OCR Text |
Show MYSTERIES OF THE HAND. The art of divination by the hand and the handwriting has received a fresh impulse from a recent publication. It has been languishing in Europe for years. Even the gypsies are dropping it for the more profitable occupation of robbing hen-roosts; and of late I have missed the standing advertisement in a Dublin paper promising you an accurate analysis of your character and destiny in return for a specimen of your handwriting and two shillings worth of stamps. There are various other modes of divination, facial expression, for instance, and phrenology. Most professors keep to one alone, I believe there is a sort of trade courtesy among them which keeps each out of the other's domain. It would be considered unprofessional for a gentleman who feels your bumps to draw any conclusion from the color of your eyes. This good old rule, founded on principle of live and let live, has, however, been set aside by a Frenchman, M. Desbarolles, who has just published a learned treatise called "Mysteries of the Hand: Complete Revelations." This book is likely to make a great stir in Paris, and the Figaro has given a whole page of extracts. M. Desbarolles is not quite fair with us, at least if we pin him to the letter of his title, for he mixes up all the trades of divination. If he cannot judge you by the hand, he will judge you by the handwriting. If he has seen neither your hand nor your handwriting, he will sum up from a view of your head; and if all those means are wanting, he will get your photograph and make it the very window of your soul. There is no getting away from Desbarolles; he is the philosophic detective of conscience; when he has made up his mind to have you, I should say the very best thing would be to surrender at once. Desbarolles flies at high game. Most of his instances are drawn from the observation of well known living men. He has tested the character of Dumas by all his methods, and though Bismarck did not give him the same opportunities, he has read him off beautifully from his photograph and from a facsimile of his hand-writing. Dumas was as tractable as the possum of American fable. When he heard that Desbarolles wanted him, he "came down" at one. The professor accordingly let him off as lightly as he could. His study is systematic. He gives us what other people have said of the character of Dumas and what Dumas himself says on it, and then he shows how it is all confirmed by the independent testimony of the signs. "He is a willful, impetuous boy," wrote the old father, "and sometimes we quarrel and he runs away from me like a second prodigal son. Whenever he does that I at once buy a calf and begin to fatten it, because I know he will be back in a few weeks. He does come back; we embrace and are friends. Ill-natured people say he returns for the calf, but I know better than that." Now, by a coincidence queer, the hand of Dumas confirms every word of the above. Nor is this all; every conclusion of old humdrum common sense about him is confirmed by chiromancy and its kindred sciences. It is not encouraging for common sense. "He is a philosophic writer," we are accustomed to say. "How could he be otherwise?" cries Desbarolles?, "look at the knot on the middle finger just below the nail, it is the intense desire to get at the bottom of everything, above all of metaphysic mystery." "He has the critical spirit," "Of course," says Desbarolles "observe the slightest unevenness in the line of the nail just where it joins the flesh - that is criticism or nothing." It is delightful and all our other poor guesses at truth are established in the same authoritative way. We have humbly believed, for example, that Dumas is conscientious and laborious in his peculiar kind of work. "According to the length of his fore-finger," says Desbarolles?, "he cannot possibly be anything else." Again, he looks a long way ahead. Now, what says Desbarolles? "Prophecy is marked as clearly as possible on these two hands, else what is the meaning of the two islets in the neighborhood of his line of life? You doubt their evidence; well, what do you think of the other island - a sort of appendix for proof - on the right hand, near the mount of the moon? The mount of the moon means water. The water has always been associated with the communications of persons gifted with second sight. Scott, in the ‘Monastery,' places the first apparition of the White Lady on the borders of a stream. The prophetic gift of Dumas is in the nature of an intellectual second sight; hence the significance of his Mount of the Moon." Ah, what a fine thing in book learning! Yes, Dumas is certainly a seer, for years ago, as Desbarolles/ reminds us, he went so far as to affirm that William of Prussia was one of the most ambitious princes of his time. Cases of this kind are not to be explained on any theory of mere judgment or good luck; and but for Desbarolles with his Mount of the Moon and the rest, they might be enough to revive the belief in sorcery. Still more refreshing is the way in which Dumas confines himself. In a long interview with the great man, Desbarolles gets him to call out all the points of his own character, and then turns them up from the pack as neatly as a performing canary at a fair. Dumas first takes a sort of general excursion into the domain of his own nature. "I am a very easy-going fellow, but people must not go too far with me. I prefer loving to being loved, and those I love have only to do everything I want to obtain my affection in full measure. I am very tolerant and placable, except in certain things. If the people I love offend me in these things I clear them out of my soul and memory like so much waste paper. I have an intense respect for property, so much that I never even give people advice without they ask for it, liberty of action being in my opinion a more precious property than all the rest. I adore the society of women; first, because they teach you to understand man, and then because they never know what they are doing, what they have done, nor what they are going to do. I know of no finer spectacle than a beautiful and honest woman, but she must be beautiful or there will be no merit in her being honest. I start with the idea of human nature that all men are scoundrels, and that all women are not one bit better than they ought to be. When I find that I have been mistaken in one of them, I feel a satisfaction unknown to persons who do not start from the same despairing point of view." "With all these theories, why do you not turn politician?" murmured Desbarolles. "It would not amuse me," said Dumas; "besides, it is too easy." He paused an instant in reflection, while Desbarolles, not to lose time, was in a figurative sense peculiarly characteristic of him, running all over his head. "I see you have constructiveness very highly developed," said the professor. "In fact, I have recognized that by your skill with your hand in everything, even in the noble game of billiards. This organ seems to me to be coupled with acquisitiveness. Is it possible that, with all your generosity, you love money?" He had hit it again. "I am frightfully acquisitive," replied Dumas. "I have no personal wants, and yet whenever I buy any work of art I am always thinking for how much I could sell it again at a profit. I should like to be as rich as all the Rothschilds put together - I would change the face of a good many things in France." Hence they came to a very delicate point of the dialogue. Desbarolles, in looking at his hand, could not conceal from himself, as a conscientious man of business, that one of the mounts meant mischief - mischief in the first degree; in fact, murder. The mount of Mars is enormous. Desbarolles had never seen such another, except in the hands of Tropman, who as every reader of the gazette of crime knows, had a whole hecatomb of slain to his account. Desbarolles puts it delicately: If he is a philosopher he is also a Frenchman. "There are anomalies," he says, "in chiromancy. Thus developments of the Mount of Mars may mean impetuous ardor, sangfroid, perseverance, blind fury, even murder;" and he looks steadily at Dumas. "Tropman, whose hand I examined with the permission of the police, had just such a mount of Mars as-" "As mine, you mean to say," returned Dumas, not in the least embarrassed; "yes; I suppose the only difference between us is in my line of Mars running to the sun." "Perhaps so," I said with a smile. "Well, well," said Dumas, "I will take care; I am warned now, but, my dear friend, between ourselves, what you say is true, and I should not at all be surprised if this murderous influence of Mars in my hand were responsible for the ‘Kill her!' at the end of one of my pieces, and for the murder or the duel which you find in nearly all of them. The fact is, I could put people to death very quietly in certain cases. Virginius killing his daughter or Brutus punishing his son with death for disobedience to the laws seem to me the simplest things in the world." But, after all, M. Dumas was too easy. The man of science in dealing with him was like the sportsman firing from a six-barreled gun. If he missed with chiromancy, there was phrenology or physiognomy or calligraphy to bring him down. He shows himself a true genius when he divines without most of these aids, and swims on the ocean of speculation with a minimum of corks. He has never seen Bismarck's hand, never even felt the weight of it, except as a patriotic Frenchman, he has not so much as seen his handwriting, only a poor facsimile of it, yet on this slight indication, and that of a photograph, he reads off the German chancellor like a page of big print. The letter was one written by Bismarck to his wife during the war, intercepted by the French and published fac simile by the Figaro. It may have contained some few secrets as Bismarck wrote it, but it contained infinitely more when subjected to the piercing gaze of the seer. "Look at this downward slope of the letters," he cries; "it means misery and ruin - else why did Napoleon I. always slope up the paper during the time of his prosperity, and down the paper when he was down in his luck?" "Ah!" he adds, "if I could only see the hand of Bismarck as well as the handwriting, then I could prophesy; then I could tell you exactly how the cataclysm through which we are passing is to finish. But, after all, the hand-writing is enough. Look at the enormous size of it! It is just as big as Wallenstein's, or the ferocious Swedish warrior's, Wrangle, and both of them died a violent death. It is an absurdly high handwriting, and what does that mean but a craving for a lofty position - ambition, love of fame, Immense pride? Why, it is even higher than the handwriting of Louis XIV., the proudest of kings. It is an ardent, and at the same time, a concentrated handwriting - no flourishes; and what are flourishes but the signs of an effervescence without restraint. It is lively, it is brusque, but it is self-contained. From the way in which he forms the tail end of his letters you can tell there is no cunning in him; still his winding, serpentine lines show that he is a diplomatist." (These little curly terminations, it would appear, are for the weak members of the craft.) The worst sign of all, according to Desbarolles, is the superhuman pride shown in the crossing of the t's. The t's, in fact, are more than eloquent. The Germans, he says, generally cross their letter low down; Bismarck crosses it right at the top - just to have a way of his own - "supreme pride." After this it will not astonish us to learn that other parts of the letter to Mme. Bismarck show him to be "like a tiger which throws itself on its prey." Desbarolles had discovered all this when fortune threw the great chancellor himself in his way. He did not see much of him - he simply met him taking a walk - but he saw enough to recognize "all the signs of wars," which means, among other things, that when he was at the university he was rather fond of his beer. This chance meeting, coupled with a view of a photograph, served to finish off the chancellor almost as completely as Dumas. They revealed a love of music, of property, revengefulness, ruse, and a taste for the stage. Destructiveness was added to the debit of the dread account after a glance of the big Bismarckian ear, and there was only a poor pennyworth of benevolence for the credit side. Bismarck's spirit of justice and his savage aptitudes, we are given to understand, will always be unevenly matched. This is nearly perfect, as far as it goes, and I do not know that anything is wanting to complete it, except a science of character founded on an observation of the corns of the foot. |