SHOWN BY FACE

Evening Star, Issue 21640, 8 February 1934, Page 6

SHOWN BY FACE

CHARACTER OF MAN USE OF MEASUREMENT FRENCHMEN'S CLAIMS French scientists and academicians are roaming over a new field of knowledge. They arc working out a new way to gauge human character by the shape of human faces, writes Harvey James in the ‘ Daily Mail.’ It has long been agreed, at least among tho savants, that the brain is shaped bv tho actions and reactions of the mind; that the inside of the skull is moulded according to the form of tho brain, and that tho outside is shaped by the inside. Before the war a famous German scholar had stigmatised this field of research as “ the erroneous execution of a possibly sound idea.” And it is admitted by the modern French school that this remark was probably justified by the practice of certain enthusiasts, 'who professed at a glance to road the character of their friends, and sometimes even went so far as Christopher North, who suggested—maybe sarcastically—that humanity could be saved if the skull was massaged in infancy into a shape that accentuated good aild repressed evil tendencies. The modern trend of the French school of scientists is to concentrate rather on general tendencies than on particular cases. Summing up the research of past centuries, Dr Desfosses, of Paris, now suggests that human character can be divided into a number of categories and that each category can be distinguished by the general shape of the face. THE RECTANGLE. The most highly-developed people usually have faces cast in the form of rectangles and triangles. The perfect rectangle denotes balanced judgment and firmness of character. As the upper portion of the head is accentuated so are the intellectual qualities —while the lower denote the physical ones. We all of us have grown used to the protuberant forehead and the firm jaw. The late Marshal Foch had such a balanced rectangular face; in Oliver Cromwell the lower part—the jaw—is accentuated; in Beethoven the upper part is stressed by a projecting forehead. The heads of Talleyrand, Edison, Marconi, and Gladstone are variations of the rectangle. When the upper or intellectual part of the head is yet more accentuated over the lower, the physical part, wo find the face of the intellectual; and when each feature is sharpened in the face by the stress of acute suffering and experience we get the typical countenance of the ascetic. _ Take up a picture of Richelieu. Lord Chancellor Brougham, 'Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, or Lord Allen of Hurtwood, and you will see_ at once the triangular cast of the thinker. Then turn to any medieval divine—the gentle St. Francis, the cruel Torquemada, Savonarola, that amazing anachronism of the Middle Ages who convulsed Renaissance Florence, and there you will see the deeply marked, sharpened triangle of the ascetic. Round heads, oval heads, hexagon heads, and heads cast more or less in the shape of a trapezoid are also shown to the scientist. The _ oval, varying from a perfect round which tends to he insipid, to an elongated eclipse, which betrays the nervous temperament, is the mark of a womanly, sometimes of a womanish, character. IN MEN TOO. But it occurs also in men—men of the irritable artistic type; you will find it in the oval form the countenances of our Stuart Princes, in varying degrees from James I. to Bonnie Prince Charlie. It is unmistakable in Charles I who combined the hastiness,_ tho swift, and often unbalanced judgments, and the irritability with the enthusiasm, loyaUy, and devotion that often make up the character of women. But in the usual oval form found among women themselves this shaped head shows sweetness of temper and a gentle manner; you see it in the idealised paintings of the French eighteenth century, while the Gainsborough and tho Reynolds portraits of reigning Georgian beauties, Mrs Siddons—shall we gay P—or the Duchess of Devonshire, portray the oval in its varying degrees of sweetness and nervous irritability. , , , , , Very different are the traits denoted by an apparently similar cast of head —the ovoid. . The ovoid is not related to the oval. It is a sort of debased triangle in the scientific category. In the ovoid the top part of the face from cranium to eyebrows is blown out over the lower. It is, in fact (as well as metaphoncally), a swelled bentf. It shows the intellectual qualities of the ti uingle carried to the pitch of excess—pride, ambition, and determination inflated to the edge of the irrational. Queen Elizabeth had such a head She was able, determined, forceful, and not over-scrupulous. Two hundred years later we find in Napoleon Bonaparte precisely that mixture of the womanish oval with the forceful ovoid that we should expect of his mighty erratic genius. . • And under a glass case m the Red Square at Moscow countless pilgrims see the ovoid head in its perfection, sloping from the high, egg-like crown to the narrow', rounded-off chin of Vladimir Ilyich TJlianoff—known to historj' as Lenin. PLACID KIND. The trapezoid head is carried on the shoulders of your steady, unimaginative man wdio goes placidly through life. He goes placidly, but he goes nowhere in particular. He is materialist and practical. If your car goes wrong stop the first passer-by with a trapezoid head; ho will probably be able to put it right for you. . Such are the main classes into which scientists put our heads. But it must not be forgotten that many outside influences, like climate, environment, and hereditary qualities and failings, also contribute. . These influences have all had their share in forming, for example, a type of countenance familiar among Englishmen of the upper class. _ It consists of palo blue eyes, fair hair, broad forehead, inconspicuous chin. It has endured unaltered through the centuries. . . „ , , You can find it in any Guards mess. And you can also find it, where I have seen "it, in the countenance of King Arthur as ho was depicted 500 years ago in the statue that watches by the tomb of Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck, in the Tyrol.