THE DISAPPEARING SMILE.

Manawatu Times, Volume LXV, Issue 1868, 12 March 1913, Page 2

THE DISAPPEARING SMILE.

A London daily paper lias made the alarming discovery that the art of smiling is, in the urban districts at least, become rarer day by day. The cause to which this is attributed is the large amount of high speed tra filling done nowadays. Smiling. it is asserted, is incompatible with speed. Rapid motion sets the facial muscles rigid; it gives a thrill which deadens the risible faculties. A baby will smile in its perambulator as its nurse wheels it along at two miles an hour, but the same baby, riding in a motor car, loses the faculty for smiling as soon as it is aware of the rapid motion. Motor-omnibus drivers, chauffeurs, and taxicab men are usually gloomy, grim taciturn, whereas the omnibus drivers and handsorn cabmen of a decade ago were round, rubicund, jolly and smiling. It is not that a different race has sprung up within the decide, for many of them are the same men as those of ten years ago, but they are travelling above the smile limit. Airmen, again, are not smiling men, as a rule. Smiling photographs of them which are sometimes seen in th-i Press, are, it must be remembered, taken when the aeroplane and its pilot are at rest after a flight, when, the spinal muscles being relaxed, facial muscles can come into play. Few, if any, airmen have been snap-shotted smiling just before flight, and they are much too tense to smile whilstflying. Old Londoners who have revisited the city after an absence of several years, agree in noting the increasing grimness of the London countenance. A much travelled actor recently stated that underground traveling had robbed the people of their smiles, and instanced the guards on the underground trains as the most taciturn of men. But those: who drive at high speeds in the open air are the same. It is the speed, not the underground work, which makes the men gloomy. The rollicking jests and sallies which used to be exchanged by the drivers of omnibuses, and which used to set the whole load of passengers shaking with laughter, are heard no more, and the motor omnibus proceeds on its way with the greatest gravity. The speed has killed the smile. Presumably we have to look forward to the day when men will go about the cities smile-less, and when laughter will be treatsd as a sign of barbarism or idiocy.