The False Photographer

When, as lately, events have happened that seem (to the fancy, at least)
to test if not stagger the force of official government, it is amusing to
ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilisation, ours especially,
when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded of one weakness
this morning in turning over an old drawerful of pictures.

This weakness in civilisation is best expressed by saying that it cares
more for science than for truth. It prides itself on its "methods" more
than its results; it is satisfied with precision, discipline, good
communications, rather than with the sense of reality. But there are
precise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only mean a
hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And good
communications may in practice be very like those evil communications
which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a
"scientific age," which wants to know whether the train is in the
timetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one
instance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: the
case of photography.

Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared, and
the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so that
he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted or
suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head
thrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair and
slight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders, a
definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I should
have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man, with a
profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's.

Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a great
many times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget, if
seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland
Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and dark
emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic or
whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked like some
swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of coalblack
hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately under his
eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have been painted
scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one under the lower,
seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches of Mephistopheles.
His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them which Stevenson saw in the
Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes distorted the expression by
screwing a monstrous