HANDWRITING

When "The Book of Snobs" was appearing week by week in Punch, Thackeray derived constant aid from suggestive correspondents. "'Why only attack the aristocratic Snobs?' says one estimable gentleman. 'Are not the snobbish Snobs to have their turn?' 'Pitch into the University Snobs!' writes an indignant correspondent (who spells elegant with two l's)."

Similarly, if I may compare small things with great, I am happy in the possession of an unknown friend who, from time to time, supplies me with references to current topics which he thinks suitable to my gentle methods of criticism. My friend (unlike Thackeray's correspondent) can spell elegant, and much longer words too, with faultless accuracy, and is altogether, as I judge, a person of much culture. It is this circumstance, I suppose (for he has no earthly connexion with the Army), which makes him feel so keenly about a cutting from a newspaper which he has just sent us:—

"In a report just issued by the War Office on the result of examinations for promotion many officers are said to be handicapped by their bad handwriting. Some show of 'want of intelligence, small power of expression, poor penmanship—in fact, appear to suffer from defective education.'

"On the other hand, the work of non-commissioned officers shows intelligence and power of concise expression, while penmanship is good.

"But the percentage of failures among the officers shows a large decrease—from 22 per cent. in November 1904 to 13 per cent. in May last. The improvement is particularly noticeable among lieutenants. It is apparent, says the report, that a serious effort is being made by the commissioned ranks to master all the text-books and other aids to efficiency."

"This," says my correspondent, "is a shameful disclosure. Cannot you say something about it in print?" Inclining naturally to the more favourable view of my fellow-creatures, I prefer to reflect, not on the "poor penmanship" and "defective education" of my military friends, but on their manly efforts after self-improvement. There is something at once pathetic and edifying in the picture of these worthy men, each of whom has probably cost his father £200 a year for education ever since he was ten years old, making their "serious effort to master the text-books and other aids to efficiency," in the humble hope that their writing may some day rival that of the non-commissioned officers.

It was not ever thus. These laudable, though lowly, endeavours after Culture are of recent growth in the British Army. Fifty years ago, if we may trust contemporary evidence, the Uneducated Subaltern developed, by a natural process, into the Uneducated General.

"I have always," said Thackeray in 1846, "admired that dispensation of rank in our country which sets up a budding Cornet, who is shaving for a beard (and who was flogged only last week because he could not spell), to command great whiskered warriors who have faced all dangers of climate and battle." Because he could not spell. The same infirmity accompanied the Cornet into the higher grades of his profession—witness Captain Rawdon Crawley's memorandum of his available effects: "My double-barril by Manton, say 40 guineas; my duelling pistols in rosewood case (same which I shot Captain Marker) £20." And, even when the Cornet had blossomed into a General, his education was still far from complete: "A man can't help being a fool, be he ever so old, and Sir George Tufto is a greater ass at sixty-eight than he was when he entered the army at fifteen. He never read a book in his life, and, with his purple, old, gouty fingers, still writes a schoolboy hand."

But do Soldiers write a worse hand than other people? I rather doubt it, and certain I am that several of my friends, highly placed in Church and politics and law, would do very well to apply themselves for a season to those "text-books and other aids to efficiency" by which the zealous Subaltern seeks to complete his "defective education."

Mr. Gladstone was accustomed to say that in public life he had known only two perfect things—Sir Robert Peel's voice and Lord Palmerston's writing. The former we can know only by tradition; the latter survives, for the instruction of mankind, in folios of voluminous despatches, all written in a hand at once graceful in form and absolutely clear to read. "The wayfaring men" of Diplomacy, though sometimes "fools," could not "err" in the interpretation of Palmerston's despatches. The same excellence of caligraphy which Palmerston himself practised he rightly required from his subordinates. If a badly written despatch came into his hands, he would embellish it with scathing rebukes, and return it, through the Office, to the offending writer. The recipient of one of these admonitions thus recalls its terms, "Tell the gentleman who copied this despatch to write a larger, rounder hand, to join the letters in the words, and to use blacker ink."

If Lord Palmerston stood easily first among the penmen of his time, the credit of writing the worst hand in England was divided among at least three claimants. First there was Lord Houghton, whose strange, tall, upright strokes, all exactly like each other except in so far as they leaned in different directions, Lord Tennyson likened to "walking-sticks gone mad." Then there was my dear friend Mr. James Payn, who described his own hand only too faithfully when he wrote about "the wandering of a centipede which had just escaped from the inkpot and had scrawled and sprawled over the paper," and whose closest friends always implored him to correspond by telegraph. And, finally, there was the "bad eminence" of Dean Stanley, whose lifelong indulgence in hieroglyphics inflicted a permanent loss on literature. The Dean, as all readers of his biography will remember, had a marked turn for light and graceful versification. The albums and letter-caskets of his innumerable friends were full of these "occasional" verses, in which domestic, political, and ecclesiastical events were prettily perpetuated. After his death his sister, Mrs. Vaughan, tried to collect these fugitive pieces in a Memorial Volume, but an unforeseen difficulty occurred. In many cases the recipients of the poems were dead and gone, and no living creature could decipher the Dean's writing. So what might have been a pretty and instructive volume perished untimely.

Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, the brilliant dame who raised the Gordon Highlanders and who played on the Tory side the part which the Duchess of Devonshire played among the Whigs, had, like our English Subalterns, a very imperfect education; but with great adroitness she covered her deficiences with a cloak of seeming humour. "Whenever," she wrote to Sir Walter Scott, "I come to a word which I cannot spell, I write it as near as I can, and put a note of exclamation after it; so that, if it's wrong, my friend will think that I was making a joke." A respected member of the present Cabinet who shares Duchess Jane's orthographical weakness covers his retreat by drawing a long, involuted line after the initial letter of each word. Let the reader write, say, the word "aluminium" on this principle; and he will see how very easily imperfect spelling in high places may be concealed.

With soldiers this chapter began, and with a soldier it shall end—the most illustrious of them all, Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Let it be recorded for the encouragement of our modern Subalterns that the Duke, though he spelled much better than Captain Crawley, wrote quite as badly as Sir George Tufto; but that circumstance did not—as is sometimes the case—enable him to interpret by sympathy the hieroglyphics of other people. Is there any one left, "In a Lancashire Garden" or elsewhere, who recalls the honoured name of Jane Loudon, authoress of "The Lady's Companion to her Flower Garden"? Mrs. Loudon was an accomplished lady, who wrote not only on Floriculture, but on Arboriculture and Landscape Gardening, and illustrated what she wrote. In one of her works she desired to insert a sketch of the "Waterloo Beeches" at Strathfieldsaye—a picturesque clump planted to commemorate our deliverance from the Corsican Tyrant. Accordingly she wrote to the Duke of Wellington, requesting leave to sketch the beeches, and signed herself, in her usual form, "J. Loudon." The Duke, who, in spite of extreme age and perceptions not quite so clear as they had once been, insisted on conducting all his own correspondence, replied as follows:—

"F.M. the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to the Bishop of London. The Bishop is quite at liberty to make a sketch of the breeches which the Duke wore at Waterloo, if they can be found. But the Duke is not aware that they differed in any way from the breeches which he generally wears."