HANDWRITING AND CHARACTER. F ROM a little book on what is
very ambitiously termed "The Philosophy of Handwriting,"* containing the auto- graphs of between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and forty public characters, whose handwritings the author seems often to have studied in manuscripts of some length, we learn —not how close is the analogy between character and handwriting, but how exceedingly little there is in that analogy which can be explained articulately. The only generalisation which could be safely justified from " The Philosophy of Handwriting," is that, so far as this work goes, there is apparently no philosophy in it at all. Its author, indeed, finds signs of the man in the handwriting,—of flashiness in Lord Beaconsfield's writing, and of originality and causticity in Mr. Carlyle's. Mr. Bright's is that of a "straight- forward and decided temperament." Rosa Bonheur's is "bold and defiant." Charles Beetle's looks " clear, vigorous, and ap- parently legible" at the start, but is found to be full of diffi- culties and confusions in the attempt to read it in bulk. Bishop Colenso's writing is "fluent, dignified, and graceful," but rather " conventional." K arl Blind's is " terse, decided," and indicative of "severe independence," each letter being suddenly and sharply finished off, which is, we suppose, the chief indication of Karl Blind's revolutionary instincts. And if remarks of this kind furnish a philosophy for hand- writing, there are plenty of them. But we doubt whether, in any case, without a knowledge of the character from other sources first, the diagnosis of the character from the handwriting would have been even as near the mark as, in relation to some of the more characteristic hand- writings, it may, perhaps, be. The truth is, that people try to get more out of a handwriting than it can usually tell. There are characteristics which it can disclose, but many more which it cannot. When the author, for instance, argues from the autograph of Oliver Wendell Holmes that it is impossible * The Philosophy of Handwriting. By Don Felix do Salamanca. London Ohatto and Windua that a man who writes as he does " could be anything but kind- hearted," he infers from a handwriting what it is all but impos- sible that a handwriting could disclose. No doubt, a handwriting may suggest largeness, frankness, openness of mind,—may suggest the naturalness and pleasurableness of the task a opening the writer's mind to the friend, or to the world of friends, for whom it is intended ; but we very much doubt whether this suggestion is not, even where it corresponds with the truth, a mere coincidence. When we remember that the handwriting is formed not in any attempt to communicate one's mind to others, but in painful efforts to acquire the art of recalling to oneself what one has seen or heard,—that young people write, at the time their hand is being formed, for every sheet of genuine correspondence, reams of paper hastily filled with notes of lectures, or copies of the writings of others, or records of what they have read, the mood in which they write' being mostly not a social mood at all, but the mood of one who is making arrangements for renewing impressions which he is otherwise likely to lose,—it does not seem very likely that the attitude of the mind towards others, should be one of the chief characteristics to imprint itself on the hand- writing. On the other hand, there are characteristics which, even in the operation of writing down such matters as these, would be sure to betray themselves. If a man is, or is not, in so great a hurry to got to the end that he slurs over the means —in other words, if he is patient or impatient of the mechanical processes he has to get through in order to attain his end —that patience or impatience will be sure to show itself, and we know nothing of which it is so generally easy to judge from a handwriting, as of the patience or impatience of a man's temperament in this respect. Again, no doubt, energy, or the want of energy, may be discovered from the handwriting ; for energy, or want of energy, is just as likely to be displayed at the time the hand is forming, and just as likely to be reflected in the way in which the hand is formed, as patience or impatience itself. And the patience is quite distinct from the energy. You may have patient energy or patient indolence, impatient energy or impatient indolence, and all these will generally leave a clear stamp on the handwriting. In relation to this book, if we wanted an illustration of patient energy, we should take the autograph of Joseph Mazzini, which our author says typifies " the wisdom of the serpent united to the harm- lessness of the dove." It really typifies neither wisdom nor harmlessness, any more than it typifies either the serpent or the dove. It typifies indomitable patience and intensity, with a certain amount, we should. say, of self-consciousness and self- esteem as well. In Mr. Carlyle's writing there is, again, a, curious mixture of both patience and impatience, with the energy which is its great characteristic. The patience is reflected in the very careful detail,—the punctuation, the com- pleteness, the neat divisions. But the impatience shows itself in the crosses and flourishes, on which, as not being essen- tial to the meaning, Mr. Carlyle expends the excitability of his temperament. Here, then, you have proof of super- abundance of energy,—of the careful self-restraint which keeps
this energy from so overflowing as to spoil the adaptation of the writer's means to his end,—and yet of his satisfaction in letting it express itself through the odds and ends of his writing, though not in a manner to interfere with the utilities of that writing, with its subservience to its main purpose. But how little way such indications as these go towards any, general ex- pression of the character, we may illustrate by referring to the writing of Charles Dickens,—which is not contained in this book,—writing which indicates as much patience in the detail as
Mazzini's or Carlyle's, not less impatience in the redundant flourishes and much more of rhetorical nuance in them than in Carlyle's, and as much energy, too, as iu either of them ; but not the less Dickens's hand is totally unlike either of theirs, being a much more outward hand than either,—a hand that seems to be sweeping towards and grasping after a distant end, rather than making itself sure of a present possession.
Another quality of which handwriting usually,—not always —gives clear indications, is the elasticity or stiffness of the writer in adapting his mind to external demands. Of literary
men, you always find that ,owing power, such as Charles Reade's, or Charles Dickens's, or Sir Henry Taylor's, or Anthony
Trollope's, is expressed in an easy running hand,—lucid and har- monious or otherwise, in proportion generally to the amount of orderly or artistic feeling in the writer's mind. Carlyle, for in- stance, though one of the most poetical of seers, is certainly not fluent. His thought reconstructs with pain and difficulty what his mind and eyes have seen, and in the patient, but somewhat crabbed, and oddly emphasized handwriting, you see this. But Sir Henry Taylor's hand • runs as free and as clear as the Thames at Richmond. Mr. Trollope's runs as easily as the needle jerking up and down in a sewing-machine ; and Professor Tyndalre, who has as much at least in him of the orator as of the man of science, and whose mind is eminently flexible in the power of adapting itself to the external world, runs smooth as a bicycle. On the other hand, many poets, many very eloquent poets, seem to betray in their handwriting the conflict between their own thought and the words in which they are compelled to convey or note it down. Mr. Swinburne's seems always to be in a tangle, expressive of the way in which his mind overleaps the word he is dealing with, and mixes itself up with some other word with which he is not dealing. And in a very much less degree Mr. Tennyson's hand seems to throw over the words he writes shadows of dissatisfaction that they do not express something more or something less, or at all events, some- thing different. Nothing is more noticeable than the difference between the hands of those who seem satisfied with their words, who seem to find a certain pleasure in the rapidity with which they express their thought, and the hands of those who are dissatis- fied with their words, and are disposed to torture language till it expresses something more or less. Some of the musical com- posers especially—not the English musicians—seem utterly out of temper with words in general. Offenbach, Wagner, and Verdi wrote such hands as it is not easy to rival among human things,—as though words were a wrong to their soul, and a sort of parody on the true expressiveness of sound. And it is quite possible that in their case, even from their first use of written characters, a certain vexation against unmusical sounds may have rendered the habit of written speech unwelcome and irk- some to them,—in short, that the conception of the sound. made the task of conveying the sound to their own and other ears an ungracious one. If this should have been so, it would be but another illustration of the same kind of impatience as is visible in the minds of poets whose fancy so teems with appro priate words, that it is disposed to wrestle against the poverty of the word actually chosen, after all.
But what is clear to us is, that very little indeed of character can properly be inferred from handwriting, for this excellent' reason, that only those parts of the character which are chiefly active while the hand is being first acquired and formed,—not those which are at work when it is used for its highest purposes,—can well express themselves in the hand- writing. To find candour, amiability, sympathy, courage, dis- trust, suspicion, malice, cowardice, and so forth, in the hand- writing, seems to us almost necessarily imaginary. The hand is formed under conditions which do not bring out or exer- cise such characteristics at all, in the case of ninety-nine men' and women out of a hundred. It is formed under conditions which do give room, on the contrary, for the play of patience, energy, flexibility of mind, and a certain dash or awkwardness, and which may in certain exceptional cases give room also for the play of the feeling for language and for the joy or pain of expression. Now, all qualities of the character which may thus have been prominent while the handwriting was being formed, may well impress themselves upon it. But you might as well expect to find in handwriting the evidence whether a man or a woman were fonder of arithmetic than of geometry, as to find in it, in the majority of cases, the evidence of the characteristic moral qualities with indicating which it is often credited.
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