CHAPTER IIITHE WILLING HAND
The human hand is not only the symbol of the intelligent artificer, “the hand of the master,” the sign and epitome of the lord and ruler; it is the instrument of the will alike for good and evil deeds. The idea of it as the active participator in every act embodies itself in all vocabularies. The imperial mandate, the lordly manumission, the skilled manufacturer, the handy tool, the unhandy workman, the left-handed stroke, the handless drudge, with other equally familiar terms, all refer to the same ever-ready exponent of the will; so that we scarcely recognise the term as metaphorical when we speak of the “willing hand.” The Divine appeal to the wrathful prophet of Nineveh is based on the claim for mercy on behalf of those who had not yetattained to the first stage of dexterity which pertains to childhood. “Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand that cannot discern between their right hand and their left?” To this same test of discernment poor Cassio appeals when, betrayed by the malignant craft of Iago, he would fain persuade himself he is not enslaved by the intoxicating draught: “Do not think, gentlemen, I am drunk. This is my right hand, and this is my left!” Only the infant or the drunkard, it is thus assumed, can fail to mark the distinction; and to select the true hand for all honourable service. It is the sceptred hand; the hand to be offered in pledge of amity; the one true wedding hand; the hand of benediction, ordination, consecration; the organ through which human will acts, whether by choice or by organic law. The attempt, therefore, to claim any independent rights or honourable status for the sinister hand seems an act of disloyalty, if not of sacrilege.
But hand and will have co-operated from the beginning in good and in evil; even as in that first erring deed, when Eve—
Her rash hand, in evil hourForth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she ate;Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seatSighing through all her works gave signs of woe.
Her rash hand, in evil hourForth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she ate;Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seatSighing through all her works gave signs of woe.
Her rash hand, in evil hourForth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she ate;Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seatSighing through all her works gave signs of woe.
Her rash hand, in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she ate;
Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe.
The symbolic and responsible hand accordingly figures everywhere. The drama of history and of fiction are alike full of it. Pilate vainly washes his hands as he asserts his innocence of the blood of the Just One. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!” is the agonised cry of Lady Macbeth. “This unworthy hand!” exclaims the martyr, Cranmer, as he makes it expiate the unfaithful act of signature, as though it were an independent actor, alone responsible for the deed. In touching tenderness the venerable poet Longfellow thus symbolised the entrance on life’s experiences—
Oh, little hands that, weak or strong,Have still to rule or serve so long;Have still so much to give or ask;I, who so long with tongue and penHave toiled among my fellow-men,Am weary thinking of your task.
Oh, little hands that, weak or strong,Have still to rule or serve so long;Have still so much to give or ask;I, who so long with tongue and penHave toiled among my fellow-men,Am weary thinking of your task.
Oh, little hands that, weak or strong,Have still to rule or serve so long;Have still so much to give or ask;I, who so long with tongue and penHave toiled among my fellow-men,Am weary thinking of your task.
Oh, little hands that, weak or strong,
Have still to rule or serve so long;
Have still so much to give or ask;
I, who so long with tongue and pen
Have toiled among my fellow-men,
Am weary thinking of your task.
But childhood speedily reaches the stage when the privileged hand asserts its prerogative, and assumes its distinctive responsibility. For good or evil, not only does the right hand take precedence in theestablished formulæ of speech, but the left hand is in many languages the symbol or equivalent of impurity, degradation, malice, and of evil doings.
Looking then on right-handedness as a very noticeable human attribute, and one that enters largely into the daily acts, the exceptional manifestations of skill, and many habits and usages of life: the fact is indisputable that, whether we ascribe its prevalence solely to education, or assign its origin to some organic difference, the delicacy of the sense of touch, and the manipulative skill and mobility of the right hand, in the majority of cases, so far exceeds that of the left that a term borrowed from the former expresses the general idea of dexterity. That education has largely extended the preferential use of the right hand is undoubted. That it has even unduly tended to displace the left hand from the exercise of its manipulative function, I fully believe. But so far as appears, in the preference of one hand for the execution of many special operations, the choice seems, by general consent, without any concerted action, to have been that of the right.
The proofs of the antiquity of this consensus present themselves in ever-increasing amplitude, leading finally to an investigation of traces apparentlyshowing a prevalentdexterityamong palæolithic artificers. The paintings and intaglios of ancient Egypt, the sculptures of Nineveh and Babylon, and the later products of Hellenic and Etruscan art, when carefully studied, all yield illustrations of the subject. But the disclosures of archæology in its later co-operation with the researches of the geologist have familiarised us with phases of human history that relegate the builders of the Birs Nimrud, and the sculptors of Nineveh or Thebes, to modern centuries. The handiwork of the palæolithic cave-dwellers and the primitive drift-folk produce to us works of industry and skill, fashioned when art was in its infancy, and metallurgy unknown.
It is unnecessary here to aim at even an approximate estimate of the remoteness of that strange epoch when the cave-dwellers of the Vézère and the northern slopes of the Pyrenees were the contemporaries of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the long-extinct carnivora of the caves; and the fossil horse, with the musk-sheep, reindeer, and other Arctic fauna, were objects of the chase among the hunters of the Garonne.
The assignment of the primitive relics of human art to a period when the use of metals was unknown,and man had to furnish his implements and weapons solely from such materials as wood, horn, bone, shell, stone, or flint, has naturally given a novel importance to this class of relics; and we owe to the pen of Dr. John Evans not only an exhaustive review of the ancient implements and weapons of Great Britain, but also, incidentally, of the world’s Stone Age, in nearly all countries and periods. In that work, accordingly, some of the earliest traces of man’s handiwork, as the manipulator and tool-maker, are described. Of those the implements of the River-drift Period are at once the rudest and most primitive in character. They occur in vast numbers among the rolled gravel of the ancient fresh water or river-drifts, of what has received from the included implements the name of thePalæolithic Period; and if they are correctly assumed to represent the sole appliances of the man of the Drift Period, they indicate a singularly rude stage. In reality, however, the large, rude almond and tongue-shaped implements of flint are nearly imperishable; while trimmed flakes, small daggers or arrow-heads, and other delicately fashioned flint implements,—as well as any made of more perishable materials, such as shell, wood, or bone,—must have been fractured inthe violence to which the rolled gravels were subjected, or would perish by natural decay.
But the same period is no less definitely illustrated by deposits sealed up through unnumbered centuries under the stalagmitic flooring of limestone caves, or in the deposits of river gravels and silt, filling in many of the caves with red earth and gravel embedding implements closely resembling those of the drift. The ossiferous deposits, moreover, found in some of the oldest caves of England, France, and Belgium, which have disclosed palæolithic tools, include also remains of the mammoth, cave-bear, fossil-horse, hyæna, reindeer, and other animals either wholly extinct, or such as prove by their character the enormous climatic changes referred to. In so far, therefore, as they afford any indication of the antiquity of man, they point to ages so remote that it is unnecessary to investigate the bearings of evidence suggestive of comparative degrees in time. Every new discovery does, indeed, add to our means of determining a relative prehistoric chronology which for some aspects of the inquiry is replete with interest and value. But the subject is referred to now solely in its bearing on the subordinate yet significant questionrelative to the manipulation of the primitive tool-maker.
Here then, if anywhere, we may hope to find some of the earliest evidences of dexterity, alike in its technical and its popular sense. The primitive Troglodytes of Europe have not only transmitted to us abundant evidence of their industry as tool-makers, but also remarkable illustrations of their imitative art, and of an æsthetic faculty developed into rare excellence under all the disadvantages of the cave-dweller fashioning his own artistic implements in a palæolithic age. In such a stage of social life man was uninfluenced by any necessity for concerted action, and so was free to follow inclination or instinct in the preference for either hand.