling
forehead and the drooping lids;—all these, which are growing too common,
not among the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs, they think,
of the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual. At least
they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the same race can
be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in those old Greek
sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and, it must be said, in the
portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, Copley, and Romney. Not such,
one thinks, must have been the mothers of Britain during the latter half
of the last century and the beginning of the present; when their sons, at
times, were holding half the world at bay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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