From: joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   Martha Bridegam  writes:   
      
   > Of course the Sherlock Holmes stories had a big influence on Orwell,   
   > and Orwell himself grew up in the near aftermath of the Victorian   
   > era, and he did tend to write type-casting sorts of things like "At   
   > fifty, everyone has the face he deserves," and the line in the poem   
   > about "...the thing that I saw in your face..." and he also spent   
   > that period playing at being a Master of Disguise. I do get the   
   > feeling that Orwell, too, quietly believed that people tended to fit   
   > types. Certainly he had a taste in his fiction for dramatic moments   
   > supplied by people acting contrary to appearances -- as e.g. the   
   > dreadful transformation of the junk-shop keeper in *1984*, or Fatty   
   > Bowling's unsuspected inner life that leads to his uncharacteristic   
   > stolen vacation.   
      
   The belief in physiognomy -- on faces as an index of character --   
   crops up in a number of odd places in Orwell.  In _Nineteen   
   Eighty-Four_, the treacherous failure of that notion is presented as   
   one of the horrors.  Julia bets her life on her ability to detect   
   political unorthodoxy in her fuckbuddies' faces, and she & Winston   
   make the same bet on O'Brien's face, and lose.  The Party is very good   
   at physiognomy, and no doubt has detected Winston in facecrime despite   
   his continual efforts to avoid it.   
      
   Orwell evidently thought he was pretty good at it too.  I think I may   
   have ridiculed before in this company the passage in "Revenge Is Sour"   
   where he describes a captured SS officer:   
      
       Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance....  He did not look   
     brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low   
     way, intellectual.  His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by   
     powerful spectacles.  He could have been an unfrocked clergyman,   
     an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium....   
      
   I suppose any normal person can tell at twenty feet that I am neurotic   
   and, in a low way, intellectual; but would Orwell have been able to   
   say, looking at me lying on a floor after being awakened by a kick,   
   that I could *not* have been an unfrocked clergyman, etc.?  I think he   
   was bluffing.  The implausibility of the whole idea is nicely   
   suggested by an epigram that I think goes back to the 18th century:   
      
     That there is falsehood in his looks   
     I can and must deny.   
     They say their owner is a knave,   
     And sure, they do not lie.   
      
   Public revelation of character would not be selected for.   
   --   
   ---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   ||:  It is the fate of fools to amuse their enemies and bore  :||   
   ||:  their friends.                                           :||   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)