Gesture is an important as well as interesting study.  How beautiful it is to see the thousand pieces of the myological apparatus set in motion and propelled by this grand motor feeling!  There surely is a joy in knowing how to appreciate an image of Christ on the cross, in understanding the attitudes of Faith, Hope and Charity.  We can note a mother’s affection by the way she holds her child in her arms.  We can judge of the sincerity of the friend who grasps our hand.  If he holds the thumb inward and pendant, it is a fatal sign; we no longer trust him.  To pray with the thumbs inward and swaying to and fro, indicates a lack of sacred fervor.  It is a corpse who prays.  If you pray with the arms extended and the fingers bent, there is reason to fear that you adore Plutus.  If you embrace me without elevating the shoulders, you are a Judas.

What can you do in a museum, if you have not acquired, if you do not wish to acquire the science of gesture?  How can you rightly appreciate the beauty of the statue of Antinous?  How can you note a fault in Raphael’s picture of Moses making water gush from the rock?  How see that he has forgotten to have the Israelites raise their shoulders, as they stand rapt in admiration of the miracle?  One versed in the science of gesture, as he passes before the Saint Michael Fountain, must confess that the statue of the archangel with its parallel lines, is little better than the dragon at his feet.

In view of the importance and interest of the language of gesture, we shall study it thoroughly in the second book of our course.

Chapter II.

Definition and Division of Gesture.

Gesture is the direct agent of the heart, the interpreter of speech.  It is elliptical discourse.  Each part of this definition may be easily justified.

1. Gesture is the Direct Agent of the Heart.—­Look at an infant.  For some time he manifests his joy or sorrow through cries; but these are not gesture.  When he comes to know the cause of his joy or sorrow, sentiment awakens, his heart opens to love or hatred, and he expresses his new emotion not by cries alone, nor yet by speech; he smiles upon his mother, and his first gesture is a smile.  Beings endowed only with the sensitive life, have no smile; animals do not laugh.

This marvelous correspondence of the organs with the sentiment arises from the close union of soul and body.  The brain ministers to the operations of the soul.  Every sentiment must have its echo in the brain, in order to be unerringly transmitted by the organic apparatus.

Ex visu cognoscitur vir. ("The man is known by his face.”) The role of dissimulation is a very difficult one to sustain.

2. Gesture is the Interpreter of Speech.—­Gesture has been given to man to reveal what speech is powerless to express.  For example:  I love.  This phrase says nothing of the nature of the being loved, nothing of the fashion in which one loves.  Gesture, by a simple movement, reveals all this, and says it far better than speech, which would know how to render it only by many successive words and phrases.  A gesture, then, like a ray of light, can reflect all that passes in the soul.