The French composer André Gretri (1741-1813) had three daughters of the same age: the eldest - 16, the middle - 15, the youngest - 14 years old.
One winter evening, together with their mother, they went to a ball, to a house they knew well. The dancing was in full swing when Gretry entered, and his daughters were getting everyone's attention. Everyone admired their beauty and humble demeanor.
Gretry walked over to the fireplace, where an important-looking gentleman was standing. Gretry saw that he did not take his eyes off his daughters either. But he looked at the girls, his brow furrowed, in deep and gloomy silence. Suddenly he turned to the composer:
- Dear sir, do you not know these three girls?
For some reason, Gretry did not say that it was his daughter, and answered dryly:
- I think these are three sisters.
- And I think the same. They dance for almost two hours without rest, I watched them all this time. You can see that everyone is in awe of them. You can't be more beautiful, sweeter and more modest.
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His father's heart began to beat faster, Gretry could hardly refrain from admitting that these were his children. The stranger continued; his voice became solemn, with the intonations of a prophet:
- Listen to me carefully. In three years, none of them will be alive!
The stranger's words made a stunning impression on Gretry. The gloomy master immediately left. Gretry wanted to follow him, but could not budge: his legs did not obey him. Having come to his senses, he began to ask others about the strange man, but no one was able to tell his name. Only one thing became clear: he posed as a physiognomist, a student of the famous Lavater.
"This strange prediction came true," Gretry wrote later in his memoirs, "within three years I lost all my daughters …"
The name of Johann Caspar Lavater (1741 - 1801) is now forgotten, as well as the physiognomy developed by him (physiognomy). The most talented of his students, the Viennese physician and anatomist Franz Gall, who supplemented physiognomy with phrenology, a theory according to which one can determine the character and fate of a person by the structure of his skull, is also not remembered.
The essence of Lavater's physiognomy was as follows. Man is an animal, moral and intellectual, that is, lusting, feeling and thinking.
This nature of man is expressed in his entire figure, therefore, in the broadest sense of the word, physiognomy examines the entire morphology of the human body. Since the head is the most expressive mirror of the human soul, physiognomy can be limited to the study of the face.
Intellectual life is expressed in the structure of the skull and forehead, moral life - in the structure of facial muscles, in the outline of the nose and cheeks, animal features reflect the lines of the mouth and chin. The center of the face, its main detail is the eyes, with the surrounding nerves and muscles. Thus, the face is divided, as it were, into floors, according to the three basic elements that make up the soul of everyone. Physiognomy studies the face at rest. In motion and excitement, he is studied by pathognomy.
Having developed such a theory, Lavater himself did not follow it in practice. Since childhood, he loved to paint portraits, was extremely impressionable, and redrawn faces that struck him with beauty or ugliness many times. His visual memory was excellent. He noticed that honesty and nobility give harmony even to an ugly face.
Lavater was born in Zurich, studied theology there, and from 1768 until his death served first as a parish deacon and then as a pastor in his hometown. He continued: to draw ears, noses, chins, lips, eyes, profiles, full faces, silhouettes - and all this with comments. Gradually, Lavater believed in his ability to determine by appearance the mind, character and presence (or absence) of the divine principle in a person.
He had the opportunity to check the correctness of his characteristics in confessions. In his albums there were drawings of fragments of the faces of all his flock, portraits of people familiar and unfamiliar, outstanding, great and ordinary. In Physiognomy, he analyzed the faces of great people of different times in their portraits, and some of the characteristics gave the impression of brilliant psychological guesses.
According to Lavater, Friedrich Barbarossa has the eyes of a genius, while the folds of his face express the annoyance of a person who cannot escape from the yoke of petty circumstances.
Miserly and voluptuous people differ in the same way: a protruding lower lip.
In the person of Socrates there are the makings of stupidity, popularity, drunkenness and even atrocities, but you can see from his face that all this was defeated by efforts of will.
In Brutus, the upper eyelid is thin and "reasonable", the lower - round and soft, corresponding to the duality of his courageous and at the same time sensitive character.
The wide distance between the eyebrows and the eyes in Descartes indicates the mind not so much calmly knowing, but inquisitively striving for it.
Four types of temperament (Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine and Melancholic) in types of appearance
Raphael's soft curls show an expression of simplicity and tenderness that make up the essence of his personality.
In Ignatius Loyola, who was first a warrior and then the founder of the Jesuit order, militancy is visible in the sharp contour of the face and lips, and Jesuitism is manifested in the "sniffing nose" and in the hypocritically half-closed eyelids.
Spinoza's amazing mind is clearly visible in the wide space of the forehead between the eyebrows and the root of the nose, etc. etc.
These remarks, mixed with considerations about temperaments, "national" physiognomies and even about the faces of animals, are fascinating and interesting, but have no scientific value in the absence of scientific methods of observation.
Lavater's exposition of the foundations of physiognomy is constantly interrupted by various lyrical digressions: he teaches the reader, then he scolds the enemies of physiognomy, then he quotes the physiognomic observations of Cicero, Montaigne, Leibniz, Bacon and other philosophers. In addition to them, he still had predecessors: the ancient Greeks - Aristotle and Zopyrus, who defined the essence of Socrates, confident that big ears are a sign of a refined mind; Pliny the Elder, who assured that quite the opposite, but with big ears, will live to a ripe old age.
In his Physiognomy, Lavater at times indulges in despair at the thought of the unknowability of human nature, illustrating this thought with the depiction of the repentant King David, blinded by heavenly light. Indeed, penetration into the essence of human character in such a genius as Shakespeare does not require descriptions of appearance. His plays very rarely talk about facial features, however, reading them, you imagine Hamlet, and Shylock, and Othello, and Iago. Almost everyone…
With a smile, you read about Goethe in Lavater: "The genius of Goethe is especially evident from his nose, which marks productivity, taste and love, in a word, poetry."
Lavater believed in Cagliostro and his miracles. And when his swindles were exposed, Lavater began to claim that this was another Cagliostro, and the true one was a holy man.
Flexible and long, with a protruding nose and bulging eyes, always exalted, he looked like an agitated crane. So he was remembered by those who knew him.
Gradually, physiognomy became the main goal of his life, although he continued to write and preach. His popularity grew, his fame became all-European, and his visit to a number of European cities turned into a triumphal procession. He not only determined the essence of people, but also predicted their fate.
They began to come to him, send portraits of wives, brides, lovers, bring children. Sometimes funny things happened. On one occasion he mistook a criminal sentenced to death for a famous statesman, but in most cases he was right. Miracles have been told about him.
Once a handsome young abbot came to Zurich. Lafather did not like his face. A little time passed, and the abbot committed murder.
A certain count brought his young wife to Lafather. He wanted to hear from the famous physiognomist that he was not mistaken in his choice. She was a beauty, and the count hoped that her soul was just as beautiful. Lavater doubted this and, in order not to upset her husband, tried to avoid a direct answer. The Count insisted. I had to say that Lavater was really thinking about his wife. The count was offended and did not believe it. Two years later, his wife left him and ended her days in a brothel.
One lady brought her daughter from Paris. Glancing at the child, Lavater refused to speak. The lady begged. Then he wrote something on a sheet of paper, put it in an envelope, sealed it and took the lady's word to print it no earlier than six months later. During this time, the girl died. Mother opened the envelope and read: "I grieve with you."
Lavater compiled his own psychological portrait:
“He is sensitive and vulnerable to the extreme, but his natural flexibility makes him a person always contented … Look at these eyes: his soul is mobile-contrast, you will get everything or nothing from him. What he must perceive, he will perceive immediately or never … The thin line of the nose, especially the bold angle formed with the upper lip, testifies to the poetic makeup of the soul; large closed nostrils indicate moderation of desires.
His eccentric imagination contains two forces: a sound mind and an honest heart. A clear, open forehead shows kindness. His main drawback is gullibility, he is benevolent to the point of carelessness. If twenty people in a row deceive him, he will not stop trusting the twenty-first, but the one who once arouses his suspicion will get nothing from him …"
He was convinced that the characterization was impartial.
Fans idolized Lavater, considered him a seer. Great writers and poets studied physiognomy in order to make the descriptions of the heroes of their works more closely match their inner world. With reference to Lafater, Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov characterizes Pechorin's appearance in "Princess of Lithuania". The correspondence of portrait characteristics with physiognomy is in many of Lermontov's works. In February 1841, Lermontov, in a letter to A. I. Bibikov was told that he was buying Lavater's book.
Dickens's portrait of a bigot and scoundrel Uriah Tipa is remarkable, which disgusts the reader at the first meeting:
“The low doors under the arch opened and the same face appeared in them again. Despite the noticeable reddish tinge inherent in the skin of most red-haired people, it seemed to me as similar to the face of a dead man as it did at the moment when it looked out of the window before.
Its owner was indeed a red-haired youth of only fifteen years old, as I later learned. Then he seemed to me much older. His red hair was cut extremely short to match a comb. He had almost no eyebrows at all, but his eyelashes were completely absent. This gave his red-brown eyes a very special expression. They were so devoid of proper shade and cover that I could not imagine how the owner arranged for them to sleep.
It was a broad-shouldered and bony young man in a black frock coat and similar trousers and a white tie. The suit seemed decent to me, and the coat was buttoned up. Especially striking was the long, thin hand of a young man, reminiscent of a skeleton arm …"
Dickens goes on to describe how this young man loved to rub his hands incessantly and occasionally wipe them dry with a handkerchief. When he ran his finger across the sheet of paper, it seemed that a wet and slippery trace remained on it, like from a snail …"
Honore de Balzac in "The Human Comedy", in the part called "The Peasants", based on the physiognomy of Lavater, gives the following portrait characterization of one of the heroes - Tonsaru:
“He hid his true character under the guise of stupidity, through which sometimes common sense, which resembled the mind, gleamed, especially since from his father-in-law he adopted a“catchy speech”. A flattened nose, as if confirming the saying "God marks rogue," awarded Tonsar with a nasal tone, the same as that of everyone who was disfigured by the disease, narrowing the nasal cavity, which makes it difficult for air to enter it.
The upper teeth protruded at random, and this, in Lavater's opinion, a formidable defect, was all the more noticeable because they sparkled with whiteness, like the teeth of a dog. If Tonsar had not had the imaginary complacency of a slacker and the carelessness of a village hawk, he would have instilled fear even on the most insightful people.
There were a lot of followers of Lavater in the literary environment. Physiognomy provided a wealth of material. He was a win-win with fictional heroes. It was used by both admirers of the great physiognomist and those who had not heard of him. Signs of external traits corresponding to a particular character trait spread among representatives of different strata of society and no longer required references to the original source. In addition, they could have been Lavater's predecessors.
Thin lips are for an evil person, thick lips for a good person. The black eye is dangerous, the blue one is beautiful. A chin protruding forward is in strong-willed people, a sloping chin is in weak-willed people, etc. etc.
The legend of the looped ears was especially impressive. It is cited by Ivan Bunin in a story with the same title: “Geeks, geniuses, vagabonds and murderers have looped ears, that is, they look like a noose - just like the one that crushes them.”
And everything would be fine if everyone could, like Lavater, determine character and predict fate based on his theory. Since this did not happen, there were no regularities, but there were only random coincidences, physiognomy began to be forgotten and, moreover, ridiculed as a pseudoscience.
One of the curiosities that went down in history was an attempt to define the character of Charles Darwin by the follower and admirer of Lavater, the captain of the sailing ship "Beagle" Fitzroy, who believed in physiognomy as a system not subject to criticism.
He was convinced that he would be able to determine the abilities of each of the candidates who came to him for the post of naturalist in circumnavigation by the shape of the nose. Looking closely into Darwin's face, he felt some doubt that a man with a similar nose would have the energy and determination to endure the journey ahead. Fortunately, Fitzroy managed to overcome his doubts and later had to admit that he was wrong.
The life of the Zurich pastor could not have been overshadowed by anything if he had not voiced his protest against the occupation of Switzerland by the French in 1796. For this he was expelled from Zurich, but after a few months he returned. His sermons and moral reasoning resumed, adding nothing to his fame as a physiognomist and to his literary fame. He wrote several works on biblical themes and collections of religious lyrics, but as a poet he was of no importance.
His death in 1801 was the result of a naive idealistic view of things. He decided to indulge in soul-saving discourses with drunken French marauders. One of them shot him. From this wound, Lavater died. Before his death, he forgave the murderer and even dedicated a poem to him.
Did Lavater, the seer of the fate of so many people, know what fate awaited him? He has no indication of this.
“If we had accurate images of people who ended their lives on the scaffold (such live statistics would be extremely useful for society),” wrote Balzac, “then the science created by Lavater and Halle would unmistakably prove that the shape of the head of these people, even innocent, marked with some strange features. Yes, rock stigmatizes the faces of those who are destined to die a violent death."