Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/603

Rh bent or training. Yet his name was so commanding in the annals of physiognomy as to distract attention from the slightness of the foundations upon which his elaborate superstructure was raised. Indeed, the impressiveness of elaborate plates and luxurious editions, and the support of distinguished but uncritical patrons, were responsible for much of his fame. The reader who desires first-hand acquaintance with Lavater must be prepared for tedious assertion, for generalities that do not even glitter, for persistent avoidance of real issues, for the futile contention and misunderstanding of a propagandist. Of method he had little, and for the most part translated directly and by use of a dictionary of fanciful etymologies, from the language of a superficial anatomy into that of a wholly arbitrary psychology. He presented a popular, empirical grouping of feature-interpretation by virtue of a certain common-sense shrewdness, which he elevated to the dignity of a universal physiognomical sense—“those feelings which are produced at beholding certain countenances, and the conjectures concerning the qualities of the mind,” which the features suggest. The extensive collection of portraits alone offset the tedium of the text. Lavater was an expert draftsman, and a diligent collector of engravings, outline drawings, and the silhouettes then in vogue. To each picture he attached a character-reading, which reflected little more than his personal impression or knowledge of the subject, to which occasionally were added special correlations of such traits as prudence, cunning, industry, caution, determination or what not, with the forehead, the eye, the nose, the mouth, the chin.

It was inevitable that the practical interest, lacking the compensations of Lavater’s serious purpose, rapidly turned physiognomy into vulgar quackery. The followers of Lavater developed a craving for handy recipes by which to interpret the meaning in terms of character, of chin, forehead, eyebrows, and of the several distinctive combinations of feature, by an arbitrary or plausible system of signs. Physiognomy degenerated into a baseless and senseless empiricism. Oblique wrinkles in the forehead were held to indicate an oblique or suspicious mind; small eyebrows with long concave eyelashes were made the sign of phlegmatic melancholia; long high foreheads were advised not to contract friendships or marriages with spherical heads; such was the detailed but arbitrary correlation oracularly set forth with no more analysis or understanding of facial traits than of mental ones.

Lavater’s work supplies a convincing and not too ancient example, if such be needed, of the limitations of impressionism as a basis for the study of character and of its utter futility for the purposes of a sound psychology; and that apart from the like disqualifications resulting from an ignorance of the significance of such somatic features as those which formed the basis of the system. It shows how readily an