Woods: What Is There in Physiognomy 



311 



always a finely proportioned being 

 both in face and figure, so here, there, 

 and everywhere, the delusion is con- 

 veyed and multiplied that the good 

 looking man is the average man. This 

 is not at all true, and one way to 

 prove it is simph^ to look at people 

 separately, one after another, and do a 

 little mental arithmetic. 



By taking a number of photographs 

 of people in precisely the same position 

 and over-imposing one upon another, 

 the well known composite photograph 

 is made. But the typical or usual 

 human being is not a composite. Very 

 few people look at all like a composite 

 photograph. Each taken separately 

 varies, more or less, some in one 

 feature, and some in another. Every- 

 one looks different from everyone else, 

 as everyone knows; but how many 

 people have ever thought how aston- 

 ishingly variable the faces of the 

 people one passes on the street really 

 are? Most people do not look at 

 each face separately, but if every single 

 face is scrutinized separately and 

 mentally recorded, the truth of this 

 general variability, in other words, 

 general ugliness, becomes obvious. This 

 can be done on a not too crowded 

 thoroughfare, in a trolley car, or rail- 

 way station. The present writer has 

 whiled away many an hour in this 

 lazy, but not unprofitable occupation 

 of looking at people separately, instead 

 of collectively. One of the best op- 

 portunities in the world for seeing what 

 the average man really looks like comes 

 once a year on Labor Day, when, for 

 anthropological instruction, men are 

 selected, classified and labeled. Let 

 anyone of intelligence, education, and 

 maturity stand on the curbstone as a 

 Labor Day parade swings by, and 

 look at each single face with an idea of 

 mentally adding up the total number 

 of faces that approximate the com- 

 posite face of the idealized working 

 man — such a face for instance as one 

 sees in drawings marked Labor. Some- 

 times he is shaking hands with 

 conventionalized Capital, always a 

 stout gentleman in silk hat, and for- 



merly with side-whiskers. Sometimes 

 he is quarreling with said stout gentle- 

 man, in which case neither party is a 

 subject for flattery from the artist's 

 pencil, but the true standard figure, 

 the one that remains in the mind, is 

 always the idealized or composite, not 

 the true or usual. 



To test this, let the reader turn to the 

 first popular magazine at hand and go 

 through the advertisements or illus- 

 trations. The present writer did this 

 after writing the above sentence, and 

 the accompanying cut (Fig. 5) was 

 the first one found. It shows the 

 point very well. Here we have a well 

 balanced and rather attractive face' 

 the nose average or slightly long, 

 straight, well formed and thoroughly in 

 harmony with the other features. 

 The second and third pictures found are 

 also reproduced (Fig. 6). They are 

 the two symbolic figures of labor 

 illustrating an article on the conditions 

 of labor. Naturally these are idealized 

 and rendered attractive, almost refined 

 in expression. They are here placed 

 face to face and the rest of the picture is 

 omitted.* 



Of course, it cannot be said that 

 faces like this do not occasionally 

 exist in the world of reality, but they 

 are certainly rare. Their rarity can 

 only be appreciated by one who 

 seeks to find them either on the street 

 or at some other spot where genuinely 

 average men can be seen in numbers. 



The person who searches for facial 

 beauty in crowds, either of men or 

 women, will, according to his standards, 

 probably find one face in from ten to 

 twenty, not that will satisfy, for that is 

 another story, but that will conform to 

 standard proportions. In other words 

 more than nine-tenths of the faces one 

 passes on the street have some feature 

 radically wrong. It may be the nose, 

 it may be the mouth, lips, chin, etc. 

 The reason for dwelling on all this is, 

 that there is a sort of paradoxical 

 statement true of the face of the average 

 man. In one way his features are 

 average in another way not. The 

 forty Canadian soldiers (Figs. 8-10) 



All three pictures are from Hearst's International Monthly, 



