"HANDWRITING AND CHARACTER."
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Stn.,—As regards this matter, one or two points seem to me worth considering besides those you touch upon. It is a com- mon observation that whatever a man does is more or less characteristic of him. Every act of a man is, more or less, an expression of his individuality ; nobody else could have done the same thing in exactly the same way. But that act by which a man most fully expresses himself is the act called utter- ance,—the giving-out of the thought or emotion that is in him. In this act the whole of the man is concentrated ; in it are the germs or indications of all that his history and constitution have made him. We distinguish persons we know as accurately by their voices as by their faces ; and if we have accustomed our- selves to observe handwriting, more accurately still by that. Suppose a man in a state of ease and freedom, and suppose him to write a letter of a page or two to his friend. Inevitably the chirography of that letter will give the key to his whole character,—to some features of it more than to others, but in a greater or a lesser degree to all. We may not know how to apply the key, but undoubtedly it is there. Confirmations of this assertion are many and obvious. The pen is held by the man's hand, but the words and letters are formed, not inde- pendently by the hand, but by the mind. and nature of the man acting through the hand as a means ; and not by any part of his mind and nature, but by the whole of them. In other words, his own peculiar life is in it, and cannot be kept out of it ; even the very effort whereby a man might strive to disguise his hand- writing is itself a revelation. And the same characteristic. which led Czar Nicholas, for example, to cross his es heavily was also manifested, though, perhaps, in a less easily recog- nisable form, in everything he did,—in the tone and inflection of his voice, in his step, in the way he took snuff or poked the fire, in his manner of touching a lady's hand, or of ordering a mutineer to be shot. At first-sight, there may seem to be little enough connection between a heavy crossing to a 1, and a cer- tain way of poking a fire, just as there may seem to be little enough connection between the formation of an icicle and the growth of a violet ; and yet we have in both cases the action of a single quality (imperious will in the one case, the heat and light of the sun in the other), manifesting itself in different ways. As with the will, so with other traits. Your objection that character cannot be fully inferred from handwriting, because only those parts of the. character which were active while the hand was being formed can express themselves in the handwriting, seems to me to lack weight. For how, then, do you explain the patent fact that the handwriting changes with the growth, and that while it is im- possible for any man to alter the fashion of his handwriting by an instantaneous fiat of his will, it is equally impossible for him to write the same hand at thirty that he wrote at fifteen,—the- only quality in it remaining constant being an indefinable one, which seems to correspond to what we call human identity, which stands apart from attributes of character, although, governing the method in which they develop and declare them- selves P As to. the improbability of the obscurer traits, such as amiability, sympathy, suspicion, showing in the handwriting' it should be remembered that investigations of this kind, are conducted by a combined process of induction and synthesis, that the elementary or essential traits of human, nature are less numerous than the redundancy of modern nomenclature would. lead us to suppose ; thus that the trait of amiability, for instance, would be shown to ex- ist partly from the presence in the handwriting of some broader element, and partly by a putting together or com- parison between some other traits, from which that known as- amiability would be inferred. The extent of space which I venture to ask of you is not commensurate with that of the subject, and I will only observe, in conclusion, that I write by no means as an expert in Don Felix's science, but only as a. believer in the possibility of its existence. The key, I maintain, is at the disposal of whomsoever has the skill to fit it to the
[We question altogether our correspondent's doctrine. The handwriting is not formed in acts of self-expression or "utter- ance," but rather in acts of laborious registering of other persons' thoughts and utterance. Again, does the handwriting vary from day to day and. hour to hour, as the expression of the face varies ? It is rather a slowly altering mask, expressing much more the attitude of certain sustained efforts made a few years ago, than the tone or feeling of the immediate present.—En. Spectator.]
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