“that peculiar set of features which is so characteristic of bad characters in England, and so general among prisoners that it is usually, I believe, known by the name of the ‘felon-face;’ I mean that they have prominent cheek-bones, bullet-shaped head, cowering but restless eyes, and heavy sensual lips, and added to this a shackling dress and manner.”

Of the Damaras Galton says (99) that “their features are often beautifully chiselled, though the expression in them is always coarse and disagreeable.”  And to quote Mungo Park on the Moors once more (158): 

“I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them a disposition toward cruelty and low cunning....  From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics.  The treachery and malevolence of their character are manifested in their plundering excursions against the negro villages.”

BEAUTIFYING INTELLIGENCE

Galton’s reference to the Damaras illustrates the well-known fact that, even where nature makes an effort at chiselling beautiful features the result is a failure if there is no moral and intellectual culture to inspire them, and this puts the grave-stone on the Concupiscence Theory—­for what have moral and intellectual culture to do with carnal desires?  A noble soul even possesses the magic power of transforming a plain face into a radiant vision of beauty, the emotion changing not only the expression but the lines of the face.  Goethe (Eckermann, 1824) and others have indeed maintained that intellect in a woman does not help a man to fall in love with her.  This is true in so far as brains in a woman will not make a man fall in love with her if she is otherwise unattractive or unfeminine.  But Goethe forgot that there is such a thing as hereditary intellectual culture incarnated in the face.  This, I maintain, makes up more than half of the personal beauty which makes a man fall in love.  A girl with good features is twice as beautiful if she is morally pure and has a bright mind.  Sometimes a face is accidentally moulded, into such a regular beauty of form that it seems to mirror mental beauty too.  A man may fall in love with such a face, but as soon as he finds out that it is inhabited by a stupid or coarse mind he will make haste to fall out again, unless his love was predominantly sensual.  I remember once falling in love with a country girl at first sight; her face and figure seemed to me extremely beautiful, except that hard work had enlarged and hardened her hands.  But when I found that her intellect was as coarse as her hands, my ardor cooled at once.