Why do I not adopt italic handwriting? My present writing has nothing to be said for it: it is arbitrary, ugly, and illegible, and certain characters have recently deteriorated to the point where I have to stop on reaching them and use an alternative form.
The first answer to my question that comes to mind is that it is my own handwriting and to jettison it would be a betrayal of “character.” This is clearly a prejudice belonging to my upbringing, and not one that I really need allow to influence me. The second answer is more solid: it is that there seems no point in giving style to one item of my behavior when the rest is always going to remain perfectly styleless and inelegant. Style, to have any meaning, would have to be something comprehensive and systematic, directing my various activities toward a common ideal. At first sight, I can discover no traces of any such system in myself or in my education. On considering further, however, a few things I leamed when very young, at school or at home, do show traces of such a system. Copperplate writing, certain rules of composition (not using the same word twice in one sentence), not turning my feet inward as I walk do seem to be the vestiges of a larger system of polite accomplishments. And this system is what we call neoclassic or Augustan. None has superseded it, and where it survives in English education it does so in a ghostly and wholly debased manner. It continues to lose ground, moreover, as in the fashion for substituting italic for Copperplate writing. But, characteristically, I have to think of my handwriting as “my” writing and not as copperplate.
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