Revival: The Psychology of Handwriting (1925)

Robert Saudek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351339155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

Graphology, in English and American manuals of handwriting, stands in the relation with all other pseudo-sciences, founded on half truths and wrought with superstition and amateur fads, compared to modern science. In this book, the author attempts to put before the English public the fundamental principles, methods and laws of scientific graphology. Contents: common objections to graphology and their refutation; history of graphology; physiology and psychology of writing; random test of the correctness of methods explained; practical hints for drawing up of graphological analyses; specimens of analysis.

III

The Physiology of Writing

THERE can be no doubt that there are no two quite similar handwritings, nor that certain peculiarities of handwriting run so unfailingly and so unexceptionally parallel to certain traits of character that from them we may by analogy assume the corresponding traits of character.

One example to elucidate this : A pasty writing (écriture pâteuse) is always indicative of pronounced prevalence of sensual traits. This may, according to the standard of handwriting and other indications, mean in the one case a capacity for visual appreciation and enjoyment based on sensuality and instinct, in another case excess, desire for pleasure, but it always denotes a prevalence of sensuality over sensibility.

In these cases Crépieux-Jamin’s diagnosis is “sensualisme” and “gourmandise”. Klages draws the same conclusions from handwriting of this description and adds, by way of a possible explanation, a highly developed sense of colour.

For the last seventy years graphologists of all countries have recognised this sign as unfailing, and the above-mentioned connection has certainly been verified in hundreds of thousands of cases without exception.

If I turn over the leaves of, roughly, twelve hundred manuscripts in any published collections of autographs of well-known persons of several countries (say the autograph publications in the British Museum, a few volumes of The Autographic Mirror, the third volume of Henry Smith William’s The History of the Art of Writing, two portfolios edited by Warner and Bergh, The World’s Greatest Manuscripts, and two volumes of the French publication L’Autographe), I shall find in every instance of “pasty writing” the correctness of the diagnosis confirmed by the name of the author. To this series belong Casanova (No. 27), Oscar Wilde (No. 79) and Lord Byron (No. 30) (both otherwise with a high standard), Lady Hamilton (VIII. 29) (with a low standard), etc. Wherever I may take my specimens they will prove the assertion. Like any other graphologist, I should find it difficult to mention an exception.

Yet even the credulous reader will probably find it hard to suppress a certain amount of scepticism. He will not doubt the fact itself, but will be unable to assimilate it mentally so long as he is unable to offer “some explanation” to himself.

French, Italian and American graphologists have made as little attempt to find an explanation of this case as of any other, and rely entirely on experience.

But Klages’ fundamental conception would not allow of his doing this, and he endeavoured to find an explanation. He maintains that “the pastiness is explained either by the pen being held far from the nib, or, indeed, by special aesthetic reasons due to the affinities of the writer for the saturated, one might say, coloured tone peculiar to pasty writing. This, again, is based on a sensuality demanding strong irritant stimulants, and is therefore indicative of originality delighting in sensual enjoyment, sometimes of a sense of colour.”

This explanation does not advance us much. It merely treats of a pronounced liking for saturated contrasts in colours, a liking which finds expression in deep coloured writing standing out from the white surface of the paper. Such a connection may frequently exist, but it is not necessary and has no bearing on the essential part of the question. First, it can be questioned whether it is necessary that sensuality should go with a sense of colour, and even where this is so the delight in saturated colours in sensually inclined persons forms only one of the many accompanying factors of sensuality.

The question why persons of a sensual disposition write a pasty hand, or, to express it more positively, why when writing they hold their fingers particularly far from the point of the pen, remains unanswered, and it is not probable that we shall ever find an answer for it. We must rest content and comfort ourselves with the fact that this connection curiously—although inexplicably—appears at all times and among all nations. There are innumerable revelations of life for which we possess no physiological-psychological explanation, and shall probably never possess any, but which, nevertheless, we do not doubt. How is hypnosis produced, how the transference of thought in a state of consciousness, what processes take place in the brain when one person hypnotises another ?

But in the matter occupying our attention at the moment, the examination of the relations between handwriting and character, other questions crop up which threaten to undermine the main foundations of graphology. There arises a question which up to the present has never been formulated, and which I should like to express in the following form : Is not scientific graphology, after all, a science dependent on a certain intellectual epoch, a science which—although in countries like England and Holland it is still unknown—has already passed its zenith and, as a great feature of a single century, is already on the decline ?

To elucidate this inquiry, let us select an example from another realm of research : psycho-analysis.

It is to Freud we owe the doctrine that nervous diseases are always traceable to suppressed sexual impulses which have been forced to assume other forms. This doctrine applied to a definite period, our own, and was in most cases correct when directed to certain Central European social circles. In England at first very little could be made of it. Some people showed great enthusiasm for the theory, although in practice they found no confirmation of it. With the outbreak of the War came a whole series of new, unknown nerve diseases. The various disorders were all registered under the heading of shell-shock in the hospitals at the front, and were in the first instance treated as such. At last English believers in the Freudian doctrine applied Freud’s rules—originally intended only for suppressed sexuality—to the impressions the shell-shock patients had received, from the effects of which their nervous system had been shattered. And Freud’s doctrine was confirmed immediately in the practical treatment in English hospitals.

Then came the period of inflation in Central Europe, and together with it a sudden outbreak of nervous disorders. Here again Freud’s doctrine was applied by physicians, not to the suppression of sexual impulses, but to the suppression of half-conscious or unconscious misdeeds in financial matters, to embezzlements and acts of profiteering, committed only in imagination. Once more Freud’s doctrine proved correct, even though when applied to sexual suppression it had failed.

Impulses of a definite colouring and a definite nature are attached to a definite period which offers the requisite conditions and temptation. Theoretically it may be assumed that all these conditions will some day, in a different period, not exist, and that Freud’s doctrine of suppression will then be deprived of its foundations. It is possible that, founded on the conditions of a definite period, it will perish with that period, that the doctrine as well as the symptoms which it serves to explain are but simple “signs of the times”. Let us return to our specific graphological examples, to pastiness as a symbol of sensuality. It can only be produced by writing with “a long pen”. The impression it produces is characterised by Crépieux-Jamin with the words “fat and stumpy”. From that we may conclude that if a sensual person were trained to adopt a different manner of holding his pen, so that the muscular movements he has been trained to make became his second nature, that the first original habit of holding his pen high up were suppressed, his writing would then cease to be pasty, and lapses into the original manner of writing would no longer occur.

But is it possible to carry out successfully a training so opposed to the original habit and to unconscious habit ?

Graphologists say no, pedagogues say yes.

Now, as American pedagogues work more conscientiously and systematically than those of the European Continent and of England for a reform in the manner of writing, we may hope to be supplied by them with the best material for solving this fundamental question.

The reform in the teaching of writing was, as is known, undertaken for hygienic reasons. It was asserted that owing to the customary manner of holding the body, arm and head, curvature of the spine, writers’ cramp and myopia were engendered; it was further asserted that by a straight position, by the adoption of a non-lateral position for the head, by placing the writing surface parallel to the edge of the table and by the use of a vertical handwriting, all these evils could be obviated. Soon after the first experiments in this subject, a further step was taken, and not only was a hygiene of writing to be attained, but at the same time a greater efficiency, that is, a higher speed and greater legibility.

Starting from the assumption that writing is a means of expression, only uniform writing which is produced in the quickest manner and is most legible is considered the best, which is like inferring from the assumption that clothing serves to cover and keep warm the body, that the best clothing is that which best fulfils this purpose. It is well known that even uncivilised races do not accept this point of view.

The art of writing, however, was contaminated in America, and also in some other places, by the most terrible, the most prosaic and unimaginative word of our modern vocabulary, by the word efficiency, and, confronted with this fact, we are obliged to study the consequence of this dread visitation.

The result is thin writing in which the distinction in the thickness of up-strokes and down-strokes has disappeared (in consequence of the use of a non-resilient pencil, the stylo with ink emitter at the end), in which the down-strokes are all made at an angle of ninety degrees (the variations in measurements carried out in copybooks of the upper forms amount to between two and three degrees), in which a free choice of the forms of letters was, indeed, left to the individual inclination of the pupils (so as not to impair efficiency by opposing the “peculiar” inclination of many pupils for definite forms), but in which no mercy was shown to connections (angle and arch), and, by means of cleverly worked out exercises of the fingers, the forearm and the muscles of the hand, such currency of so-called slender letters was attained that every hesitating, timid form was driven out of the poor children by means of this veritable Prussian-American drill.

I am, of course, not in a position to state whether another graphologist would not be able to discern lapses into the old habit. I myself have not been able to do so. The American pedagogue, W. C. Reavis, St. Louis, has elaborated instructive tables showing how lapses may be corrected, and for every error (oh, glorious times in which originality is immediately nailed down as error !) has enumerated the causes which may possibly underlie it. A lapse from the model upright writing may, for instance, be due to one of five causes, and it is the duty of the teacher to determine immediately which of these causes is responsible for the deplorable lapse.

European graphologists who have not become acquainted with the results of this method of teaching writing will be too easily prompted to give the confident answer that it is only necessary to penetrate this writing (with plenty of material at their disposal) in order to perceive here, as elsewhere, all the differential shades, if, perhaps, less strongly pronounced. They were obliged to do the same with writing of the old school if it belonged to the class of non-expressive writing. But those who have travelled and had occasion to observe biological facts in various countries will not be so prone to adopt this optimistic opinion. Psychologists are always inclined to undervalue the purely physiological, and frequently have no conception of what in certain respects may be attained by a systematically sustained course of drill.

The physical education of high-class English society has for generations paid great attention to good carriage. An upright position when walking was cultivated from infancy to old age by the grandparents of the present generation. When now a visitor from the Continent strolls round the elegant business quarters of London, such as Bond Street and the neighbourhood, and asks himself if he can determine by her carriage the age of the lady walking in front of him, he will experience that his estimate is correct in hardly one case out of ten. It is possible that he may mistake a lady of seventy for one of twenty-five.

An upright carriage, if acquired in early youth as a habit, is in old age the most easy to maintain, the least fatiguing, and it is only indescribably difficult for those who have not acquired the habit in youth. Not dissimilar conditions prevail in regard to writing.

In spite of all medical experts, I do not believe that slanting writing in itself is a cause of curvature of the spine, that the so-called Wundt-Lamansky law according to which the eyes more readily follow perpendicular and horizontal lines than slanting lines holds good, nor that slanting writing is injurious to the eyes. Body, arm, hand and head may be held quite as correctly when writing with a slant, and the whole difference shown by the more favourable statistics for upright writing is, as Professor Freeman of Chicago University very wisely remarks, due mainly to the fact that teachers of the reform method consciously pay greater attention to the correct holding of the body than do teachers of the old system, and if teachers of slanting writing were to give the same attention to the position of the body, statistics would change in their favour and prove the equality of upright and slanting writing.

All this, however, is beside the question. The cry that upright writing alone is hygienic and stands for greater efficiency has gone forth, it has grown to be a battle-cry, and has caused a great revolutionary movement. This movement is a fashion, but a fashion which bears within it the seed of long duration. No one can doubt that upright writing is not more unhealthy than slanting writing, no one can maintain that the writing is rendered less legible or is produced less rapidly, and, as it would appear that all the advantages of a correct position are observed in upright writing, whereas in the teaching of the old method this was not the case, the movement will make rapid progress, and once introduced will maintain itself for a long time. But if from the manner of writing which they have acquired by extensive drill, people have benefited in regard to health, are free from writers’ cramp, much less subject to pains from eye-strain, and are nearly entirely free from backache,and, nevertheless, write a rapid, flowing and legible hand, the second habit of certain muscular movements will become permanently natural to them, because muscles acquire new habits without difficulty only when comfort is found in a conservative persistence in the newly acquired system.

This will remove certain mechanical premises in which alone certain peculiarities in writing may be developed, and with them, also, certain symptoms in individual writing.

It is indeed a fact that manners and styles of writing are preserved longer and are subject to slower changes than other human institutions, but that is not an essential property of writing, but is due to the small attention that for centuries was paid in the schools to the teaching of writing compared with other subjects, and this again was due to the fact that teachers of calligraphy, like gymnastic instructors, were naturally the least educated and, to tell the truth, frequently the most stupid of the staff. Thus, in spite of the fact that the artificial twirls in handwriting, flourishing and striking were preserved in England for, roughly, two centuries, our present style of writing may, perhaps, not persist longer than a quarter of a century. It will yield to a new style, to graphic forms produced with different mechanical means, having physiological premises which render the production of certain peculiarities, at present still frequent, mechanically impossible. And these are, in fact, precisely the peculiarities which are of special importance for graphological interpretation.

Graphology, founded to-day on a safe, empirical basis, which has stood repeated tests, will see itself deprived of this foundation and be obliged, in arduous labour filling whole decades, to amass new empirical facts. When, then, in the new technical means of writing, for the same peculiarities of character new and other Symptoms have been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I Common Objections to Graphology and their Refutation
• II History of Graphology
• III Physiology of Writing
• IV Psychology of Writing
• V Random Test of the Correctness of Methods explained
• VI Practical Hints for drawing up of Graphological Analyses
• VII Specimens of Analyses
• Index