With the Egyptians, the hand was a symbol of force; with the Romans,
a symbol of fidelity. We please ourselves in clothing the occult
powers, such as Time, Nature, Destiny, with a human hand: the hand
of Time overthrows empires, and impresses wrinkles on our brows; the
hand of Nature is prodigal to us of gifts, which are ravished from us
by the hand of Death; the hand of Destiny or of Providence, in fine,
conducts us across the paths of life.
Old stereotyped language, which we use, and shall use always. Are
we not, as Saint Evremond said, in the hands of love, as the balls
in the hands of tennis-players--and the first happiness which love
can give, is it not, according to Stendhal--and all the truly
sensitive--the first pressure of the hand of the woman we love?
Our ancestors swore by the hand, and read in the hand the mysteries
of the future. On the day of coronation, the hand of justice was
borne before the kings; the hand is used in salutation; we ask for
the /hand/ of the lady we wish to espouse in lawful marriage; we
wash our hands, like Pontius Pilate, of faults which we could not
help committing; and if I were to have to make for you the panegyric
of this organ, I should have, like Scheherazade, to put off the end
of my discourse every day till the morrow. Sir Charles Bell, in
his book, /The Hand: Its Mechanism, etc./, has given a synthesis
of all I could possibly add, and has proved that the human hand is
so admirably formed, possesses a sensibility so exquisite, that
sensibility governs with so much precision all its movements, it
answers so instantaneously to the impulses of the will, that one
might be tempted to believe that it is itself its seat. All its
actions are so energetic, so free, and withal so delicate, that it
appears to have an instinct apart; and neither its complication as
an instrument is ever dreamt of, nor the relations which subject it
to the mind. We avail ourselves of the service of the hand, as we
perform the act of respiration, without thinking of it; and we have
lost all remembrance of its first feeble efforts, as of the slow
exercise which has brought it to perfection.
The hand, in a word, is the most perfect instrument given by God to
man; but I ought not to forget, my fair friend, that poets seldom
wear gloves, and philosophers never; and that, philosophising as I
am, I remain outside the Glove, and, above all, appear to forget that
axiom of Fontenelle: Had we our hand full of authenticated facts or
truths, we should but half open it, and that after a feeble fashion.
The Glove is worthy of entering into the legend of a fairy tale, and
remaining there always, as the slipper has entered into the poetry
even of fable, with the theme of /Cinderella/. An ancient King of
France was indeed in love all his life with an unknown woman, only
from having seen her Glove in the midst of a masked ball given
to his court. Could it not easily be conceived according to the
approximative aphorism, "Show me your Glove, I will tell you who you
are." At the opera ball, in the surge of masks and of dominoes, in
the midst of the comings and goings on that staircase so exalted,
it needs but a Glove imprisoning a little hand to allure at once
the passion of a man of delicacy--a long white Glove lovingly glued
to a hand divinely small, a fine delicate wrist, and the exquisite
roundness of the forearm. This is enough to transport a lover of the
fair sex. The Glove appears not only in all festivals where grace and
beauty preside; it is found in all the rudeness and clumsiness of its
origin at the Poles, among the Norwegians, the Laps, and the Fins,
who wear huge Gloves of wool in summer, and thick Gloves of reindeer
skin, with the hair outside, in winter.
Defended by these Gloves, they sometimes sally bravely from their
huts, in spite of the cruel frosts, to kill the white bear and the
seal, just as the dramatic engravings which illustrate our stories of
voyages to the North Pole represent them to us.
But methinks your eye is asking me in disquietude about two little
bound books which I have in my reach. Reassure yourself, these are
not recitals of tourists, which are for painting us the manners of
the inhabitants of Karasjok or of the Lofoten Isles: I will read
to you at once, without allowing you to languish any longer, their
titles. Upon one of these works, see for yourself /Collection of the
Best Riddles of the Time/, composed on divers serious and sprightly
subjects by Colletet; on the other, /Collection of Riddles of the
Time/, by the Abbé Cotin. You already divine that I intend to act no
traitor's part towards you, and that I am going to read you some old
charades in verse upon Gloves:
The first riddle--/énigme/ has been masculine in French at least
since the seventeenth century, in despite of its profound
femininity--the first riddle, in obscure and ambiguous terms,
indicates that the Glove, after having been the natural covering of a
rustic animal, serves to-day as an artificial covering for an animal
more refined: man!
We're two or ten, and to a body wed,
We once a thing of breathing life were over;
Like it we lived, and now, although we're dead,
Another life more excellent we cover.
This quatrain riddle is by François Colletet, that poor poet up to
his neck in mud. Listen now to Cotin--the Trissotin of Molière--in
this singular sextain:--
With mortal flesh our five soft mouths we fill,
And in the winter to repletion feed;
If one of us be lost, the world's agreed
To treat the rest of us exceeding ill;
But if we all remain together, then
We do almost all that is done by men.
Mediocre, isn't it; tortured, bombastic, gross, all at once? There is
nothing here to make us fall into an ecstasy, and repeat to satiety,
as some highly refined courtiers used to do, "Ah, with what congruity
of terms are these thoughts expressed!"
I shall abandon the riddles at once. These two specimens are enough.
Another point:
Many physiologists affirm that great warriors have been remarkable
for a beautiful hand, which they loved perhaps to adorn with the most
delicate gloves. They instance Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne,
and Napoleon.
According to an historian of the First Empire, some generals
attending Bonaparte one day in his private room, found his big
military Gloves and his little hat on a side-table. Actuated by
curiosity, each one of them tried in turn the Glove and the hat; but
it appears there was not a single hand which could force its entrance
into those big Gloves, and upon those giants' shoulders not a single
head which could fill up the little hat.
Napoleon was, it is weil known, no less proud of his hand than Byron,
who, his biographer tells us, had a hand so small, that it was out of
all proportion with his face. Byron thought and wrote that nothing
characterised birth more than the hand; it was, according to him,
almost the sole index of aristocracy of blood.
Since the fifteenth century, we can trace in the museums of France,
Holland, Italy, Spain, and Germany, the interest which painters of
all schools have taken in the study of the hand, and, indeed, of
the Glove. Van Dyck and Rubens were passed masters in this art, and
Titian has left an admirable masterpiece in his /Young Man with
the Glove/. Velasquez almost always makes his powerful models hold
Gloves, nobly folded in their right hand. In Venetian paintings we
see the Glove on the hands of the Doge, of his wife, of ambassadors,
of senators, of residents, and even of merchants. The mere study
of the Gloves in these portraits and these costumes would suffice
for a long pamphlet, for we must consider the Glove in all classes
of society and in all epochs, from the embroidered Gloves of the
Doges to the special Gloves of the merchants, of the rectors of the
university of Padua, and even of the monks of the brotherhood of the
Cross, which were violet on a white ground, &c.
But it would be madness to endeavour to omit nothing in this
monograph of the Glove, a tentative work, and an unpremeditated
sketch of little pretension.
Have we not still to consider the stuffed fencing Glove, with the
short shield of red leather, and the giant Glove which swells the
fist of the boxers?--the ordinance Glove of the good Dumanet; that
white cotton Glove which the brave trooper puts on so willingly on
Sunday, coming out of barracks like a conquering hero? Is there
not besides the Glove of the Cuirassier, with its large shield of
buckskin, which this last man of iron places so gallantly on his hip
when he is on express service?
The history of Gauntlets and of military Gloves from the time of the
Middle Ages would make a mighty volume, like the ladies' Glove and
the work-people's Mitten. The liturgical Glove, yet more important,
is of three kinds: the /pontifical Glove/, which was worn by bishops
and abbés; the Glove which simple priests had adopted for particular
occasions; and lastly, the /prelatic/ /Glove/. On /pontifical
Gloves/ alone Monseigneur X. Barbier de Montault has found means
to write in the /Bulletin Monumental/, 1876-1877, nearly two
hundred pages of closely packed text, in 8vo: /Ab uno disce omnes/.
See, my amiable friend, I repeat it--see in what an inextricable
archæological labyrinth I might have set you to wander, /à propos/
of all these dear little Gloves, of which I had promised you a
history, but about which it appears to me I am making only a lively
chatter of whipped Glove. I should not have set on the table aught
beyond that which lends grace to woman: Gloves on a champagne glass
or in a shepherdess's hat, roses and a love-letter half opened; such
simple still life had assuredly better inspired my Muse than all the
documents brought together and packed one on another, well calculated
to frighten a mind which is by no means pleased with such barricades
of notes and annotations. Ah, my fair friend, how right was Balzac,
in his brilliant and profound /Traité de la vie élégante/, when he
wrote the following lines, which I had not sufficiently considered
before pledging my word in your society!
"The learned man, or the elegant man of the world, who would search
out in every epoch the costumes of a people, would compile the most
interesting history and the most rationally true. . . . . To ask
the origin of shoes, of alms-purses, of hoods, of the cockade, of
hoop-petticoats, of farthingales, of /Gloves/, of masks, is to drag
a /modilogist/ into the frightful maze of sumptuary laws, and upon
all the battlefields, where civilisation has triumphed over the gross
manners imported into Europe by the barbarism of the Middle Ages.
"Things futile in appearance," continues the author of the /Théorie
de la démarche/, "represent either ideas or interests--whether
it be bust, or foot, or head"--he might have said, above all, or
hand--"you will ever see a social progress, a retrograde system, or
some desperate struggle formulating itself by the assistance of some
part or other of the dress. Now the shoe announces a privilege, now
the hat signals a revolution--a piece of embroidery, a scarf, or some
ornament of straw, is the sign of a party. Why should the toilet be
then always the most eloquent of styles, if it was not really the
whole man, the man with his political opinions, the man with the
text of his existence, the hieroglyphic man? To-day /Vestignomy/ has
become almost a branch of the art created by Gall and Lavater."
I am overwhelmed, O my indulgent friend! I feel that I have been far
inferior to my task, and I fear I have not had that charming art of
saying nothing which often says so many things. I have neglected to
show you the Glove in princely /Inventaires/, in the old chronicles,
and in the delightful tales of Boccaccio, of the Queen of Navarre, of
Straparole, of Bonaventure Desperriers, and even in Brantôme, who has
written a little story, full of old French /esprit/, on a Glove found
in the bed of a fashionable lady. I had a good opportunity of showing
you the anecdotic Glove of ever so many romances and memoirs from /Le
Petit Jehan de Saintre/ up to Casanova the Venetian, going through
/l' Histoire amoureuse des Gaules/.
But the natural and the unpremeditated is also a French quality,
of which we must sometimes allow the grace, even in recognising
its defects. I left the history of the Glove, I believe, in 1840;
and I do not suppose that I have painted for you all the little
cuffs, festoons, ruches, notchings, indentations, which adorned the
fastenings of the town Gloves of our elegant ladies, nor the long
black mittens which accompanied the blonde bodices, of which in those
modest times people were madly fond. It is of little consequence for
me to follow the fashions from 1840 to the present day: one cannot
be a woman and remain ignorant of these different variations of a
fashion of which all the specimens return periodically to reconquer
a second of celebrity. Open-worked Gloves of Chinese silk, Spanish
Gloves, Beaver Gloves, Swedish Gloves, glacé kid Gloves, musketeers'
Gloves, Colombine, with cuffs--what do I say?--the qualifications are
innumerable; they change still more than the fashion, for the epithet
gives a springtide and deceives the customer--/a fortiori/ would
it deceive the /Gantuographer/, if you will allow me this hideous
neologism.
That which I have not been able to accomplish, that which you have
not demanded of me, that which nevertheless would have interested you
far more than this sleepy talk, is the /Physiology of the Glove/,
with this epigraph taken from an anonymous but witty author--"The
style is the man; the Glove is the woman; the style sometimes
deceives, but the Glove never."
I am launched, don't you see, into theories historic, philosophic,
and, above all, physiognomic, in a study altogether beside the mark?
Allow, my sweet and somnolent one, that if you had permitted me at
first to take this part (which for my slight notice was assuredly
better), I should have been less clumsily stiff, less dull above all,
less pretentious besides; albeit I make no other pretension here than
to do your pleasure. You have thrown me the Glove on the confines of
history; it is thence that I have raised it with more effeminancy
than swagger.
I could have wished that fancy might have dictated to history; but,
in the present case, it is the most that has been done, if history
has succeeded in warming the amiable fancy, which has not taken
Gloves to make us villainously sulky with each other.
Pardon!--indulgent interlocutress!
Excuse also, amiable lady readers, ye who read this congealed babble,
and who have yet less reason to be favourable to me, in this sense,
that to you all, alas! I cannot say, as was once said in the polite
world--/Friendship allows the Glove./