My Face Is My Fortune by Dr F W Boreham

An essay found in Dr Boreham's desk.

The milk maid in the nursery rhyme boasted that her face was her fortune.¹ Her proud declaration is, in reality, and understatement. Few of us realise the immensity of the opulence that a face may represent.

I

 The universe may be ransacked in vain for any more complicated or amazing piece of mechanism. It is, of all precision instruments, the most precise. In his essay on Madame D’Arblay, Macaulay stresses the fact that, while no two faces are alike, yet, very few faces, deviate very widely from a common standard.  Among the millions of people who inhabit London, he says, there is not one who could be mistaken by his acquaintance for another; yet one may walk from Paddington to Mile End without seeing one person in whom any feature is so overcharged that we turn around to stare at it. An infinite number of varieties lies between limits which are not very far asunder.

 Whether we recognise it or not, we are all made happier or gloomier by the faces that we meet on the street. The glances that greet us on the pavement are strangely infectious.

A yawn, a laugh, a smile, a pucker, a scowl – no one of these can mantle a countenance without changing, as if by magic, the cast of every other face in the company.  A yawn, and everyone looks bored; a smile, and everybody brightens. It follows that a beautiful face is the most effective adornment that can be found in any company, whilst a brutal or repulsive face nullifies every attempt that can be made to render the environment, charming.

II

But the really extraordinary thing is that each of the millions of faces that we meet, so closely resembling each other yet so sharply differing from each other is not so much a face as a set of faces. For the human face, wonderful as it is, is, but the outward and visible symbol of something even more wonderful than itself. “Strictly speaking,” says Victor Hugo, in his ‘Travailleurs de la Mer’, “strictly speaking, there is something that resembles us even more strongly than our faces; and that is our expressions.”  A single face, differing in general outline from all other faces, is itself capable of an infinite variety of aspects and variations. Each expression, as it momentarily appears and disappears, is composed of a certain admixture of emotional ingredients. In each such admixture, the component parts are mingled in proportions suggested by the reactions of the individual to the immediate circumstances, and that intricate admixture, in those identical proportions, is never likely to occur. The face is a kaleidoscope.

 Herein lies, the secret of all really superlative art. Take the drama, for example. A first class actor can not only mimic a man; he can mimic any man in any mood. Diderot says that he once saw David Garrick pass his head between two folding screens, and, in the space of a few seconds, his face assumed successively, an incredible multiplicity of expressions.  It portrayed the entire gamut of human emotion.

III

Turning from the stage to the studio, Ruskin used to say that all the greatest painting in the world is the painting of the human face.

The veriest tyro can produce a recognisable portrait of a familiar countenance; only a master can convey to the canvas, a typical and characteristic expression.  “Strictly speaking,” as Hugo says, “the face is merely a mask; the man is cleverly concealed behind it.” It is the supreme business of the artist to paint, not the mask, but the man. The actor must reveal the man’s inner motives, mental impulses, changing emotions;  the artist must make the countenance upon the canvas the instrument by which he opens to us a window through which we penetrate the very soul.

In a sense, every man is a sculptor; he is working, not in marble or granite or bronze, but in flesh and blood.  By means of his response to the experience of life, he is gradually carving a face. That is why we commonly speak of good faces or bad faces. The good faces are not of necessity lovely faces, nor the bad faces ugly faces. The good face may be wrinkled and scarred; the bad face may have every feature perfectly poised and balanced. But, pretty or plain, character looks through. And character looks through because character is the one thing that matters.  The face is the man, and the face of the moment is the man of that moment. It is because the human countenance is so perfectly equipped as an expression of the personality behind it, that the most sublime revelation ever given to men took the form of a face. “God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,” writes, the greatest of the apostles, “has shined into our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”  If the words mean anything, they mean that heaven itself could find no implement more suited to its divine purpose than a human face, and they mean that the man who has reverently gazed into that thorn-crowned face has peered into the heart of the Eternal.

1. Where are You Going, My Pretty Maid? Nursery Rhyme.