t would be a judicious pastime for some curious scholar to write up the antecedents and traditions of these ten ubiquitous digits with which nature dowers most of us; a survey reaching from the crime that darkened the morning of the world—the handiwork of cain—to the most delicate outcome of art, finished yesterday; a summary of all the vicissitudes and symbolisms connected with the hand and its doings; challenges, investitures, perjuries, salutations; the science of chiromancy that the romans loved; records made by chisel or pen by michael angelo, goethe, palestrina; of gloves and rings and falcon-jesses; of armor buckled on by saddened sweethearts, and prizes bestowed at tourneys; of power in the soldier, and persuasiveness in the fair lady; of eastern juggling, and missal illuminations in gray cells, and manuscripts folded and preserved through centuries; of "pickers and stealers" and money-getting associations, seizures, bestowals, and benedictions. the dutch boy, stopping the dyke with his frozen thumb in times of flood, shall not be forgotten; nor that maid of honor who, with her slender wrist, bolted the door against the raging mob of revolutionists, undauntedly long, and at last vainly; and in the chapter of heroisms shall be found the patient pyramid-builders, and mucius scævola, unflinching in fire; how with his hand attila made kings tremble, xerxes scourged the sea, and the saint of old assisi won bird and beast from solitude, to feed and be caressed. we bethink us lastly of antique instruments, old tapestries, intaglios, and rare lamps; of the child christopher wren, raising card-houses and forecasting the stone glories of london; or of petrarch, roving in a dusty world of books, and so dying, suddenly and with-18-out pain, with his arm about them, as of things among those which our historian shall touch.
scarce any author, save sir thomas browne, hath thought it worth while to spend learned discussion on the right and the left hand. yet it is a peculiar schism we graft on a youngling's mind when we teach it to discard the good service and ready offices of its honest sinistral member; so that we may come to look upon a left-handed neighbor as a sort of natural protest against an ill custom, and a vindication of unjustly suppressed forces.
a hand clinched, a hand outstretched, have in them all of defiance and supplication; hospitality shines in a hand proffered,—"a frank hand," as the moor saith. like a shell turned from the light, but with the tints of the morning not yet faded from it, is a babe's hand, "tip-tilted," lovely, as if it should close on nothing ruder than a flower. the bronzed hands of toil, the opaque hands of idleness, differing even as life and death, the dear, remembered, cordial hands of one's youth,—shall they not have their laureate also in the commentator that is to be, this new philosopher in trifles, this student of the furthest and subtlest bodily activities, and chronicler, as it were, in extremis?
the hand betrays the heart; not to thee, obstreperous gypsy! with thy sapient life-lines, but even to the unchrismed eye of the laity. we detect good-nature in yon plump matron, because of that pudgy but roseate part of her appended to her tuscan bracelet; good-nature and generosity and simple faith. we have close acquaintance with courageous hands, melancholy hands, avaricious hands, compassionate hands, fastidious hands, hands sensitive and fair, friends to all things gentle, and pulsing with intelligence. we read in this hand how it hath healed a bitter wound; and in that, how it hath locked the door against a cry. have we not known hands dark and shrunken with age or suffering, instinct yet with so-called patrician blood? the memory comes over us of the prince (such was verily his meek title) from a far isle, the inscrutable asiatic, acclimated in speech and dress, whose chilling touch, recalling icicles in midsummer, we superstitiously evaded at meeting and parting, and over whose origin we sun-lovers made jests, in the halls of that dreaming heir of a later dynasty, madame b.
it was the boast of job that he had not kissed his hand in sign of worship to sun nor moon nor stars. note the pertinent and noble metaphor of banquo, to express reliance and rest in time of perplexity:—
"in the great hand of god i stand."
to what fopperies, what wild freaks of mediæval years, hath the pliant hand lent itself! to the triangles, stars, portraits of ancient caligraphic cunning; to the wig, shape facetious, embodying a request to the barber, or the heart, dolphin, and true-love knot, that revealed a swain's metrical sighs to the scrutinizing eyes of phyllis. peace to those old minimizers! to him, the spider-worker, whose elfin iliad cicero saw, packed miraculously in a nutshell; to sturdy peter bales, "that did so take eliza" with his infinitesimal tracery, which the lion-queen delighted to read through a mighty glass, holding his airy volume on her thumb-nail!
disraeli the elder tells us of the pleasing origin of that modern phrase,—"to write like an angel;" gracefully derived from one angelo vergecio, a scribe who drifted to paris under francis i., and whose name became in time a synonyme for beautiful caligraphy. to write like an angel! now, with due allowance of the possession, among celestial beings, of our poor terrene accomplishments, yet may angels themselves most solemnly and securely preserve us from the foregoing solecism! saving the primordial angelo, a legend incorporated, none do so much write like angels as that slave-trader, the writing-master, enemy and subjugator of the hand's natural freedom. handwriting, that should be matter of separate mental habit and muscular action, as hartley coleridge averred, the writing-master artificializes into a set form: a young lady is to write so; a clerk, so. there is a rascally supposed respectability in keeping to this masquerade, where revelations of individuality are never in order. spectre of our childhood, bugbear of ambrosial years, tyrant, nay, what can we call thee worse than thou art in bare english, copy-book! the faithfullest vow of our life, religious as hannibal's, was against thee. we recall with unalterable haughtiness, that not for one moment did we tolerate thee, save under burning protest; that thy long-drawn da capo moralities, all letter and no spirit, made our soul shudder; that every hour at the desk of old, under thy correct, staring eye, was an hour of scorn and insurrection; and that we celebrate daily thine anniversary and thy festival, after our own heart, in cherishing every irregularity that thy puritan code abhorreth. aye, tails and quirks are dear to us, and we fear not to send forth our t without his bar, our i without her dot, lest we should seem reconciled to thine atrocious ritual. we shake our enfranchised hand in thy face, thou stereotyped impostor!
we are not of misanthropic habit, but we reserve a sentiment warm as york's against lancaster, or a right carlist's towards the mild usurping race of spain, for that fellow-mortal whose traceries in ink and pencil are sealed with orthodoxy. by the accepted wretchedness of their capitals, the moral depravity of their loop-letters, we choose our friends,—the least erring the least dear. we cannot abide giotto, because of his o, that had no blemish. we take solace and delight in that exquisite janus-jest of the last bourbon louis, who, re-entering his palace, the imperial initial everywhere above and beside him, said, with a light shudder, to one of his blood, "voilà des ennemis autour de nous!" not for all the authority of divine prudence herself, shall we be mindful of our p's and q's. a flourish—not, indeed, the martial blare of trumpets, but the misguided capers of a pen-point—we look upon as a cardinal, yea (if we may proportion adjectives to our grade of feeling), a pontifical sin.
character demonstrates itself in trifles. wash-24-ington wrote with clearness and deliberation, like a law-maker; rufus choate, intricately and whimsically, like a wit. oldys runs down the list of english royal autographs, drawing no inferences, and set solely on his fact. cromwell's signature is paradoxically faint and vacillating. "elizabeth writ an upright hand,—a large, tall character; james i., in an ungainly fashion, all awry; charles i., an italian hand, the most correct of any prince we ever had; charles ii., a little, fair, running, uneasy hand," such, adds a commentator, as we might expect from that illustrious vagabond, who had much to write, often in odd situations, and never could get rid of his natural restlessness and vivacity. it goes somewhat hard with us that porson, young, and especially thackeray, wielded a proper quill, and were prone to consider penmanship as one of the fine arts. nevertheless, we take it that mr. joseph surface, in the comedy, would write so as to gladden the "herte's roote" of a school-mistress; as, likewise, might our honest friend iago. item, that homer's-25- mark was but a hen-scratch, outdone, in his own day, by the most time-out-of-mind stroller that sang, eyeless, with him.
no missionary, fretting over the innocent rascalities of afric tribes, burns with holier wrath than seizes us on beholding the prospectus of the "penman's gazette." hark to its beguiling philippics: "good penmanship hath made fortunes; every year thousands are advanced by it to position and liberal salaries; students make it a specialty. it is worth more than all the greek and latin, the antiquated rubbish of the higher schools and colleges, for, ('thine exquisite reason, dear knight?')—for it yields prompt and generous returns in money, food, clothing, good associations, and incentives to usefulness in the world!" the gentle reader is to imagine money in huge capitals, and the other rewards of merit dwindling successively, till the incentives to usefulness are scarce visible to the naked eye. and then, forsooth, one is encouraged periodically by the fish-like portraits of famous penmen! have a care, have a care, little guileless abecedarian, lest thy physiognomy, some black morning, should lend its beauty to the procession of fiends who write like angels!
whom shall we hire to shout from the house-tops, vehemently, and with quixotic disinterestedness, that success should be won through ambitions a trifle exclusive of money, food, and clothing; and that this "new heraldry of hands, not hearts," is a monstrous error? who is there to heed that strange doctrine? think into what grave parley we might be drawn, even by the silken string of the "penman's gazette;" into what resentment of an unheavenly lesson! but we forbear.
a century closes at the finger-tips of two men of unequal age, and every touch of palm to palm forges a link of the unseen social chain which connects us with the father of our race. we take in ours, with enthusiastic consciousness, a hand we honor, or a hand that by representation has, perhaps, held cordially that of "the great of old." so chance we to strike, across the gulf of time, into the grasp of caedmon, the saxon beginner, or the real roland of the horn, or plato, or alcuin, or him of salzburg, the sunniest-hearted maker of music. neither in our speculations can we forget that a hand not all of earth rested once upon childish heads in galilee, and passed among vast crowds, forgiving, healing, and doing good; and we know not but that our meanest brother, coming as a stranger, may bring to us, in more ways than one, its transmitted benediction.
