Windows of Love

RIGHT AND LEFT

Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase,’knoweth the right hand from the left.’ This fact in his economy goesclosely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal onthis sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulatelanguage, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of hisuniversal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a greatextent, ‘by his own right hand;’ and his own right hand, we may shrewdlysuspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not forthe manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.

It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man wasonce, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again tobe in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers ofthis volume–in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoterportions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and thefamiliar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated–shouldcomplain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain fortheir special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using theright and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarksin immortal verse, ‘was the manner of Primitive Man.’ He never mindedtwopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp hewanted. How could he when twopence wasn’t yet invented? His mamma neversaid to him in early youth, ‘Why-why,’ or ‘Tomtom,’ as the case mightbe, ‘that’s the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.’ He grew up toman’s estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidiousdistinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that hishands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapelyarrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particularhand he did it with.

How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whomI never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of fivehundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? Atfirst sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must bepurely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing_a priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his innerconsciousness. Not so. See how clever modern archaeology has become! Ibase my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man wasambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his leftas with his right, and just as successfully.

This seems once more a hazardous statement to make about a remote

ancestor, in the age before the great glacial epoch had furrowed themountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true andstrictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with theforefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile onthe page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unlessyou are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally andinstinctively draw it with the face turned towards your left shoulder?Try now to draw it with the profile to the right, and you will find itrequires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand movesof its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginaryprofile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in thiscase looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, withtheir right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned tothe left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing sois a test of their perfect right-handedness.

But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we knowpersonally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drewmen and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either wayindiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have beenambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; andindeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece ofbone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, becomparatively difficult.

I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one veryclear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say withtolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as aspecies when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he becomeotherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helpingto explain the origin and source of man’s supremacy in nature–histool-using faculty–but it is also of interest from the light it castson that fallacy of poor Charles Reade’s already alluded to–that weought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition ofsavages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised mannow right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirablefor him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition ofhis undeveloped stone-age ancestors.

The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, tothe most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be differentin use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spiteof all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn’t show: but it showsinternally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle’s assertion to thecontrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and thatthe liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strictand formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human

organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to theirregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even theparticular direction of the printed letters now before you.

For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners werestrikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere deVere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, helay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms hadinspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed hishiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with aclub, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off intriumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, thelearned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found someStrephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky sex, heand that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and thevictor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains ofthe vanquished suitor. I don’t say these habits and manners were pretty;but they were the custom of the time, and there’s no good denying them.

Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting animal, fought forthe most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and hisfists; till in process of time he added to these early and naturalweapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession ofthe ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex andspecies. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposedand vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don’t, natural selectionmanages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. Tothe boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerableportion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on theleft breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strongman. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand tofight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heartand to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And whenweapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is theright hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over theheart for defence the shield or buckler.

From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right andleft in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, thesuperiority of the right hand was only felt in the matter of fighting.But that alone gave it a distinct pull, and paved the way, at last, forits supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitualemployment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife madethe nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to thecontrol of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquiredby the right–see how the very word ‘dexterity’ implies this fact–madeit more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the samehand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows andarrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was

the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the handwith which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right handremains especially ‘the hand in which you hold your knife;’ and that isexactly how our own children to this day decide the question which iswhich, when they begin to know their right hand from their left forpractical purposes.

A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerableother differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them areextremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writingand printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such apractice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticedabove–the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with thenatural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that allearly writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which isnow universal in western countries. Every schoolboy knows, for instance(or at least he would if he came up to the proper Macaulay standard),that Hebrew is written from right to left, and that each book begins atthe wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, andhieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead ofbeing written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to followits natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in naive drawing, with afree curve from the right leftward.

Nevertheless, the very same fact–that we use the right hand alone inwriting–made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and thechange was due to the use of ink and other pigments for stainingpapyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from rightto left it would of course smear what it had already written; and toprevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing wasreversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand wouldcover and rub out the words written.

The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed isnowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiforminscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in theEuphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, onwhich the words to be recorded–usually a deed of sale or something ofthe sort–were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid. Andthe method of impressing them was very simple; the workman merelypressed the end of his graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus givingrise to triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of variousletters. When alabaster, or any other hard material, was substituted forclay, the sculptor imitated these natural dabs or triangular imprints;and that was the origin of those mysterious and very learned-lookingcuneiforms. This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as itthrows an indirect light on the simple reasons which sometimes bringabout great results, I hold it not wholly alien to the present seriousphilosophical inquiry.

Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that infact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately uponthe remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to delivera blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.

Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from thisorder of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watchyourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from ahill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that youbegin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from theleft-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) hasaccustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made itespecially natural when we are trying to ‘read’ or take in at a glancethe meaning of any complex and varied total.

In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone astep farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a paintingfrom left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intendsus so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes insuccession are represented on a single plane in the same picture–ashappens often in early art–they are invariably represented in theprecise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning atthe upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. Ifirst noticed this curious extension of the common principle in themediaeval frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verifiedit by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient andmodern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum ofsuch story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every pictureconsists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, forexample, of Noah’s Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stagesin that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gatheringthe grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa diPisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at thepatriarch’s disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.

Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this orderalmost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter willnaturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: andhe will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story heunfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which twoprinciples it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left,and end at the lower right-hand corner.

I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval betweenprimitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during allthat time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradualdegrees each day still further differentiated and specialised.Innumerable trades, occupations, and habits imply ever-widening

differences in the way we use them. It is not the right hand alone thathas undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, thoughsubordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If thesavage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, ormain mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. Ifone hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork tomake up for it. In almost every act we do with both hands, each has aseparate office to which it is best fitted. Take, for example, so simplea matter as buttoning one’s coat, where a curious distinction betweenthe habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with ease andcertainty. Men’s clothes are always made with the buttons on the rightside and the button-holes on the left. Women’s, on the contrary, arealways made with the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes onthe right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction, which haslong engaged the attention of philosophers, has never yet beendiscovered, but it is probably to be accounted for by the perversity ofwomen.) Well, if a man tries to put on a woman’s waterproof, or a womanto put on a man’s ulster, each will find that neither hand is readilyable to perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps thebutton in his right hand, pushes it through with his right thumb, holdsthe button-hole open with his left, and pulls all straight with hisright forefinger. Reverse the sides, and both hands at once seemequally helpless.

It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress ormanufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of rightand left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitelyincrease for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases likeboots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person’sintelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habituallytied in a sailor’s knot acquires one long side, left, and one short one,right, from the way it is manipulated by the right hand; if it were tiedby the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrewsand of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with thenatural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrewwith the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterlyawkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers thekeyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to theright, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it beconveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches andthe numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is apeculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. Aservant offers you dishes from the left side: you can’t so readily helpyourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired ofthe German race, because it could never be taught like the English tokeep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn atthe left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at theside; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the righthand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the leftbreast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to

reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once thatthey are immediately implied in the very fact of our originalright-handedness.

And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade’s mistakennotion of the advantages of ambidexterity. You couldn’t make both handsdo everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort,efficiency, and convenience. Each hand learns to do its own work and todo it well; if you made it do the other hand’s into the bargain, itwould have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficulteven then to prevent specialisation. We should have to make thingsdeliberately different for the two hands–to have rights and lefts ineverything, as we have them now in boots and gloves–or else one handmust inevitably gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgicalinstruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to theleft; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can’t upsetall this without causing confusion. More than that, the division oflabour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten thedextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know thatthe exact opposite has been the case. Man’s special use of the righthand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes. If ever hisright hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed beginto totter. Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. Whatshe finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many goodpoints to recommend it.

And this last consideration suggests another aspect of right and leftwhich must not be passed over without one word in this brief survey ofthe philosophy of the subject. The superiority of the right caused itearly to be regarded as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty hand; theinferiority of the left caused it equally to be considered asill-omened, unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence comeinnumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand offriendship that we always grasp; it is with our own right hand that wevindicate our honour against sinister suspicions. On the other hand, itis ‘over the left’ that we believe a doubtful or incredible statement; aleft-handed compliment or a left-handed marriage carry their owncondemnation with them. On the right hand of the host is the seat ofhonour; it is to the left that the goats of ecclesiastical controversyare invariably relegated. The very notions of the right hand and ethicalright have got mixed up inextricably in every language: _droit_ and _ladroite_ display it in French as much as right and the right in English.But to be _gauche_ is merely to be awkward and clumsy; while to be rightis something far higher and more important.

So unlucky, indeed, does the left hand at last become that merely tomention it is an evil omen; and so the Greeks refused to use the trueold Greek word for left at all, and preferred euphemistically to

describe it as _euonymos_, the well-named or happy-omened. Our own_left_ seems equally to mean the hand that is left after the right hasbeen mentioned, or, in short, the other one. Many things which are luckyif seen on the right are fateful omens if seen to leftward. On the otherhand, if you spill the salt, you propitiate destiny by tossing a pinchof it over the left shoulder. A murderer’s left hand is said by goodauthorities to be an excellent thing to do magic with; but here I cannotspeak from personal experience. Nor do I know why the wedding-ring isworn on the left hand; though it is significant, at any rate, that themark of slavery should be put by the man with his own right upon theinferior member of the weaker vessel. Strong-minded ladies may get up anagitation if they like to alter this gross injustice of the centuries.

One curious minor application of rights and lefts is the rule of theroad as it exists in England. How it arose I can’t say, any more than Ican say why a lady sits her side-saddle to the left. Coachmen, to besure, are quite unanimous that the leftward route enables them to seehow close they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continentalauthority is equally convinced the other way, I make no doubt this is amere illusion of long-continued custom. It is curious, however, that theEnglish usage, having once obtained in these islands, has influencedrailways, not only in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, likecarriages, go to the left when they pass; and this habit, quite naturalin England, was transplanted by the early engineers to the Continent,where ordinary carriages, of course, go to the right. In America, to besure, the trains also go right like the carriages; but then, thoseAmericans have such a curiously un-English way of being strictlyconsistent and logical in their doings. In Britain we should havecompromised the matter by going sometimes one way and sometimes theother.

EVOLUTION

Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the choleragerm, woman’s rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,it is ‘in the air.’ It pervades society everywhere with its subtleessence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and itsslang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampantPhilistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believeshe knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everydayconversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits ofauthors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebuloussemi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer–don’t you know?–and alot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the

best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in abelief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied byTopsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,that most things ‘growed.’ Especially is it known that in the opinion ofthe evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended frommen with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of thecommon gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of thevarious points in the great modern evolutionary programme.

It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of coursediffers fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known toall of us in our own minds as ‘other people,’ that almost every point inthe catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of thewildest description. Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more thanGeorge Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electrictelegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than weare descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we haveanything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship withour poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search ofa ‘missing link’; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for themost part wholly unimportant ones. If we found the imaginary link inquestion, he would not be a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. Andso forth generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and currentfallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary teaching. Whatever mostpeople think evolutionary is for the most part a pure parody of theevolutionist’s opinion.

But a more serious error than all these pervades what we may call thedrawing-room view of the evolutionist theory. So far as Society with abig initial is concerned, evolutionism first began to be talked about,and therefore known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather itoverhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin published his’Origin of Species.’ That great book consisted simply of a theory as tothe causes which led to the distinctions of kind between plants andanimals. With evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took forgranted the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, theearth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the mountains andthe valleys, nay even life itself in the crude form, everything in fact,save the one point of the various types and species of living beings.Long before Darwin’s book appeared evolution had been a recognised forcein the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace hadworked out the development of suns and earths from white-hotstar-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth’s surfaceto its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had workedout the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slowmodification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from itssimplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.

But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these things. Theevolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked

for at Mudie’s, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side byside with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous courtmemoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the wordevolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refineddinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the ‘Darwinian theory,”natural selection,’ ‘the missing link,’ and the belief that men weremerely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting uponthem. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented andpatented the entire business, including descent with modification, ifsuch notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large’s speculativeintelligence.

Now, evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and olderantecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead usto imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and ithas an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push itback, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague andindefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Romanpoet–the only original poet in the Latin language–did indeed hit outfor himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous andshapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time itwas wonderful. But Lucretius’s philosophy, like all the philosophies ofthe older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of thedevelopment of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,but wholly evolved, like the German thinker’s camel, out of its author’sown pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt havebuilt an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a littlestraw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-makingbeing still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowyAladdin’s palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginaryworld of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos intoan orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systemsarise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build forall time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use soundbricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.

It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began totake form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modernevolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas wholed the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moseshad already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of theeighteenth century.

Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logicalorder. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precedein development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without aworld to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced tocomparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, andmatter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,