THE 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 yet attained 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 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 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 the
established 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 apparently showing a prevalent _dexterity_ among 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 the _Palæolithic 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 in the 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 question relative 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.