Dead Pan

Being a Comprehensive Look at the Synthetic Physiognomy of an Ideal Dramatic Critic

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

THIS will try not to be too personal. Let's say that a hitherto unknown drama critic, having been given the accolade of a place on one of New York's most important morning dailies, began, willy-nilly, to have his picture published with his reviews. This was the custom. This was his reward for having laboured so semi-anonymously in the crepuscular dignity of afternoon newsprint elsewhere. Every morning, out of the maledictions and dirges he had composed on the theme of the play of the night before, his own face shone. Like a moon amid the clouds it hung—or so it seemed to him. Not that he had any great illusions about this face, but it was his own.

Suddenly letters of insult and indignation were loosed at him. Readers protested. Subscribers threatened cancellations. Friends wrote him all too friendly advice. "Why do you publish that ugly mug of yours?" "Do you think your stuff is any easier to read when you adorn it with such a photographic proof of your daily dyspepsia, your spiritual baldness, your dull temper?" Just one grim compliment to console him: "The portrait which accompanies your inexcusably mean remarks on my new play explains everything. It is the deadest pan ever put on human shoulders. It is, I presume, the ideal pan for a critic."

THE ideal pan for a critic. The worst had now been said about it. The picture was immediately and permanently removed. But the harm had been done. The critic stayed home and brooded for several first-nightless nights on his supremely good luck in having been born with an ideal critic's pan.

He began mirror-gazing. This was a quite all right occupation, often indulged in (so he remembered) by Dickens and Balzac and other famous physiognomists. He began to study—stealthily, at first, and then with rude delight—the features of fellow critics, producers, ticket-takers, restaurateurs, actors, Sunday editors and Morris Gest.

His world became one of those closely thronged flotillas of faces, disembodied and grotesque, which Ralph Barton delights to draw of the theatrical gatherings. He became almost expert in the infinite variations of the human countenance. Above the constants of white collars and decollete, he saw these pranks accomplished by The Potter who had moulded mortal clay so much the same and yet always so whimsically and minutely different.

The banker who looked like a butcher. The playwright who, in his most threadbare moments, looked like a banker. The miser whom no one would ever dream of accusing of miserliness because he had been born with a jolly snub-nose and ruddy cheeks. The poet with a rough neck. The bootleg-gangster an excellent counterpart of Saint Sebastian. The critics ... all of those otherwise pleasing and impressive critics who appeared to be anything but critics.

He was content. At least he looked his part. His face proclaimed his profession. He had the deadest of pans. He could afford, now, to sit back and ponder on that ideal, analyse calmly and objectively, arrive at some philosophy for the exquisite minutiae of difference in features and expressions which make this or that drama critic's facial confession a delusion or an ideal.

The ideal pan for a critic. He sought some slight hint of it in one of his favourite and most curious books. Not a new book, precisely, nor much noticed by the world's greatest scientists when it appeared in 1923. Perhaps its author, Gerald Elton Fosbroke, gave it too short and frivolous a title page for the pundits to appreciate. He called it Character Qualities Outlined and Related. And added: "Summing Up the Evidence of Individual Qualities and Tendencies as Shown by the Reactions of the Mind and Body on the Face". In such a volume the secret might lie deep.

Certain distinct and more or less familiar faces illustrate this learned text by the Professor. For instance, there are the heads of Seneca and Sir Christopher Wren, of Lavater, Lebec and Henry II of France. Lebec is included because "the looseness of the structures of this face are the result of dissipation. The brow, the eye, the coarseness of the nose, mouth and chin all indicate the relaxation of uncontrollable emotions."

Imagine what consternation arose in our critic's heart when he saw the unmistakable similarity of a most famous fellow play reviewer to this sadly coarse and uncontrollable M. Lebec. It was embarrassing. A real friend would have shut the book then and there, or at least turned his head for a moment, as if from an accidental glimpse of a king in the bathtub, or of some best beloved actress plying a toothpick in public. It was growing uncomfortably personal.

AND from the start you may remember the resolve to avoid the too personal. The only decent and honourable—indeed, charitable—dodge would be to take many critics' pictures, all possible critics', near-critics' and mere play reporters' unsuspecting photographs, and weld them into one composite. A composite that would retain the best features of all and bestow on the residua of undistinguished cuticle and common clay a benignant and helpfully beautifying blur. To this composite the laws of Professor Fosbroke's science might then be as bluntly as you please applied. From this composite the face of perfect criticdom could be evolved.

A critic really should always wear a faults-face. That goes without punning. From time immemorially ungrateful, the critic has been called upon to sit on art's sidelines and wolf the lapses, misdemeanours, wilful crimes in mere creators' play. He must be the sleuth of the aesthetes, the Stone Guest among actors, the snarler, the stepson of Satan denying and deriding before the portal of the Sublime.

What, then, are the correct lineaments for a gentleman of such horrendous occupations? What sort of nose is the well-countenanced critic to wear this season? Is the downward mouth-line fashionable any longer? Are squints in style among the cognoscenti? Are not high brows grown rather hopelessly common? With our critics' composite for a map, and Professor Fosbroke's treatise for a key, we may be able to solve such momentous dilemmas. We may be, as it were, face to face with perfection.

Take, for instance, the matter of foreheads. A compressed brow is one of the signs of Vitality, according to Professor Fosbroke. Creative Ability calls for a "particularly full but compact upper forehead, well rounded on all extremities, high back crown, leaving the brow, which should be prominent, with a reasonably quick curve."

WOULD you say, from his looks, that our assembled critic is either Vital or Creative? Or, incidentally, need he be? Need he even be Original, when Originality is proven by a forehead which is "particularly full on the upper outer corners, but not square, with emotional activity present to a medium degree . . ."?

Would you say our critic possesses Enthusiasm? "A full blooded condition showing active circulation, with elastic muscles, with energy and breadth shown by well developed expanded brow, nose, and mouth structures, and high chest, with good lung capacity, are all essential to Enthusiasm."

Has he a Sense of Humour? If so, then "the development of the muscle bordering the rim of the lower lid, showing active sense excitability, should be evident." Has he Sensitiveness? Look for "a well defined nape line to the neck . . . ear and nose cartilages fine in their texture, not transparent, but tending in this direction, the nostrils unusually finely cut, running to the point of the nose; the upper lip medium too short in length," etc.

The attribute of Judgment is displayed when the nose is expanded, the tip compressed. A good judge must have a long upper lip. The lower lip and ball of the chin should be drawn upward. Mental Alertness, again, calls for a "sharp jaw line", and can be "found where the upper third of the face is more strongly developed than the lower third". A Percipient Mind demands a more than ordinarily deep-seated eye, more than ordinary dilation of the pupil. Power of Observation is shown at its finest in a "brow drawn down close to the eye ... the inner corner of the eye being farther forward than the outer corner—the position something as the eye of the horse. . . ." Would you, then, grant our critic passing marks in Judgment, Perception, Observation? Or even a faint resemblance to the horse?

Alas, the most immediately noticeable characteristics are what Professor Fosbroke calls the "Active Negatives". A muscular chin ball, an irregular lip line, perhaps a droop to one side of the lower lip, full nose and distended nostril . . . what are these signs but the face-marks of Irritability? And when the corners of the mouth and the inner corners of the flanges of the nostrils are all drawn down with a dark red colouring to the whole nose, what but Ill-Temper?

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Shall we go into the sad cases of Resentment, Vindictiveness, Jealousy, Bitterness, Pessimism, Intolerance— into those deductions which the facial scientist must draw from flabby skin and heavy chin, from parched lips, from high nape line and sunken optics and the yellow tinge that eyeballs wear when the bile boils over? Skepticism, Cynicism, Belligerency, Egotism and Cunning . . . they are too painful a set of stocks-in-trade to be sought on this occasion. If they are all component parts of the makeup of the perfect critic, let's pretend we can't discover them. Let's overlook the backward brow, the strained eye, the repressed mouth, the top back apex of the head, the tell-tale wrinkles and the sunken temple of the ideally dead pan.

Better and kinder, in short, to rely on the professor's own explication of Criticism, ipse. He leaves you in no doubt of the looks of a Critic. Thus:

"Criticism is a quality that results in a tendency to raise a question in relation to every action, word or thing with which one is brought in contact. Criticism is the result of having a mind not deep enough to analyse or at least not caring to, but with an irritable urge toward faultfinding. It bespeaks one who is egotistical in that he thinks he knows better about things than others and that he has the judgment to criticise. Criticism is the quickly spoken word, without any deliberation or thought. Criticism as a general rule tends to be destructive rather than constructive.

"The structures indicating this quality are usually the rather full upper forehead and perceptives that are either relaxed or only mildly compressed; light muscle structures, with a tendency toward many wrinkes between the brows, indicating the thin skinned condition; eyes that are reasonably prominent; brows not conpressed on the outer corners, a development of bagginess in the outer corners of the lids; full blooded condition and a full development of the assimilative and secretory systems indicated by full flesh growth. It is always found in one of an emotional nature, and the structures for emotionalism should be considered, as well as the structures for emotional irritability, as irritability is at the bottom of criticism."

And there you have it. And probably with the Professor's most sincere compliments to his book reviewers.