and this is often the case when the expression is naturally assumed.
The power to bring the grief-muscles freely into play appears to be
hereditary, like almost every other human faculty. A lady belonging to
a family famous for having produced an extraordinary number of great
actors and actresses, and who can herself give this expression with
singular precision, told Dr. Crichton Browne that all her family had
possessed the power in a remarkable degree. The same hereditary
tendency is said to have extended, as I likewise hear from Dr. Browne,
to the last descendant of the family, which gave rise to Sir Walter
Scott s novel of Red Gauntlet; but the hero is described as
contracting his forehead into a horseshoe mark from any strong emotion.
I have also seen a young woman whose forehead seemed almost habitually
thus contracted, independently of any emotion being at the time felt.
The grief-muscles are not very frequently brought into play; and as the
action is often momentary, it easily escapes observation. Although the
expression, when observed, is universally and instantly recognized as
that of grief or anxiety, yet not one person out of a thousand who has
never studied the subject, is able to say precisely what change passes
over the sufferer s face. Hence probably it is that this expression is
not even alluded to, as far as I have noticed, in any work of fiction,
with the exception of Red Gauntlet and of one other novel; and the
authoress of the latter, as I am informed, belongs to the famous family
of actors just alluded to; so that her attention may have been
specially called to the subject.
The ancient Greek sculptors were familiar with the expression, as shown
in the statues of the Laocoon and Arretino; but, as Duchenne remarks,
they carried the transverse furrows across the whole breadth of the
forehead, and thus committed a great anatomical mistake: this is
likewise the case in some modern statues. It is, however, more probable
that these wonderfully accurate observers intentionally sacrificed
truth for the sake of beauty, than that they made a mistake; for
rectangular furrows on the forehead would not have had a grand
appearance on the marble. The expression, in its fully developed
condition, is, as far as I can discover, not often represented in
pictures by the old masters, no doubt owing to the same cause; but a
lady who is perfectly familiar with this expression, informs me that in
Fra Angelico s Descent from the Cross in Florence, it is clearly
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