ABOUT FACES
Watch the faces as
you walk along the street ! If you get the habit of noticing, your
observations will grow keener. It is surprising to see how seldom we
find a really quiet face. I do not mean that there should be no lines in
the face. We are here in this world at school and we cannot have any
real schooling unless we have real experiences. We cannot have real
experiences without suffering, and suffering which comes from the
discipline of life and results in character leaves lines in our faces.
It is the lines made by unnecessary strain to which I refer.
Strange to say the
unquiet faces come mostly from shallow feeling. Usually the deeper the
feeling the less strain there is on the face. A face may look troubled,
it may be full of pain, without a touch of that strain which comes from
shallow worry or excitement.
The strained
expression takes character out of the face, it weakens it, and certainly
it detracts greatly from whatever natural beauty there may have been to
begin with. The expression which comes from pain or any suffering well
borne gives character to the face and adds to its real beauty as well as
its strength.
To remove the
strained expression we must remove the strain behind; therefore the
hardest work we have to do is below the surface. The surface work is
comparatively easy.
I know a woman whose
face is quiet and placid. The lines are really beautiful, but they are
always the same. This woman used to watch herself in the glass until she
had her face as quiet and free from lines as she could get it, she used
even to arrange the corners of her mouth with her fingers until they
had just the right droop.
Then she observed
carefully how her face felt with that placid expression and studied to
keep it always with that feeling, until by and by her features were
fixed and now the placid face is always there, for she has established
in her brain an automatic vigilance over it that will not allow the
muscles once to get "out of drawing."
What kind of an old
woman this acquaintance of mine will make I do not know. I am curious to
see her, but now she certainly is a most remarkable hypocrite. The
strain in behind the mask of a face which she has made for herself must
be something frightful. And indeed I believe it is, for she is ill most
of the time and what could keep one in nervous illness more entirely
than this deep interior strain which is necessary to such external
appearance of placidity.
There comes to my
mind at once a very comical illustration of something quite akin to this
although at first thought it seems almost the reverse. A woman who
constantly talked of the preeminency of mind over matter, and the
impossibility of being moved by external circumstances to any one who
believed as she did, this woman I saw very angry.
She was sitting with
her face drawn in a hundred cross lines and all askew with her anger.
She had been spouting and sputtering what she called her righteous
indignation for some minutes, when after a brief pause and with the
angry expression still on her face she exclaimed: "Well, I don't care,
it's all peace within."
I doubt if my masked
lady would ever have declared to herself or to any one else that "it
was all peace within." The angry woman was - without doubt - the deeper
hypocrite, but the masked woman had become rigid in her hypocrisy. I do
not know which was the weaker of the two, probably the one who was
deceiving herself.
But to return to
those drawn, strained lines we see on the people about us. They do not
come from hard work or deep thought. They come from unnecessary
contractions about the work. If we use our wills consistently and
steadily to drop such contractions, the result is a more quiet and
restful way of living, and so quieter and more attractive faces.
This unquietness
comes especially in the eyes. It is a rare thing to see a really quiet
eye; and very pleasant and beautiful it is when we do see it. And the
more we see and observe the unquiet eyes and the unquiet faces the
better worth while it seems to work to have ours more quiet, but not to
put on a mask, or be in any other way a hypocrite.
The exercise
described in a previous chapter will help to bring a quiet face. We must
drop our heads with a sense of letting every strain go out of our
faces, and then let our heads carry our bodies down as far as possible,
dropping strain all the time, and while rising slowly we must take the
same care to drop all strain.
In taking the long
breath, we must inhale without effort, and exhale so easily that it
seems as if the breath went out of itself, like the balloons that
children blow up and then watch them shrink as the air leaves them.
Five minutes a day
is very little time to spend to get a quiet face, but just that five
minutes, if followed consistently will make us so much more sensitive to
the unquiet that we will sooner or later turn away from it as by a
natural instinct.
ABOUT VOICES
I Knew an old
German, a wonderful teacher of the speaking voice who said "the ancients
believed that the soul of the man is here" - pointing to the pit of his
stomach. "I do not know," and he shrugged his shoulders with expressive
interest, "it may be and it may not be, but I know the soul of the
voice is here, and you Americans, you squeeze the life out of the word
in your throat and it is born dead."
That old artist
spoke the truth, we Americans, most of us - do squeeze the life out of
our words and they are born dead. We squeeze the life out by the strain
which runs all through us and reflects itself especially in our voices.
Our throats are tense and closed; our stomachs are tense and strained;
with many of us the word is dead before it is born.
Watch people talking
in a very noisy place; hear how they scream at the top of their lungs
to get above the noise. Think of the amount of nervous force they use in
their efforts to be heard.
Now really when we
are in the midst of a great noise and want to be heard, what we have to
do is to pitch our voices on a different key from the noise about us. We
can be heard as well, and better, if we pitch our voices on a lower key
than if we pitch them on a higher key; and to pitch your voice on a low
key requires very much less effort than to strain to a high one.
I can imagine
talking with some one for half an hour in a noisy factory, for instance,
and being more rested at the end of the half hour than at the
beginning. Because to pitch your voice low you must drop some
superfluous tension and dropping superfluous tension is always restful.
I beg any or all of
my readers to try this experiment the next time they have to talk with a
friend in a noisy street. At first the habit of screaming above the
noise of the wheels is strong on us and it seems impossible that we
should be heard if we speak below it. It is difficult to pitch our
voices low and keep them there. But if we persist until we have formed a
new habit, the change is delightful.
There is one other
difficulty in the way; whoever is listening to us may be in the habit of
hearing a voice at high tension and so find it difficult at first to
adjust his ear to the lower voice and will in consequence insist that
the lower tone cannot be heard as easily.
It seems curious
that our ears can be so much engaged in expecting screaming that they
cannot without a positive effort of the mind readjust in order to listen
to a lower tone. But it is so. And, therefore, we must remember that to
be thoroughly successful in speaking intelligently below the noise we
must beg our listeners to change the habit of their ears as we ourselves
must change the pitch of our voices.
The result both to speaker and listener is worth the effort ten times over.
As we habitually
lower the pitch of our voices our words cease gradually to be "born
dead." With a low-pitched voice everything pertaining to the voice is
more open and flexible and can react more immediately to whatever may be
in our minds to express.
Moreover, the voice
itself may react back again upon our dispositions. If a woman gets
excited in an argument, especially if she loses her temper, her voice
will be raised higher and higher until it reaches almost a shriek. And
to hear two women "argue" sometimes it may be truly said that we are
listening to a "caterwauling." That is the only word that will describe
it.
But if one of these
women is sensitive enough to know she is beginning to strain in her
argument and will lower her voice and persist in keeping it lowered the
effect upon herself and the other woman will put the "caterwauling" out
of the question.
"Caterwauling" is an
ugly word. It describes an ugly sound. If you have ever found yourself
in the past aiding and abetting such an ugly sound in argument with
another say to yourself "caterwauling," "caterwauling," "I have been
'caterwauling' with Jane Smith, or Maria Jones," or whoever it may be,
and that will bring out in such clear relief the ugliness of the word
and the sound that you will turn earnestly toward a more quiet way of
speaking.
The next time you
start on the strain of an argument and your voice begins to go up, up,
up - something will whisper in your ear "caterwauling" and you will at
once, in self-defense, lower your voice or stop speaking altogether.
It is good to call
ugly things by their ugliest names. It helps us to see them in their
true light and makes us more earnest in our efforts to get away from
them altogether.
I was once a guest
at a large reception and the noise of talking seemed to be a roar, when
suddenly an elderly man got up on a chair and called "silence," and
having obtained silence he said, "it has been suggested that every one
in this room should speak in a lower tone of voice."
The response was
immediate. Every one went on talking with the same interest only in a
lower tone of voice with a result that was both delightful and soothing.
I say every one,
there were perhaps half a dozen whom I observed who looked and I have no
doubt said "how impudent." So it was "impudent" if you chose to take it
so, but most of the people did not choose to take it so and so brought a
more quiet atmosphere and a happy change of tone.
Theophile Gautier
said that the voice was nearer the soul than any other expressive part
of us. It is certainly a very striking indicator of the state of the
soul. If we accustom ourselves to listen to the voices of those about us
we detect more and more clearly various qualities of the man or the
woman in the voice, and if we grow sensitive to the strain in our own
voices and drop it at once when it is perceived, we feel a proportionate
gain.
I knew of a blind
doctor who habitually told character by the tone of the voice, and men
and women often went to him to have their characters described as one
would go to a palmist.
Once a woman spoke
to him earnestly for that purpose and he replied, "Madam, your voice has
been so much cultivated that there is nothing of you in it - I cannot
tell your real character at all." The only way to cultivate a voice is
to open it to its best possibilities, not to teach its owner to pose or
to imitate a beautiful tone until it has acquired the beautiful tone
habit. Such tones are always artificial and the unreality in them can be
easily detected by a quick ear.
Most great singers
are arrant hypocrites. There is nothing of themselves in their tone. The
trouble is to have a really beautiful voice one must have a really
beautiful soul behind it.
If you drop the
tension of your voice in an argument for the sake of getting a clearer
mind and meeting your opponent without resistance, your voice helps your
mind and your mind helps your voice.
They act and react
upon one another with mutual benefit. If you lower your voice in general
for the sake of being more quiet, and so more agreeable and useful to
those about you, then again the mental or moral effort and the physical
effort help one another.
It adds greatly to a
woman's attraction and to her use to have a low, quiet voice and if any
reader is persisting in the effort to get five minutes absolute quiet
in every day let her finish the exercise by saying something in a quiet,
restful tone of voice.
It will make her more sensitive to her unrestful tones outside, and so help her to improve them.
ABOUT FRIGHTS
Here are two true
stories and a remarkable contrast. A nerve specialist was called to see a
young girl who had had nervous prostration for two years. The physician
was told before seeing the patient that the illness had started through
fright occasioned by the patient's waking and discovering a burglar in
her room.
Almost the moment
the doctor entered the sick room, he was accosted with: "Doctor, do you
know what made me ill ? It was frightful." Then followed a minute
description of her sudden awakening and seeing the man at her bureau
drawers.
This story had been
lived over and over by the young girl and her friends for two years,
until the strain in her brain caused by the repetition of the impression
of fright was so intense that no skill nor tact seemed able to remove
it. She simply would not let it go, and she never got really well.
Now, see the
contrast. Another young woman had a similar burglar experience, and for
several nights after she woke with a start at the same hour. For the
first two or three nights she lay and shivered until she shivered
herself to sleep.
Then she noticed how
tightened up she was in every muscle when she woke, and she bethought
herself that she would put her mind on relaxing her muscles and getting
rid of the tension in her nerves. She did this persistently, so that
when she woke with the burglar fright it was at once a reminder to
relax.
After a little she
got the impression that she woke in order to relax and it was only a
very little while before she succeeded so well that she did not wake
until it was time to get up in the morning.
The burglar
impression not only left her entirely, but left her with the habit of
dropping all contractions before she went to sleep, and her nerves are
stronger and more normal in consequence.
The
two girls had each a very sensitive, nervous temperament, and the
contrast in their behavior was simply a matter of intelligence.
This same
nerve specialist received a patient once who was positively blatant in
her complaint of a nervous shock. "Doctor, I have had a horrible nervous
shock. It was horrible. I do not see how I can ever get over it."
Then she
told it and brought the horrors out in weird, over-vivid colors. It was
horrible, but she was increasing the horrors by the way in which she
dwelt on it.
Finally,
when she paused long enough to give the doctor an opportunity to speak,
he said, very quietly: "Madam, will you kindly say to me, as gently as
you can, 'I have had a severe nervous shock." She looked at him without a
gleam of understanding and repeated the words quietly: "I have had a
severe nervous shock."
In spite of
herself she felt the contrast in her own brain. The habitual blatancy
was slightly checked. The doctor then tried to impress upon her the fact
that she was constantly increasing the strain of the shock by the way
she spoke of it and the way she thought of it, and that she was really
keeping herself ill.
Gradually,
as she learned to relax the nervous tension caused by the shock, a true
intelligence about it all dawned upon her; the over-vivid colors faded,
and she got well. She was surprised herself at the rapidity with which
she got well, but she seemed to understand the process and to be
moderately grateful for it.
If she had
had a more sensitive temperament she would have appreciated it all the
more keenly; but if she had had a more sensitive temperament she would
not have been blatant about her shock.
Annie Payson Call (1853–1940) was a Waltham author.
She wrote several books and published articles in "Ladies' Home Journal".
Many articles are reprinted in her book "Nerves and Common Sense".
The common theme of her work is mental health.
