Facial Expression. 69 



which is a very wide " pseudo-science " as Oliver Wendell 

 Holmes calls it ; and I can merely remark in passing that the 

 excellent reasons on which he bases his nomenclature are fully 

 and pithily stated in the little essay on the subject that appears 

 in his " Professor at the Breakfast-table." The other point 

 that I must refer to, in regard to the form of the face, is to 

 enquire whether there is any necessary connexion between a 

 certain proportion among the features and the conventional 

 idea of beauty. Taking up this question in the widest sense, 

 it must certainly be answered in the negative. There is 

 assuredly no standard of beauty of face that could comprise the 

 ideals of all civilised races, to say nothing of the peculiarities 

 that might be discovered by the curious enquirer among some 

 of the uncivilsed. Viewed in this wide aspect, there is no 

 solution to the problem, and one can only escape from the 

 dilemma by the aid of the proverb De giistibus non est 

 disputandum. Yet for most European races, for all at least 

 that by descent or intellectual contact have acquired something 

 of the Hellenic spirit, it would appear that a law of the 

 necessary form of beauty may be laid down ; and it suggests 

 strange possibilities as to the actual origin of our sense of 

 formal beauty, when we discover an exact mathematical princi- 

 ple of proportion underlying this conception. Did those clear- 

 sighted sages who compiled Euclid and taught us how to reason, 

 also compile the canon law of beauty and teach us the excel- 

 lence of true proportion in material form, as in that of thought ? 

 To that question there is no answer now. We do not even 

 know who formulated the truths of Euclid ; yet that most 

 witty of all scriptures remains to shew what the men of that 

 time could do. And if we believe that Pheidias and Praxiteles 

 were inspired by the principle of mathematical proportion, to 

 which many of their works undoubtedly conform, we are making 

 at least a more reasonable guess at truth than if we held the law 

 of proportion expressed in their work to be mere coincidence, or 

 the outcome of an instinct felt and acted on, but not understood. 

 Into this curious enquiry I cannot further enter here, but it is 

 interesting to notice that the researches of modern investigators 



