Moreover, it is - though so significant - hardly to be called expression.It is not articulate.It implies emotion, but does not define, or describe, or divide it.It is touching, insomuch as we have knowledge of the perturbed tide of the spirit that must cause it, but it is not otherwise eloquent.It does not tell us the quality of the thought, it does not inform and surprise as with intricacies.It speaks no more explicit or delicate things than does the pulse in its quickening.It speaks with less division of meanings than does the taking of the breath, which has impulses and degrees.
No, the eyes do their work, but do it blankly, without communication.Openings into the being they may be, but the closed cheek is more communicative.From them the blood of Perdita never did look out.It ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk.
It was hiding in her paleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison.It leapt and looked, at a word.It was conscious in the fingers that reached out flowers.It ran with her.
It was silenced when she hushed her answers to the king.Everywhere it was close behind the doors - everywhere but in her eyes.
How near at hand was it, then, in the living eyelids that expressed her in their minute and instant and candid manner! All her withdrawals, every hesitation, fluttered there.A flock of meanings and intelligences alighted on those mobile edges.
Think, then, of all the famous eyes in the world, that said so much, and said it in no other way but only by the little exquisite muscles of their lids.How were these ever strong enough to bear the burden of those eyes of Heathcliff's in "Wuthering Heights"? "The clouded windows of Hell flashed a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out, however, was so dimmed and drowned - " That mourning fiend, who had wept all night, had no expression, no proof or sign of himself, except in the edges of the eyelids of the man.
And the eyes of Garrick? Eyelids, again.And the eyes of Charles Dickens, that were said to contain the life of fifty men? On the mechanism of the eyelids hung that fifty-fold vitality."Bacon had a delicate, lively, hazel eye," says Aubrey in his "Lives of Eminent Persons." But nothing of this belongs to the eye except the colour.
Mere brightness the eyeball has or has not, but so have many glass beads: the liveliness is the eyelid's."Dr Harvey told me it was like the eie of a viper." So intent and narrowed must have been the attitude of Bacon's eyelids.
"I never saw such another eye in a human, head," says Scott in describing Burns, "though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time.It was large, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest.The eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament."No eye literally glows; but some eyes are polished a little more, and reflect.And this is the utmost that can possibly have been true as to the eyes of Burns.But set within the meanings of impetuous eyelids the lucidity of the dark eyes seemed broken, moved, directed into fiery shafts.
See, too, the reproach of little, sharp, grey eyes addressed to Hazlitt.There are neither large nor small eyes, say physiologists, or the difference is so small as to be negligeable.But in the eyelids the difference is great between large and small, and also between the varieties of largeness.Some have large openings, and some are in themselves broad and long, serenely covering eyes called small.Some have far more drawing than others, and interesting foreshortenings and sweeping curves.
Where else is spirit so evident? And where else is it so spoilt?
There is no vulgarity like the vulgarity of vulgar eyelids.They have a slang all their own, of an intolerable kind.And eyelids have looked all the cruel looks that have ever made wounds in innocent souls meeting them surprised.
But all love and all genius have winged their flight from those slight and unmeasurable movements, have flickered on the margins of lovely eyelids quick with thought.Life, spirit, sweetness are there in a small place; using the finest and the slenderest machinery; expressing meanings a whole world apart, by a difference of material action so fine that the sight which appreciates it cannot detect it; expressing intricacies of intellect; so incarnate in slender and sensitive flesh that nowhere else in the body of man is flesh so spiritual.
End
