Falling in Love

2. 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 goes

closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on

this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate

language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.

His right-handedness, in short, is part cause and part effect of his

universal supremacy in animated nature. He is what he is, to a great

extent, 'by his own right hand;' and his own right hand, we may shrewdly

suspect, would never have differed at all from his left were it not for

the manifold arts and trades and activities he practises.

It was not always so, when wild in woods the noble savage ran. Man was

once, in his childhood on earth, what Charles Reade wanted him again to

be in his maturer centuries, ambidextrous. And lest any lady readers of

this volume--in the Cape of Good Hope, for example, or the remoter

portions of the Australian bush, whither the culture of Girton and the

familiar knowledge of the Latin language have not yet penetrated--should

complain that I speak with unknown tongues, I will further explain for

their special benefit that ambidextrous means equally-handed, using the

right and the left indiscriminately. This, as Mr. Andrew Lang remarks

in immortal verse, 'was the manner of Primitive Man.' He never minded

twopence which hand he used, as long as he got the fruit or the scalp he

wanted. How could he when twopence wasn't yet invented? His mamma never

said to him in early youth, 'Why-why,' or 'Tomtom,' as the case might

be, 'that's the wrong hand to hold your flint-scraper in.' He grew up to

man's estate in happy ignorance of such minute and invidious

distinctions between his anterior extremities. Enough for him that his

hands could grasp the forest boughs or chip the stone into shapely

arrows; and he never even thought in his innocent soul which particular

hand he did it with.

How can I make this confident assertion, you ask, about a gentleman whom

I never personally saw, and whose habits the intervention of five

hundred centuries has precluded me from studying at close quarters? At

first sight, you would suppose the evidence on such a point must be

purely negative. The reconstructive historian must surely be inventing

_ priori_ facts, evolved, _more Germanico_, from his inner

consciousness. Not so. See how clever modern arch***** has become! I

base my assertion upon solid evidence. I know that Primitive Man was

ambidextrous, because he wrote and painted just as often with his left

as 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 the

mountains of Northern Europe; but, nevertheless, it is strictly true and

strictly demonstrable. Just try, as you read, to draw with the

forefinger and thumb of your right hand an imaginary human profile on

the page on which these words are printed. Do you observe that (unless

you are an artist, and therefore sophisticated) you naturally and

instinctively 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 it

requires a far greater effort of the thumb and fingers. The hand moves

of its own accord from without inward, not from within outward. Then,

again, draw with your left thumb and forefinger another imaginary

profile, and you will find, for the same reason, that the face in this

case looks rightward. Existing savages, and our own young children,

whenever they draw a figure in profile, be it of man or beast, with

their right hand, draw it almost always with the face or head turned to

the left, in accordance with this natural human instinct. Their doing so

is a test of their perfect right-handedness.

But Primitive Man, or at any rate the most primitive men we know

personally, the carvers of the figures from the French bone-caves, drew

men and beasts, on bone or mammoth-tusk, turned either way

indiscriminately. The inference is obvious. They must have been

ambidextrous. Only ambidextrous people draw so at the present day; and

indeed to scrape a figure otherwise with a sharp flint on a piece of

bone or tooth or mammoth-tusk would, even for a practised hand, be

comparatively difficult.

I have begun my consideration of rights and lefts with this one very

clear historical datum, because it is interesting to be able to say with

tolerable certainty that there really was a period in our life as a

species when man in the lump was ambidextrous. Why and how did he become

otherwise? This question is not only of importance in itself, as helping

to explain the origin and source of man's supremacy in nature--his

tool-using faculty--but it is also of interest from the light it casts

on that fallacy of poor Charles Reade's already alluded to--that we

ought all of us in this respect to hark back to the condition of

savages. I think when we have seen the reasons which make civilised man

now right-handed, we shall also see why it would be highly undesirable

for him to return, after so many ages of practice, to the condition of

his undeveloped stone-age ancestors.

The very beginning of our modern right-handedness goes back, indeed, to

the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different

in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite

of all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally,

indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but it shows

internally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle's assertion to the

contrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and that

the liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strict

and formal symmetry. In this irregular distribution of those human

organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the

irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the

particular direction of the printed letters now before you.

For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners were

strikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de

Vere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he

lay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had

inspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed his

hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with a

club, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off in

triumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, the

learned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some

Strephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky s*x, he

and that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and the

victor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains of

the 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 for

the most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and his

fists; till in process of time he added to these early and natural

weapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,

as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession of

the ladies of his kind, against other members of his own s*x and

species. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposed

and vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don't, natural selection

manages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. To

the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerable

portion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on the

left breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strong

man. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand to

fight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heart

and to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And when

weapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is the

right hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over the

heart for defence the shield or buckler.

From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right and

left in civilised life takes its beginning. At first, no doubt, the

superiority 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, for

its supremacy elsewhere. For when weapons came into use, the habitual

employment of the right hand to grasp the spear, sword, or knife made

the nerves and muscles of the right side far more obedient to the

control of the will than those of the left. The dexterity thus acquired

by the right--see how the very word 'dexterity' implies this fact--made

it more natural for the early hunter and artificer to employ the same

hand preferentially in the manufacture of flint hatchets, bows and

arrows, and in all the other manifold activities of savage life. It was

the hand with which he grasped his weapon; it was therefore the hand

with which he chipped it. To the very end, however, the right hand

remains especially 'the hand in which you hold your knife;' and that is

exactly how our own children to this day decide the question which is

which, when they begin to know their right hand from their left for

practical purposes.

A difference like this, once set up, implies thereafter innumerable

other differences which naturally flow from it. Some of them are

extremely remote and derivative. Take, for example, the case of writing

and printing. Why do these run from left to right? At first sight such a

practice seems clearly contrary to the instinctive tendency I noticed

above--the tendency to draw from right to left, in accordance with the

natural sweep of the hand and arm. And, indeed, it is a fact that all

early writing habitually took the opposite direction from that which is

now 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 at

the wrong cover. The reason is that words, and letters, and

hieroglyphics were originally carved, scratched, or incised, instead of

being written with coloured ink, and the hand was thus allowed to follow

its natural bent, and to proceed, as we all do in na** drawing, with a

free curve from the right leftward.

Nevertheless, the very same fact--that we use the right hand alone in

writing--made the letters run the opposite way in the end; and the

change was due to the use of ink and other pigments for staining

papyrus, parchment, or paper. If the hand in this case moved from right

to left it would of course smear what it had already written; and to

prevent such untidy smudging of the words, the order of writing was

reversed from left rightward. The use of wax tablets also, no doubt,

helped forward the revolution, for in this case, too, the hand would

cover and rub out the words written.

The strict dependence of writing, indeed, upon the material employed is

nowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiform

inscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in the

Euphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on

which the words to be recorded--usually a deed of sale or something of

the sort--were impressed while it was wet and then baked in, solid. And

the method of impressing them was very simple; the workman merely

pressed the end of his graver or wedge into the moist clay, thus giving

rise to triangular marks which were arranged in the shapes of various

letters. When alabaster, or any other hard material, was substituted for

clay, the sculptor imitated these natural dabs or triangular imprints;

and that was the origin of those mysterious and very learned-looking

cuneiforms. This, I admit, is a palpable digression; but inasmuch as it

throws an indirect light on the simple reasons which sometimes bring

about great results, I hold it not wholly alien to the present serious

philosophical inquiry.

Printing, in turn, necessarily follows the rule of writing, so that in

fact the order of letters and words on this page depends ultimately upon

the remote fact that primitive man had to use his right hand to deliver

a blow, and his left to parry, or to guard his heart.

Some curious and hardly noticeable results flow once more from this

order of writing from left to right. You will find, if you watch

yourself closely, that in examining a landscape, or the view from a

hill-top, your eye naturally ranges from left to right; and that you

begin your survey, as you would begin reading a page of print, from the

left-hand corner. Apparently, the now almost instinctive act of reading

(for Dogberry was right after all, for the civilised infant) has

accustomed our eyes to this particular movement, and has made it

especially natural when we are trying to 'read' or take in at a glance

the meaning of any complex and varied total.

In the matter of pictures, I notice, the correlation has even gone a

step farther. Not only do we usually take in the episodes of a painting

from left to right, but the painter definitely and deliberately intends

us so to take them in. For wherever two or three distinct episodes in

succession are represented on a single plane in the same picture--as

happens often in early art--they are invariably represented in the

precise order of the words on a written or printed page, beginning at

the upper left-hand corner, and ending at the lower right-hand angle. I

first noticed this curious extension of the common principle in the

medi*** frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and I have since verified

it by observations on many other pictures elsewhere, both ancient and

modern. The Campo Santo, however, forms an exceptionally good museum of

such story-telling frescoes by various painters, as almost every picture

consists of several successive episodes. The famous Benozzo Gozzoli, for

example, of Noah's Vineyard represents on a single plane all the stages

in that earliest drama of intoxication, from the first act of gathering

the grapes on the top left, to the scandalised lady, the _vergognosa di

Pisa_, who covers her face with her hands in shocked horror at the

patriarch's disgrace in the lower right-hand corner.

Observe, too, that the very conditions of _technique_ demand this order

almost as rigorously in painting as in writing. For the painter will

naturally so work as not to smudge over what he has already painted: and

he will also naturally begin with the earliest episode in the story he

unfolds, proceeding to the others in due succession. From which two

principles 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 between

primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli. But consider further that during all

that time the uses of the right and left hand were becoming by gradual

degrees 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 that

has undergone an education in this respect: the left, too, though

subordinate, has still its own special functions to perform. If the

savage chips his flints with a blow of the right, he holds the core, or

main mass of stone from which he strikes it, firmly with his left. If

one hand is specially devoted to the knife, the other grasps the fork to

make up for it. In almost every act we do with both hands, each has a

separate office to which it is best fitted. Take, for example, so simple

a matter as buttoning one's coat, where a curious distinction between

the habits of the sexes enables us to test the principle with ease and

certainty. Men's clothes are always made with the buttons on the right

side and the button-holes on the left. Women's, on the contrary, are

always made with the buttons on the left side, and the button-holes on

the right. (The occult reason for this curious distinction, which has

long engaged the attention of philosophers, has never yet been

discovered, but it is probably to be accounted for by the perversity of

women.) Well, if a man tries to put on a woman's waterproof, or a woman

to put on a man's ulster, each will find that neither hand is readily

able to perform the part of the other. A man, in buttoning, grasps the

button in his right hand, pushes it through with his right thumb, holds

the button-hole open with his left, and pulls all straight with his

right forefinger. Reverse the sides, and both hands at once seem

equally helpless.

It is curious to note how many little peculiarities of dress or

manufacture are equally necessitated by this prime distinction of right

and left. Here are a very few of them, which the reader can indefinitely

increase for himself. (I leave out of consideration obvious cases like

boots and gloves: to insult that proverbially intelligent person's

intelligence with those were surely unpardonable.) A scarf habitually

tied 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 tied

by the left, the relations would be reversed. The spiral of corkscrews

and of ordinary screws turned by hand goes in accordance with the

natural twist of the right hand: try to drive in an imaginary corkscrew

with the right hand, the opposite way, and you will see how utterly

awkward and clumsy is the motion. The strap of the flap that covers the

keyhole in trunks and portmanteaus always has its fixed side over to the

right, and its buckle to the left; in this way only can it be

conveniently buckled by a right-handed person. The hands of watches and

the numbers of dial-faced barometers run from left to right: this is a

peculiarity dependent upon the left to right system of writing. A

servant offers you dishes from the left side: you can't so readily help

yourself from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired of

the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to

keep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn at

the left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the

side; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right

hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the left

breast; 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 that

they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original

right-handedness.

And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade's mistaken

notion of the advantages of ambidexterity. You couldn't make both hands

do everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort,

efficiency, and convenience. Each hand learns to do its own work and to

do it well; if you made it do the other hand's into the bargain, it

would have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficult

even then to prevent specialisation. We should have to make things

deliberately different for the two hands--to have rights and lefts in

everything, as we have them now in boots and gloves--or else one hand

must inevitably gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgical

instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,

while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the

left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can't upset

all this without causing confusion. More than that, the division of

labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:

for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the

dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that

the exact opposite has been the case. Man's special use of the right

hand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes. If ever his

right hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed begin

to totter. Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. What

she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many good

points to recommend it.

And this last consideration suggests another aspect of right and left

which must not be passed over without one word in this brief survey of

the philosophy of the subject. The superiority of the right caused it

early to be regarded as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty hand; the

inferiority of the left caused it equally to be considered as

ill-omened, unlucky, and, in one expressive word, sinister. Hence come

innumerable phrases and superstitions. It is the right hand of

friendship that we always grasp; it is with our own right hand that we

vindicate our honour against sinister suspicions. On the other hand, it

is 'over the left' that we believe a doubtful or incredible statement; a

left-handed compliment or a left-handed marriage carry their own

condemnation with them. On the right hand of the host is the seat of

honour; it is to the left that the goats of ecclesiastical controversy

are invariably relegated. The very notions of the right hand and ethical

right have got mixed up inextricably in every language: _droit_ and _la

droite_ 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 right

is something far higher and more important.

So unlucky, indeed, does the left hand at last become that merely to

mention it is an evil omen; and so the Greeks refused to use the true

old 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 has

been mentioned, or, in short, the other one. Many things which are lucky

if seen on the right are fateful omens if seen to leftward. On the other

hand, if you spill the salt, you propitiate destiny by tossing a pinch

of it over the left shoulder. A murderer's left hand is said by good

authorities to be an excellent thing to do magic with; but here I cannot

speak from personal experience. Nor do I know why the wedding-ring is

worn on the left hand; though it is significant, at any rate, that the

mark of slavery should be put by the man with his own right upon the

inferior member of the weaker vessel. Strong-minded ladies may get up an

agitation if they like to alter this gross injustice of the centuries.

One curious minor application of rights and lefts is the rule of the

road as it exists in England. How it arose I can't say, any more than I

can say why a lady sits her side-saddle to the left. Coachmen, to be

sure, are quite unanimous that the leftward route enables them to see

how close they are passing to another carriage; but, as all continental

authority is equally convinced the other way, I make no doubt this is a

mere illusion of long-continued custom. It is curious, however, that the

English usage, having once obtained in these islands, has influenced

railways, not only in Britain, but over all Europe. Trains, like

carriages, go to the left when they pass; and this habit, quite natural

in England, was transplanted by the early engineers to the Continent,

where ordinary carriages, of course, go to the right. In America, to be

sure, the trains also go right like the carriages; but then, those

Americans have such a curiously un-English way of being strictly

consistent and logical in their doings. In Britain we should have

compromised the matter by going sometimes one way and sometimes the

other.