but unsatisfactory. If I hear that a man is lymphatic
or nervous-sanguine, I cannot tell therefrom whether
I shall like and trust him. He may produce a
phrenological chart showing that his knobby head is
the home of all the virtues, and that the vicious
tendencies are represented by holes in his cranium,
and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as disagreeable
as if phrenology had not been invented. I feel
sometimes that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity.
Its charts are almost as misleading concerning character
as photographs. And photography may be described
as the art which enables commonplace mediocrity to
look like genius. The heavy-jowled man with shallow
cerebrum has only to incline his head so that the lying
instrument can select a favorable focus, to appear
in the picture with the brow of a sage and the chin
of a poet. Of all the arts for ministering to
human vanity the photographic is the most useful, but
it is a poor aid in the revelation of character.
You shall learn more of a man’s real nature
by seeing him walk once up the broad aisle of his church
to his pew on Sunday, than by studying his photograph
for a month.
No, we do not get any certain standard of men by a
chart of their temperaments; it will hardly answer
to select a wife by the color of her hair; though
it be by nature as red as a cardinal’s hat, she
may be no more constant than if it were dyed.
The farmer who shuns all the lymphatic beauties in
his neighborhood, and selects to wife the most nervous-sanguine,
may find that she is unwilling to get up in the winter
mornings and make the kitchen fire. Many a man,
even in this scientific age which professes to label
us all, has been cruelly deceived in this way.
Neither the blondes nor the brunettes act according
to the advertisement of their temperaments. The
truth is that men refuse to come under the classifications
of the pseudo-scientists, and all our new nomenclatures
do not add much to our knowledge. You know what
to expect—if the comparison will be pardoned
—of a horse with certain points; but you
wouldn’t dare go on a journey with a man merely
upon the strength of knowing that his temperament was
the proper mixture of the sanguine and the phlegmatic.
Science is not able to teach us concerning men as
it teaches us of horses, though I am very far from
saying that there are not traits of nobleness and of
meanness that run through families and can be calculated
to appear in individuals with absolute certainty;
one family will be trusty and another tricky through
all its members for generations; noble strains and
ignoble strains are perpetuated. When we hear
that she has eloped with the stable-boy and married
him, we are apt to remark, “Well, she was a
Bogardus.” And when we read that she has
gone on a mission and has died, distinguishing herself
by some extraordinary devotion to the heathen at Ujiji,
we think it sufficient to say, “Yes, her mother
married into the Smiths.” But this knowledge
comes of our experience of special families, and stands
us in stead no further.
Print
Word
PDF
