Section 12. (b) General Signs of Character.
Friedrich Gerstäcker, in one of his most delightful moods, says
somewhere that the best characteristicon of a man is how he
wears his hat. If he wears it perpendicular, he is honest, pedantic
and boresome. If he wears it tipped slightly, he belongs to the best
and most interesting people, is nimble-witted and pleasant. A
deeply tipped hat indicates frivolity and obstinate imperious nature.
A hat worn on the back of the head signifies improvidence, easiness,
conceit, sensuality and extravagance; the farther back the more
dangerous is the position of the wearer. The man who presses his
hat against his temples complains, is melancholy, and in a bad way.
It is now many years since I have read this exposition by the
much-traveled and experienced author, and I have thought countless times
how right he was, but also, how there may be numberless similar
marks of recognition which show as much as the manner of wearing
a hat. There are plenty of similar expositions to be known; one
man seeks to recognize the nature of others by their manner of
wearing and using shoes; the other by the manipulation of an umbrella;
and the prudent mother advises her son how the candidate
for bride behaves toward a groom lying on the floor, or how she eats
cheese—the extravagant one cuts the rind away thick, the miserly
one eats the rind, the right one cuts the rind away thin and carefully.
Many people judge families, hotel guests, and inhabitants of
a city, and not without reason, according to the comfort and cleanliness
of their privies.
Lazarus has rightly called to mind what is told by the pious
Chr. von Schmidt, concerning the clever boy who lies under a tree
and recognizes the condition of every passer-by according to what
he says. "What fine lumber,"—"Good-morning, carpenter,"—
"What magnificent bark,"—Good-morning, tanner,"—"What
beautiful branches,"—"Good-morning, painter." This significant
story shows us how easy it is with a little observation to perceive
things that might otherwise have been hidden. With what subtle
clearness it shows how effective is the egoism which makes each man
first of all, and in most cases exclusively, perceive what most
concerns him as most prominent! And in addition men so eagerly
and often present us the chance for the deepest insight into their
souls that we need only to open our eyes—seeing and interpreting
is so childishly easy! Each one of us experiences almost daily the
most instructive things; e. g. through the window of my study I
could look into a great garden in which a house was being built;
when the carpenters left in the evening they put two blocks at the
entrance and put a board on them crosswise. Later there came each
evening a gang of youngsters who found in this place a welcome
playground. That obstruction which they had to pass gave me an
opportunity to notice the expression of their characters. One ran
quickly and jumped easily over,—that one will progress easily and
quickly in his life. Another approached carefully, climbed slowly
up the board and as cautiously descended on the other side—
careful, thoughtful, and certain. The third climbed up and jumped
down—a deed purposeless, incidental, uninforming. The fourth
ran energetically to the obstruction, then stopped and crawled
boldly underneath—disgusting boy who nevertheless will have
carried his job ahead. Then, again, there came a fifth who jumped,—
but too low, remained hanging and tumbled; he got up, rubbed his
knee, went back, ran again and came over magnificently—and how
magnificently will he achieve all things in life, for he has will,
fearlessness, and courageous endurance!—he can't sink. Finally a
sixth came storming along—one step, and board and blocks fell
together crashing, but he proudly ran over the obstruction, and
those who came behind him made use of the open way. He is of
the people who go through life as path-finders; we get our great
men from among such.
Well, all this is just a game, and no one would dare to draw
conclusions concerning our so serious work from such observations
merely. But they can have a corroborative value if they are well
done, when large numbers, and not an isolated few, are brought
together, and when appropriate analogies are brought from appropriate
cases. Such studies, which have to be sought in the daily life
itself, permit easy development; if observations have been clearly
made, correctly apprehended, and if, especially, the proper notions
have been drawn from them, they are easily to be observed, stick
in the memory, and come willingly at the right moment. But they
must then serve only as indices, they must only suggest: "perhaps
the case is the same to-day." And that means a good deal; a point
of view for the taking of evidence is established, not, of course,
proof as such, or a bit of evidence, but a way of receiving it,—perhaps
a false one. But if one proceeds carefully along this way, it
shows its falseness immediately, and another presented by memory
shows us another way that is perhaps correct.
The most important thing in this matter is to get a general view
of the human specimen—and incidentally, nobody needs more to
do this than the criminalist. For most of us the person before us
is only "A, suspected of x." But our man is rather more than
that, and especially he was rather more before he became "A suspected
of x." Hence, the greatest mistake, and, unfortunately,
the commonest, committed by the judge, is his failure to discuss
with the prisoner his more or less necessary earlier life. Is it not
known that every deed is an outcome of the total character of the
doer? Is it not considered that deed and character are correlative
concepts, and that the character by means of which the deed is to
be established cannot be inferred from the deed alone? "Crime
is the product of the physiologically grounded psyche of the criminal
and his environing external conditions." (Liszt). Each particular
deed is thinkable only when a determinate character of the doer
is brought in relation with it—a certain character predisposes to
determinate deeds, another character makes them unthinkable and
unrelatable with this or that person. But who thinks to know the
character of a man without knowing his view of the world, and
who talks of their world-views with his criminals? "Whoever wants
to learn to know men," says
Hippel,
[1] "must judge them according
to their wishes," and it is the opinion of
Struve:
[2] "A man's belief
indicates his purpose." But who of us asks his criminals about their
wishes and beliefs?
If we grant the correctness of what we have said we gain the
conviction that we can proceed with approximate certainty and
conscientiousness only if we speak with the criminal, not alone
concerning the deed immediately in question, but also searchingly
concerning the important conditions of his inner life. So we may
as far as possible see clearly what he is according to general notions
and his particular relationships.
The same thing must also be done with regard to an important
witness, especially when much depends upon his way of judging,
of experiencing, of feeling, and of thinking, and when it is impossible
to discover these things otherwise. Of course such analyses
are often tiring and without result, but that, on the other hand, they
lay open with few words whole broadsides of physical conditions,
so that we need no longer doubt, is also a matter of course. Who
wants to leave unused a formula of Schopenhauer's: "We discover
what we are through what we do?" Nothing is easier than to discover
from some person important to us what he does, even though
the discovery develops merely as a simple conversation about what
he has done until now and what he did lately. And up to date we
have gotten at such courses of life only in the great cases; in cases
of murder or important political criminals, and then only at externals;
we have cared little about the essential deeds, the smaller
forms of activity which are always the significant ones. Suppose
we allow some man to speak about others, no matter whom, on
condition that he must know them well. He judges their deeds,
praises and condemns them, and thinks that he is talking about them
but is really talking about himself alone, for in each judgment of
the others he aims to justify and enhance himself; the things he
praises he does, what he finds fault with, he does not; or at least he
wishes people to believe that he does the former and avoids the
latter. And when he speaks unpleasantly about his friends he has
simply abandoned what he formerly had in common with them.
Then again he scolds at those who have gotten on and blames their
evil nature for it; but whoever looks more closely may perceive
that he had no gain in the same evil and therefore dislikes it. At
the same time, he cannot possibly suppress what he wishes and
what he needs. Now, whoever knows this fact, knows his motives
and to decide in view of these with regard to a crime is seldom
difficult. "Nos besoins vent nos forces"—but superficial needs
do not really excite us while what is an actual need does. Once
we are compelled, our power to achieve what we want grows astoundingly.
How we wonder at the great amount of power used up, in
the case of many criminals! If we know that a real need was behind
the crime, we need no longer wonder at the magnitude of the power.
The relation between the crime and the criminal is defined because
we have discovered his needs. To these needs a man's pleasures
belong also; every man, until the practically complete loss of vigor,
has as a rule a very obvious need for some kind of pleasure. It is
human nature not to be continuously a machine, to require relief and
pleasure.
The word pleasure must of course be used in the loosest way, for
one man finds his pleasure in sitting beside the stove or in the shadow,
while another speaks of pleasure only when he can bring some
change in his work. I consider it impossible not to understand a
man whose pleasures are known; his will, his power, his striving
and knowing, feeling and perceiving cannot be made clearer by
any other thing. Moreover, it happens that it is a man's pleasures
which bring him into court, and as he resists or falls into them
he reveals his character. The famous author of the "Imitation of
Christ," Thomas à Kempis, whose book is, saving the Bible, the
most wide-spread on earth, says: "Occasiones hominem fragilem
non faciunt, sea, qualis sit, ostendunt." That is a golden maxim
for the criminalist. Opportunity, the chance to taste, is close to
every man, countless times; is his greatest danger; for that reason
it was great wisdom in the Bible that called the devil, the Tempter.
A man's behavior with regard to the discovered or sought-out
opportunity exhibits his character wholly and completely. But
the chance to observe men face to face with opportunity is a rare
one, and that falling-off with which we are concerned is often the
outcome of such an opportunity. But at this point we ought not
longer to learn, but to know; and hence our duty to study the
pleasures of men, to know how they behave in the presence of their
opportunities.
There is another group of conditions through which you may
observe and judge men in general. The most important one is
to know yourself as well as possible, for accurate self-knowledge
leads to deep mistrust with regard to others, and only the man
suspicious with regard to others is insured, at least a little, against
mistakes. To pass from mistrust to the reception of something good
is not difficult, even in cases where the mistrust is well-founded and
the presupposition of excellent motives among our fellows is strongly
fought. Nevertheless, when something actually good is perceivable,
one is convinced by it and even made happy. But the converse is
not true, for anybody who is too trusting easily presupposes the
best at every opportunity, though he may have been deceived a
thousand times and is now deceived again. How it happens that
self-knowledge leads to suspicion of others we had better not investigate
too closely—it is a fact.
Every man is characterized by the way he behaves in regard to
his promises. I do not mean keeping or breaking a promise, because
nobody doubts that the honest man keeps it and the scoundrel
does not. I mean the manner in which a promise is
kept and the
degree in which it is kept. La
Roche-Foucauld[3]
says significantly:
"We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our
fears." When in any given case promising and hopes and performance
and fears are compared, important considerations arise,—
especially in cases of complicity in crime.
When it is at all possible, and in most cases it is, one ought to
concern oneself with a man's style,—the handwriting of his soul.
What this consists of cannot be expressed in a definite way. The
style must simply be studied and tested with regard to its capacity
for being united with certain presupposed qualities. Everybody
knows that education, bringing-up, and intelligence are indubitably
expressed in style, but it may also be observed that style clearly
expresses softness or hardness of a character, kindness or cruelty,
determination or weakness, integrity or carelessness, and hundreds
of other qualities. Generally the purpose of studying style may be
achieved by keeping in mind some definite quality presupposed and
by asking oneself, while reading the manuscript of the person in
question, whether this quality fuses with the manuscript's form and
with the individual tendencies and relationships that occur in the
construction of the thought. One reading will of course not bring
you far, but if the reading is repeated and taken up anew, especially
as often as the writer is met with or as often as some new fact about
him is established, then it is almost impossible not to attain a fixed
and valuable result. One gets then significantly the sudden impression
that the thing to be proved, having the expression of which
the properties are to be established, rises out of the manuscript;
and when that happens the time has come not to dawdle with the
work. Repeated reading causes the picture above-mentioned to
come out more clearly and sharply; it is soon seen in what places
or directions of the manuscript that expression comes to light—
these places are grouped together, others are sought that more or
less imply it, and soon a standpoint for further consideration is
reached which naturally is not evidential by itself, but has, when
combined with numberless others, corroborative value.
Certain small apparently indifferent qualities and habits are
important. There are altogether too many of them to talk about;
but there are examples enough of the significance of what is said of
a man in this fashion: "this man is never late," "this man never
forgets," "this man invariably carries a pencil or a pocket knife,"
"this one is always perfumed," "this one always wears clean, carefully
brushed clothes,"—whoever has the least training may construct
out of such qualities the whole inner life of the individual.
Such observations may often be learned from simple people, especially
from old peasants. A great many years ago I had a case
which concerned a disappearance. It was supposed that the lost
man was murdered. Various examinations were made without
result, until, finally, I questioned an old and very intelligent peasant
who had known well the lost man. I asked the witness to describe
the nature of his friend very accurately, in order that I might draw
from his qualities, habits, etc., my inferences concerning his tendencies,
and hence concerning his possible location. The old peasant
supposed that everything had been said about the man in question
when he explained that he was a person who never owned a decent
tool. This was an excellent description, the value of which I completely
understood only when the murdered man came to life and I
learned to know him. He was a petty lumberman who used to
buy small wooded tracts in the high mountains for cutting, and
having cut them down would either bring the wood down to the
valley, or have it turned to charcoal. In the fact that he never
owned a decent tool, nor had one for his men, was established his
whole narrow point of view, his cramped miserliness, his disgusting
prudence, his constricted kindliness, qualities which permitted his
men to plague themselves uselessly with bad tools and which justified
altogether his lack of skill in the purchase of tools. So I thought
how the few words of the old, much-experienced peasant were confirmed
utterly—they told the whole story. Such men, indeed, who
say little but say it effectively, must be carefully attended to, and
everything must be done to develop and to understand what they
mean.
But the judge requires attention and appropriate conservation
of his own observations. Whoever observes the people he deals with
soon notices that there is probably not one among them that does
not possess some similar, apparently unessential quality like that
mentioned above. Among close acquaintances there is little difficulty
in establishing which of their characteristics belong to that
quality, and when series of such observations are brought together
it is not difficult to generalize and to abstract from them specific
rules. Then, in case of need, when the work is important, one
makes use of the appropriate rule with pleasure, and I might say,
with thanks for one's own efforts.
One essential and often useful symbol to show what a man makes
of himself, what he counts himself for, is his use of the word we.
Hartenstein[4] has
already called attention to the importance of
this circumstance, and Volkmar says: "The we has a
very various
scope, from the point of an accidental simultaneity of images in
the same sensation, representation or thought, to the almost complete
circle of the family we which breaks through the
I and even
does not exclude the most powerful antagonisms; hatred, just like
love, asserts its we." What is characteristic in
the word we is the
opposition of a larger or smaller group of which the I is a member,
to the rest of the universe. I say we when I mean
merely my wife
and myself, the inhabitants of my house, my family, those who
live in my street, in my ward, or in my city; I say
we assessors, we
central-Austrians, we Austrians, we Germans, we Europeans, we
inhabitants of the earth. I say we lawyers, we blonds, we Christians,
we mammals, we collaborators on a monthly, we old students'
society, we married men, we opponents of jury trial. But I also say
we when speaking of accidental relations, such as
being on the same
train, meeting on the same mountain peak, in the same hotel, at the
same concert, etc. In a word we defines all
relationships from the
narrowest and most important, most essential, to the most individual
and accidental. Conceivably the
we unites also
people who have
something evil in common, who use it a great deal among themselves,
and because of habit, in places where they would rather not have done
so. Therefore, if you pay attention you may hear some suspect
who denies his guilt, come out with a
we which
confesses his alliance
with people who do the things he claims
not to:
wepickpockets,
we
house-breakers,
we gamblers, inverts, etc.
It is so conceivable that man as a social animal seeks companionship
in so many directions that he feels better protected when he
has a comrade, when he can present in the place of his weak and
unprotected I the stronger
and bolder we; and hence the considerable
and varied use of the word. No one means that people are to be
caught with the word; it is merely to be used to bring clearness into
our work. Like every other honest instrument, it is an index to
the place of the man before us.
[[1]]
Th. G. von Hippel: Lebenläsufe nach aufsteigender Linie. Ed. v
Oettingen.
Leipzig 1880.
[[2]]
G. Struve: Das Seelenleben oder die Naturgeschichte des Menschen. Berlin
1869.
[[3]]
La Roche-Foucauld: Maximes et Refl'exions Morales.
[[4]]
Grundbegriffe der ethisehen Wissenschaft. Leipzig 1844.