Handwriting: The Way of the Brush vs. The Path of the Pen

The history of handwriting is a small subject on its surface, yet it rumbles deeply with psychological and cultural undercurrents. I return to the topic here, this time with an eye toward the way Western and Eastern cultures diverged in their approaches to the written word.

The Western Hand

If you picture the American foundational documents, originals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and look not to the earthshaking ideas they contained, but instead savor the way the texts themselves had been written down by hand, you will call to mind a beautiful, flowing, artful handwriting.

If handwriting of this era could be said to have a musical counterpart, the “gallant” styles of Hayden and Mozart would compare. And if the comparison were to be extended to men’s fashions, picture powdered wigs, trim waistcoats, and jackets ornamented with a long row of supernumerary silver buttons meant for conspicuous display. In that era, elegance and ornamentation equaled virtue.

The Need for Speed When Time Was Money

American handwriting styles simplified over time, though, evolving sharply in the direction of utility. By the early 19^th century, the elaborate loops and flourishes largely disappeared along with private tutors and handwriting masters. Penmanship drills in the new, democratic primary schools favored a fluent, practical, unromantic style, friendly to the rise of commerce and best suited to the huge new volume of commercial correspondence. These new techniques saved writers from taking the time to lift the pen between letters. Time was money.

The change from art to industry reverberated psychologically, too. Instructional handbooks routinely found a moral lesson in learning to write in what one historian has called a “fast, mercantile hand.” Perfecting those fine motor skills required self-mastery, much as best practices in business required the virtue of self-discipline.

As for musical accompaniment to the kind of handwriting that persisted into the 20^th century? Try humming one of John Phillip Sousa’s sprightly marches.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the typewriter (both the machine and the operator herself) should have begun to replace the skilled scribe by the late 19^th century. The newfangled machinery accelerated factors already trending — not just increasing speed, that is, but the standardization of the process of writing and the interchangeability of clerical workers themselves.

The words you are reading here represent late-stage examples of the need for speed. Our fingers fly on keyboards now. But our penmanship suffers.

East vs. West

Looking backward, the Western, nose-to-the-grindstone approach to processing text seems an irresistible trend. But we should not forget the beautiful embellishments that flourished on late-Medieval manuscripts. From their outposts in Ireland and Scotland, during that era when Europe had mostly forgotten how to read and write, monks toiled to produce the Book of Kells, the 1,200-year-old masterpiece of Celtic calligraphy.

Its Latin script looks familiar and plain, much like our modern printing. Those cloistered graphic artists, though, drew from wild imaginations. As they huddled over their sacred mission, their quills scratching on velum, they also “illuminated” in gold leaf the initial letters of each folio of the book, depicting dragons and other fantastic beasts. Producing this rare and precious object required the hides of an estimated 180 calves.

Six hundred years earlier, however, in China, innovations in papermaking had much-simplified production of books and scrolls. Paper is so cheaply made that it is tempting to entertain a counterfactual history of an ancient China that mass-produced books. The material may have been simpler to produce, but the script itself was another matter. Because Chinese writing is pictural rather than alphabetical, made of delicate or bold individual strokes, lettering necessarily went the way of the brush.

The Painted Word

Chinese words appear in full, as artful, representational, logical, and sometimes compound ideograms that tell tiny stories. The character for “bright” for example, abstractly pictures the sun and the full moon; the character for “peace” indicates, conceptually, a woman in a house. I can make no apologies for the ideogram that suggests a woman between two men that means “flirt.” Readers and writers of the modern Chinese language memorize the shape of as many as 4,000 characters that comprise a basic, literate vocabulary of 50,000 words, or more. Learning to read and write Chinese takes care and long effort. Chinese scribes, brushes in hand and facing this vast resource, produced elegant, gestural texts.

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Between Cultures

Brush and Inkpad

Source: Image courtesy Svenska via Wikimedia Commons (2011).

The historian Daniel Boorstin draws the key distinction between cultures. Art and writing—painting and text—diverged in Europe. Painters became artists. Writers, using the simple and versatile phonetic alphabet, became craftsmen, using their tools, the quill, the stylus, and the pen. In China, however, “by the eighth and ninth centuries,” he noted, “the way of the brush, the way of calligraphy, had become the scholar’s way.”

Thus, in China, painting and literacy joined as markers of an educated class. And the educated class, a literate gentry, ran things—for more than a thousand years. Knowledge was power. Those who aspired to join the vast, established bureaucracy of scholar-officials that governed the durable imperial system and managed its resources, were required to pass an exacting written Civil Examination that covered subjects as varied as law and literature.

The test also required them to know and practice the tenets of Confucian philosophy, a civic religion and governmental theory that prized harmony and revered tradition. All the successful candidates would necessarily toil for years to master the painted word, a tradition that also prized harmony and revered tradition.

The Worlds We Are Losing

Wedding invitations and birth announcements still feature beautiful lettering that conjures celebration. The calligraphy on death certificates continues to lend gravitas to the information that the document contains.

Computers generate these fonts now. No human hand crafts them. For a very few though—the dexterous, skilled, and talented—calligraphy survives as an expressive visual art. But as voice-to-text technology spreads, everyday handwriting may soon be reserved only for affixing signatures. The world will move on.

If we lament the loss of handwriting skill in the West, how should we measure the impact of the waning embodied pleasures of the hand, mind, emotion, and brush that written Chinese entails?