THE FUTURE OF HANDWRITING.
IS the gentle art of penmanship doomed ? Such a question is suggested by an evening spent over the delightful "Meditations of an Autograph Collector" (Harper and Brothers, 12s. Gd.), in which Mr. Adrian H. Joline has described his full and interesting collection of autographs, Mr. Joline has grave fears that the pleasant hobby which be loves may soon be rendered impossible by the march of pro- gress. " Our great men," he says, " do not write letters now; they dictate their thoughts to stenographers, and one cannot even be sure that the machine-made affair is not signed by a secretary with a rubber stamp It is sad to reflect that in future ages our successor-collectors, engaged in making sets' of Presidents, Vice-Presidents, or Governors, will be forced to content themselves with the monotonous- looking pages of type, and will be puzzled to decide whether or not the signature, like John Phoenix's famous autograph, was written by one of his most intimate friends.' The type-writing machine is the discourager of autograph enterprise, the srave of artistic collecting, the tomb of ambition." This is a formidable indict- ment of a piece of mechanism which holds a place of modest usefulness in the modern world, but it is echoed on many hands. The speed and legibility with which manu- script (if the word may be used without a "bull ") can be produced by the typewriter are so remarkable that some students prophesy the speedy disappearance of ordinary writing. It is true that the art of calligraphy can hardly be allowed to disappear altogether, for one does not see how else it would be possible to sign cheques and documents of importance so as to convey any assurance of their validity. Sherlock Holmes professed to be able to distinguish the work of one typewriter from that of another, but it is doubtful whether the average banker's clerk would follow the steps of his demonstration. And if people continue to learn to write in order to be able to affix their signatures, they are likely to put the art to other uses, unless we are to see a revival of those mediaeval daYs in which no one could write, but every man possessed a wonderful hieroglyphic which served as his signature. The Emperor Justin, who signed his edicts with the aid of a golden stencil-plate, and all the potentates who affixed seals because they could not write their names, may again furnish precedents. It is to be hoped that things will not go so far. The typewriter is an excellent machine in its way, but it has its limits. It is hard to imagine a poet sitting down to a keyboard to produce a " small sweet ode," though it may only be that the notion is unfamiliar to us : musicians—though not the most highly gifted—often compose at a piano. And there are still many people who resent receiving a friendly letter in type, though here also the real objection seems to be that most private letters thus sent have been dictated to a third person, and there seems to be a breach of confidence in the fact. Only an American is capable of strolling into one of the big type. writing shops in Holborn Viaduct and dictating his love- letters to the girl he left behind him. At present the sway of the typewriter has not become so powerful in this country as it is in the United States. After all, it is but a. transitional device, and one may very well go on with a pen until the arrival of the day of which the ingenious Mr. Wells dreams, when we shall be in wireless communication by telephone with all our friends, or at least we shall simply talk our
letters into a phonograph and forward the wax record by parcel post.
One would be sorry to see the art of handwriting threatened with extinction just when it is recognised as deserving far greater attention than has been paid to it for generations past.
It reached its lowest ebb in the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury, when, as so many Victorian novelists remind us, it was considered rather a vulgar thing to write legibly. George Eliot. so safe an authority on manners, tells us, for instance, that Fred Vincy wrote "in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day : the vowels were all alike, and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line,—in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to inter- pret when you know beforehand what the writer means."
It would be unjust to tax the early nineteenth century with inventing this quaint notion about the object of writing; Hamlet tells us of the statists who held it a baseness to write fair; but the opinion reached its climax in that Age of Snobs.
Perhaps it had its apotheosis in the mind of that eminent Frenchman who used to send out his letters in duplicate,—
one written in polite illegibility with his own hand, another copied for the reader's sake by his secretary. Palmerston, who was in advance of his time in this as in so many things, often warned young diplomatists that they really must learn not to send him "a long bavardage in an illegible hand," unless they could enclose a spare hour with each report. Of late years there has been a notable tendency towards the re- fining of handwriting, particularly in the direction of legibility, which is specially remarkable in the case of women. It is rare indeed to find a girl of this generation who pens a letter in the old-fashioned ladylike way- " In such a hand as when a field of corn Bows all its ears before the roaring East."
She writes, instead, in a bold square hand which often makes it difficult to tell the sex of a new correspondent until one glances at the signature, whereas the women of Jane Austen or Mrs. Gaskell advertised their femininity in the very address. But the same tendency is observable in the hand- writing of modern men, although it is too often defeated by the other modern tendency towards hurry. The rush of life, which is said to have practically killed the old-fashioned art of letter-writing—the telegraph and the daily papers have made Horace Walpole impossible—has also done much to deform most men's handwriting. When a dozen letters have to be written for one that sufficed in a previous generation, physical as well as literary style is bound to suffer. The pity of it is that eleven of the letters thus written are so often unnecessary ; one legible and interesting epistle would be better worth composing in the same time ! One would not go so far as Mr. Henry Blackburn, who desires a return to the days when the author was also a fair writer, and the replacing of books by elegant MSS.; or as that eminent living poet who always turns out his work in a hand recalling that of the mediaeval scribe ; but this attitude shows a better apprecia- tion of the intention and possibilities of the art of penmanship than that of the average man. It is curious, by the way, that no one has ever thought of teaching children to read manu- script as well as to write it. The one art is to the full as important as the other; a whole life may be modified by the mistaking of a word iu an important letter ; but this capacity is evidently supposed to come by nature.
Such excellent facsimiles as are furnished in Mr. Joline's charming book remind us that another strong reason why we should be sorry to have any doubts about the future of hand- writing is that it is often a trustworthy guide to character. Of course one would not homologate the claims of the grapholo- gists, who chiefly flourish in the ladies' papers, and offer a flattering delineation of the writer's character for six penny stamps. But every one will admit that handwriting often betrays the characteristics of the writer. The elegant and curiously modern hand of " paper-sparing Pope," the strong, untutored, but handsome hand of Burns, the "damned cramp penmanship" of Byron, and the beautifully lucid script of Thackeray may be chosen as illustrative of this proposition at the one extreme, as the unformed schoolboy hand which too many men preserve into later life is at the other. To select an example might be invidious. One of the great justifications of the autograph-collector is that it is often possible to • trace the progressive •deterioration of character or fortunes in the specimens which • he accumulates. Thus it has been pointed out that if one studies the alteration in the hand of Charles I. which took place during the Civil War, "the noble formation of the un- fortunate king's hand seems to dwarf and dwindle under the stress of misfortune and disappointment." Eminently characteristic of the tragic history of Mary Queen of Scots— whether one maintains that she was a consummate actress or lands her manly courage—is the fact that her last note, written in the shadow of imminent doom, shows a hand as firm and dignified as she ever wrote. Mr. Joline points out that "sons of great men not only fall below their fathers in mental capacity, but sink infinitely beneath them in matter of plain, sensible, and intelligible handwriting." Editors sometimes say that the first glance at a new contributor's manuscript tells the practised eye whether there is any promise of originality in his work,—which reminds one that Poe won his first success by the fact that his beautiful writing drew the attention of the judges to his " Manuscript Found in a Bottle," though one would have thought that such wine needed no bush. Poe's own study of "autography" led to some curious results of this kind, as when be detected Emerson's mysticism in his signature, and found in the "graceful yet picturesque quaintness" of Holmes's handwriting "an analogy with the vivid drollery of his style." Shall the typewriter or the phonograph put an end to all these agreeable researches? We would sooner agree with Feuillet des Conches that "il y a tout dans les letters autographes."
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