THE HAUNTING FACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19328, 15 May 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE HAUNTING FACE.

PICTURES OF THE MIND. ■ BV REV. J. .J. NORTH. We have in common use loud-sounding names in which are tucked away a sex, a nation, all the stars—what we will. These pretentious words are never visualised by those who use them. We say the Germans, the old maids, the heathen, and what do we seeln philosophy learned attempts are made to display the workings of the mind in its reaching out after general ideas, as it climbs, for instance, from Tom, Dick and Harry to the conception of man. We are all John Thompson's bairns, and when we are handling pretentious words wc are really seeing very ordinary sights. Browning put "all the breath and the bloom of the year in the. bag of .one bee." We put into a human face or two a whole sex, a nation, nay, even the Lord (!od himself. Fitr how many men does the idea of woman mean a sweetheart's face? Or if it is not a sweetheart it. is. still some human face we see, a haunting lace. Is there anywhere a more remarkable confession than that o! Mark Rutherford — "A man old and now nearing his end one Sunday, on a November afternoon, met a woman in London streets and looked into her face. Neither he nor she stopped for an idistant, he looked into her face and passed on and never saw her again. He married and had children, who now have children, but that woman s lace has never left him, and the colours on the portrait that hangs in his soul's oratory are as vivid as ever. A thousand times he has appealed to it, and a thousand times it has judged him, and a thousand times has it redeemed him." For Rutherford the idea of woman was in that one face. We probably all carry in our private art gallery a tew pictures whiih are the types of all the great things we talk about and with which we have to do. Grey's Frenchmen. A most remarkable illustration of this is to be found in the momentous book by Lord Grey of Fallodon. He covers with steady gait 25 years of diplomacy. He passes in review great nations whose ambassadors and whose policies were his daily concern. But what did the trench to whom he was so deeply attached mean to him? What did he see when he talked of them and of their army? He tells us with such detail in a book so momentous as to make it plain that the haunting human face had been seen by him. 1 was in the glorious spring of 1914 when he went with King George as Minister attendant on the Royal visit to Paris. The horse-chestnuts were in full flower. The first carriage held the King and the French President. The second contained Sir Edward Grey and the French Prime Minister. But Sir Edward's attention was focussed on the two French cavalry men who rode bv his carriage. "The two were of very different and opposite types. One was of swarthy complexion, with dark brown hair and a snub nose and stolid expression, a typical son of the soil, a fellow to break up (he clods of stiff land and to 'stub the ox-moor.' The other was fair, slender, almost frail in body, a i sensitive face suggesting a possible artist | or poet, perhaps rather a dilettante. His helmet sat uneasily upon him and every now and then he jerked his head to keep it in its place." Grey makes it plain that his conception of the French army with which he had so much to do in the ensuing years was built, on those two haunting faces that followed his carriage from Paris to Yincennes. A German of the Germans. But we all do that more or less. The writer of lines was by a happy chance on the most beautiful of our lakes. Mannpouri, in the January before the Great War broke out. Like other of our best things Mannpouri is hard of access and is therefore never thronged by the tourist, crowd. Among the half dozen at the Lake House was a German major. He was very tall and wore formidable moustachios, and smoked, and that, all day, very long and rank cigars. His English was passable and his hungry mind was ready for as much good talk as might offer. His discussion on the British Indian adventure was memorable and hungry eyes seemed to rake the empty fields of Ofago. as though to annex them. Nobody could call him pleasant. He was soused in the military outlook. But all through the war it was his face that interpreted Germany for tin's man—a i*( not. badly either. He was a sort of microcosm of his misguided country. Does not Thackeray assure us that the battle of Waterloo in all its dimension "world-shaking Waterloo." was for little Amelia just and only Captain George Osborne. The poor child could not see past her faithless lover to get any sort, of sight of the Duke and of "Boney." Everything was George. She may be taken as a case of arrested development. She could not pass from the particular to the general. More successful people use George better. But even so we keep in the halls of memory some haunting human faces that interpret the vaster interests with which we have to do. Holy of Holies. Nor is it otherwise in the highest regions to which insatiable man aspires. When ho seeks the gods it is with very human weapons. To see the eternal is not for us. To realise the Deity directly is not for us. For Christendom the problem of religion is focussed in a haunting human face —the most haunting of all faces. Strangely enough the evangelists give no indication of the features of the Man of Nazareth." There was discussion in the fourth century about it, one sect maintaining that his physical appearance was mean. The artists with almost one consent have given us on their canvases a blonde and oval face. Into that face we convoy the exquisite character traits of the four gospels. Robert Browning, who hit more nails on the head than any other poet, has it that the Arctic seas destroy all other names and fames, but That one face, far from vanish rather firowß, Or decomposes but to recomnose, Becomes my universe that fools and knows. Maybe it is beyond the power of conscious choice to select the pictures of the mind with which we daily live. But so far as we can choose, let us see to it that the haunting faces are as inspiring us may be—angels rather than apes, as 1 i. rjL'li would say.