THE HUMAN FACE
By
R. RAGHUNADHA RAO
(Reserve
Bank of
The
subject I have chosen for my talk1 this evening is the Human Face.
If I may be allowed to perpetrate an Irish bull, the human face has been
staring humanity in the face since the dawn of creation. No wonder it has
attracted a lot of comment, most of it, I am glad to say, favourable.
Poets have extolled it; painters and sculptors have tried to fix for ever what are essentially transient emotions that find expression in the face.
The
face is the feature we recognise people by. You may
forget a man’s name but his face remains familiar. In all this welter of
humanity no two faces are exactly alike. Beauty competitions and picture
magazines have made us familiar with what I believe are known as vital
statistics–a series of measurements: bust 38, waist 22, hips 39 and so
on. A tailor’s dummy, however, does not make a human being and the most
beautifully proportioned body would only repel if the face that looked out at
us was ugly. Set the head of a hag on the Venues de Milo herself and she
would cease to evoke admiration.
Physiologically
speaking the face is the frontal aspect of the head. The head is topped
by a skull on which there is an outgrowth of hair which can be a person’s
crowning glory. It can cause embarrassment by turning prematurely
grey or, worse still by dropping off but this is one of the ills the flesh is
heir to, and one tries to overcome it as best one can by hair lotions, dyes or,
in an earlier age, by wearing wigs. The face is the seat of four of the five
organs of sense. It is curious that some of these organs serve a dual
purpose–part of the wise economy of Nature, I suppose. The eye sees, of course;
it also speaks a distinct language of its own. It was a Tamil poet who said–I
attempt a very inadequate translation–“When eye is locked with eye, what need
is there for words?” The nose, with which you smell and
through which you breathe, is another distinctive feature of the face. I
mean you cannot help noticing it if it sticks out a mile. The nose is supposed
by some to be an index of character–this is a subject, however, which we must
leave to the experts. Let me, just in passing, note how much the pathos of Falstaff’s end is heightened by the reference to that once
fleshy, bulbous red nose now “as sharp as a pen and a babbled of green fields.”
Incidentally, the nose is the only part of the face that we can, if it is long
enough, see directly without the aid of a mirror. To look down at the end of
one’s nose first through one eye and then through the other, is, we are told, a
lesson in humility never forgotten. One author assures us that after the
experience life is never quite the same again.
Faces
can haunt, as Banquo’s face haunted Macbeth. We all know how Lady Caroline Lamb was haunted by
the vision of Byron’s face. After meeting him for the first time in a
I
spoke a moment ago of painters lavishing their colour
and their paint on the human face. Just a word or two about what is perhaps the
most famous face ever painted. I refer to the Mona Lisa of Da
Vinci about the secret of whose enigmatic smile pages enough have been written
to fill a volume. We are told that Leonardo employed singers and
instrumentalists in order to keep his sister amused. The famous smile,
incidentally, is confined to the left corner of the mouth. This I understand
was one of the social tricks cultivated by Renaissance ladies, who were told by
advisers in beauty and deportment that it was an infallible recipe for charming
the other sex. I have sometimes surprised the most amazing grimaces on the
faces of my friends and have later discovered to my horror that it was an
imitation–an unconscious one of course–of the Mona Lisa smile. There is another
painting by an Italian painter, I think, of an old man and his grandchild. The
old man’s nose is hideously ravaged by some disease; but so benign is the
expression on his face that the effect of the picture is in no way ridiculous;
it is extremely moving. The human face, gentlemen can be transformed to the
angelic when it is suffused by generous emotions.
The
face is the only part of the body that is always on view to the public gaze.
Hands may be encased in gloves and feet in shoes, but, at least after veils
have gone out of fashion, the face is there for all to see. Except
metaphorically, you cannot bury your face in the sand. Deformities in the face
are less easily hidden than elsewhere. The ravages of time leave their marks
indelibly there. Shoulders and other parts of the body can be filled out by the
tailor’s art. No such artifices are available which can radically alter the
appearance of a person’s face. No wonder, then, that a lot of
human ingenuity and thought have been expended on techniques of presenting the
face to the world so as to emphasize its advantages and minimise its defects and deficiencies.
Woodrow
Wilson the famous American President, was fond of quoting certain lines, as
applicable to his face. The lines ran
As
a beauty I am not a great star
Others
are handsomer far;
But
my face–I don’t mind it
Because
I am behind it
Its
the folks out in front that I jar.
I
hope, gentlemen, that laughter was not unkindly meant. If it was, I would have
to join it myself–I have more reasons to. The point I would like to make,
however, is that Wilson won his election, which brings me to the cardinal
distinction I want to draw.
In
the lower orders of creation it is the male that plays the leading part in the
drama of courting. The barnyard cock, e.g., proudly struts his dames before;
the peacock spreads out his feathers in a gorgeous display while we are told
that the male spider performs an absolutely fantastic dance in an attempt to
attract the female, only, in the end, to be gobbled up by her. In the human
species it is left to the female to act the hunter. If you are disinclined to
believe my word, gentlemen, I would only refer you to Bernard Shaw’s play Man
and Superman where you will observe how the hero’s fiance
pursues him even to Hell were the poor man is trying to seek some relaxation in
an intellectual discussion with Mephistophiles. Or better
still, analyse your own experience. I am, of course,
aware that it is the man who makes the formal proposal, but do you think the
poor fellow has any other course left open at that stage? I, for one, have no
quarrel with this wise dispensation of Providence; if my
endorsement will help Providence any, it is readily given. A plain face is not
a completely disabling handicap to a man. You remember that
Desdemona loved Othello not for his appearance but the dangers he had passed.
We, luckily, gentlemen, are not expected to go through fire and
water to win the lady of our choice; in this age of sophisters
and economists the ladies prefer a comfortable bank balance to military
decorations. Let us thank Providence for the practical-mindedness of women!
This practical-mindedness has nowhere shown itself more conspicuously than in
the extreme attention the women bestow on the care and beautification of their
faces. After all a woman’s face is her fortune. It would take up too much of
our time to go into the details of a lady’s toilette, even if we could hope to
penetrate into all its mysteries. It is at least curious to know that the more
glamorous novelties of recent years included perfumed earrings and diamond
beauty spots that sparkled under electric light. In the matter of dressing
their hair, as we all know, women have evolved various styles. In the 1770s we
are told “the faces of fashionable women were dominated by vast and extravagant
hair-dressings, often twice as high as the face itself...grease was rubbed into
the hair to clog it and the whole mass was then built round a frame of linen
and wire and stiffened and whitened with powder or flour; the sticky hair was
then drawn up over big pads of wool on top of the head, worked into fantastic
shapes and powdered again. For ceremonial occasions these hair-dressings might
be decorated not only with ribbons, jewels and feathers but with ornaments
representing butterflies, birds, even coaches-and-horses and ships in full
sail...A lady so got up sometimes went to the ball kneeling on the floor of her
coach with her head out of the window, and when she began to dance she had to
take care that her hair did not collide with the chandeliers.” We are told
that, in spite of the utmost precautions, accidents did occur and in two cases
at least the injuries proved fatal. To these martyrs to the dictates of fashion
let us at least pay the tribute of a sigh. This particular hair-style went out
of fashion when William Pitt, rather unchivalrously,
imposed a fairly steep tax on hair powder.
Men,
as I said a moment ago, do not need to both in so much over the care and
maintenance of their faces. Even in these days of equality of the sexes, men
are the main breadwinners and economically they are the masters. Variations for
them have been confined either to the growing of beards or shaving them off. A
beard adds an air of mystery to the human face and a full grown one inspires a
certain awe; representations of Jehovah or Zeus or the mighty prophets always
show them with a flowing beard. But a straggly and unkempt beard can be an
eyesore and a streamlined age, I suppose, has no use for excrescences.
Moustaches, covering a lesser area and more capable of cultivation, are still
popular–a wide variety of them can be seen. Almost every day from the
handle-bar to the mousy Charlie Chaplin.
Having
spoken so much of the exterior aspects of the human face, gentlemen, let us not
forget that the face is an index of the character and emotions of the
individual. The human face is supplied richly with blood-vessels which, I
believe, run close to the surface of the skin. Emotions betray themselves
unmistakably in the face. It can flush with anger or with embarrassment, as
when you blush, or blanch with fear. How to read character in a face is something
which we only learn by experience. Old Duncan said in Macbeth that “there is no art to find the
mind’s construction in the face.” Poor man, he paid with his life for his
failure to do so. The human face–the
same one–is capable of the most
varied expressions; there used to be an actor who was known as the man with a
thousand faces. I was going through the pages of an old issue of Pageant which
featured–with illustrations–President Eisenhower’s
face from A to Z. X in the series, incidentally, stands for Xerostoma
(dryness of mouth)–I am afraid, atleast in Bombay, we wear that expression all the time! As
bankers, gentlemen, we deal with human beings, and as far as the person himself
is concerned, and till we get to know him better, we have only his face to go
by. Of course we cannot take everything at its face value but at any rate we
have to arrive at it to be able to work out the discount. Nobody has ever been
able to work out a satisfactory formula to determine the human character. I
shall just mention a touching little incident about which I read the other day
which may have a moral for us. It concerns a little girl at a busy traffic
intersection waiting to cross the street. She looked up at the faces of the
passersby, then went up to an elderly-looking gentleman with a pleasant open
face, put her hand in his and said, ‘Will you please take me across?’
You
must have noticed, gentlemen, that I have not mentioned what is sometimes the
most prominent feature in the human face, that is the mouth. The best thing
that can be said about it, either as an aid to beauty or from any other point
of view, is that it is best kept shut. Which is perhaps what I should have
done. In any case, gentlemen, I have quite done now.
1 A
talk by a banker to bankers in Bombay.