The Human Face

By R. RAGHUNADHA RAO
(Reserve Bank of India, Bombay)

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. Milton, in a phrase that almost seems to savour of blasphemy, speaks of the human  face divine; when Marlowe wants to evoke the image of Helen of Troy he speaks of “the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium.” Of Helen herself Homer sings that so beautiful was her face that as she walked along the walls of Troy, old men turned round to look at her. Mr. Khambatta, in the course of one of his talks, did quote some lines of Sir Walter Raleigh which were extremely uncomplimentary to the human face and the human race. I checked the reference. It was made, I believe, at a garden party. They were improvised verses and did not, of course, represent his considered opinion. Mr. Khambatta said that Sir Walter Raleigh would not have made a good banker. I, for one, am not sorry, because Sir Walter made, by all accounts, an excellent professor of English literature. I should have thought Mr. Khambatta would have forgiven Sir Walter anything, anything at all, for the excellent little volume he contributed to the English Men of Letters series on Shakespeare. This, of course, is by the way.

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 isthe 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 London drawing-room, Lady Caroline noted in her diary, “that fair pale face is my fate.” The meeting led to tragic consequences; it almost drove Lady Caroline to suicide; it led to the social ostracism of Lord Byron and the pageant of a bleeding heart trailed through the capitals of Europe till at last Byron found a martyr’s–or semi-martyr’s–crown at Messolonghi.

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 gothroughfire 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 Macbeththat “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.