If there is one custom that might be assumed to be beyond criticism
it is the custom of shaking hands; but it seems that even this
innocent and amiable practice is upon its trial. A heavy indictment
has been directed against it in the Press on hygienic grounds, and we
are urged to adopt some more healthy mode of expressing our mutual
emotion when we meet or part. I think it would need a pretty stiff
Act of Parliament and a heavy code of penalties to break us of so
ingrained a habit. Of course, there are many people in the world who
go through life without ever shaking hands. Probably most people in
the world manage to do so. The Japanese bows, and the Indian
salaams, and the Chinese makes a grave motion of the hand, and the
Arab touches the breast of his friend at parting with the tips of his
fingers.
By comparison with these modes of salutation it may be that our
Western custom of shaking each other by the hand seems coarse and
bucolic, just as our custom of promiscuous kissing seems an
unintelligible indecency to the Japanese, to whom osculation has an
exclusive sexual significance that we do not attach to it. In the
matter of kissing, it is true, we have become much more restrained
than our ancestors. Everyone has read the famous passage in Erasmus'
letters in which he describes how people used to kiss in Tudor
England, and how, by the way, that learned and holy man enjoyed it.
He could not write so of us to-day. And there is one connection in
which kissing has never been a common form of salutation with us.
Masculine kissing is an entirely Continental habit, chiefly
cultivated among the Russians. The greatest display of kissing I
have ever witnessed was at Prince Kropotkin's house--he was then
living at Brighton--on his seventieth birthday. A procession of aged
and bearded Russian patriarchs came to bring greetings, and as each
one entered the room he rushed at the sage, flung his arms about his
neck, and gave him a resounding smack on each whiskered cheek, and
Kropotkin gave resounding smacks in return.
This is carrying heartiness too far for our austerer tastes. I do
not think that Englishmen could be bribed to kiss each other, but I
cannot conceive that they will ever be argued out of shaking hands
with each other. A greeting which we really feel without a grip of
the hand to accompany it would seem like a repulse, or a sacrilege.
It would be a bond without the seal--as cold as a stepmother's
breath, as official as a typewritten letter with a typewritten
signature. It would be like denying our hands their natural office.
They would revolt. They would not remain in our pockets or behind
our backs or toying with a button. We should have to chain them up,
so instinctive and impetuous is their impulse to leap at a brother
hand.
No doubt the custom has its disadvantages. We all know hands that we
should prefer not to shake, warm, clammy hands, listless, flaccid
hands, bony, energetic hands. The horror and loathing with which
Uriah Heep filled our youthful mind was conveyed more through the
touch of his hand than by any other circumstance. It was a cold,
dank hand that left us haunted with the sense of obscene and creepy
things. I know the touch of that hand as though it had lain in mine,
and whenever I feel such a hand now the vision of a cringing, fawning
figure damns the possessor of it in my mind beyond reprieve. It may
be unjust, but the hand-clasp is no bad clue to moral as well as
physical health. "There is death in that hand" was Coleridge's
remark after parting from Keats, and there are times when we can say
with no less confidence that there is pollution, or dishonesty, or
candour, or courage "in that hand."
Some personalities seem to resolve themselves into a hand-shake. It
is so eloquent that it leaves nothing more to be discovered about
them. There is Peaker, the publisher, for example, who advances with
outstretched hand and places it in yours as though it is something he
wants to get rid of. It is a cold pudding of a hand, or a warm
pudding of a hand, according to the weather, but, cold or warm, it is
equally a pudding. What are you to do with it? It obviously doesn't
belong to Peaker, or he would not be so anxious to get rid of it.
You can't shake it, for it is as unresponsive as a jelly-fish, and no
one can shake hands heartily with a jelly-fish. Hand-shaking must be
mutual, or it is not at all. So you just hold it as long as civility
demands, and then gently return it to Peaker, who goes and tries to
get someone else to take it off his hands, so to speak.
And at the other extreme is that hearty fellow Stubbings, the sort of
man who
Hails you "Tom" or "Jack,"
And proves by thumping on your back
How he esteems your merit.
But he does not thump you on the back. He takes your hand--if you
are foolish enough to lend it to him--and crushes it into a jumble of
aching bones and shakes your arm well-nigh out of its socket. That's
the sort of man I am, he seems to say. Nothing half-hearted about
me, sir. Yorkshire to the backbone. Jannock right through, sir.
(Oh, torture!) And I'm glad to see you, sir. (Another jerk.) He
restores your hand, a mangled pain, and you are careful not to trust
him with it again at parting. And there is the limp and lingering
hand that seems so overcharged with affection that it does not know
when to go, but lies in your palm until you feel tempted to throw it
out of the window. But though there are hands that make you shudder
and hands that make you writhe, the ritual is worth the occasional
penalty we have to pay for it. It is the happy mean between the
Oriental's formal salaam and the Russian's enormous hug, and if it
has less dignity than the Arab's touch with the finger-tips, which is
like a benediction, it has more warmth and more of the spirit of
human comradeship. We shall need a lot of medical evidence before we
cease to say with the most friendly of all poets:
Then here's a hand, my trusty frien'.
And gie's a hand o' thine.