Part 16 (1/2)
Between sound and color there is a much closer a.n.a.logy traceable, as both are the result of vibration. The same language is used to express the qualities of each.
We talk of harmony in sounds and harmony in colors, of lights and shades, of chromatics, blending, softness, sweetness, harshness, high, low, bright, dull, &c.
May not a grand anthem or chorus be to the mind of one who has never seen the light, what a fine picture is to one who has never heard sounds. I should not be surprised to hear that some blind Yankee or Frenchman has invented a telephone through which we can hear in the rippling brooks and bubbling fountains the color of their waters, in the song of birds the gorgeous tints of their plumage, and in the distant roar of Niagara, the mighty grandeur of its scenery. To an imaginative mind a well tuned, well voiced organ may be made to represent all the colors of the rainbow, from the faintest violet of the piccolo to the darkest crimson of the sub-ba.s.s.
Some blind person on being asked what he supposed red to be like, answered ”Like the sound of a trumpet.” He might have said ”Like a flame of fire.”
I once asked a blind boy, who had never seen light, if he could imagine a house on fire and how he supposed it would look. He answered, ”If it was a big fire it would look like a thousand trumpets all blowing in a different key.” I then asked him what a picture is like. ”Like anything in _shape_ you may wish to paint,” he said, ”but in color (if it is a fine picture) like one of Mozart's grand symphonies.” I have many times asked my blind lady friends how they knew in what way to arrange their colors so as to make their fancy work look tasty and attractive. How they knew what colors blended and what were discordant, and I have often received this answer: ”By a.s.sociating the names of the seven primary colors with the seven sounds of the diatonic scale, placing red as No. 1 or key note, orange next, yellow next, then green, and so on to violet. Thus red will not blend with orange, being the first and second of the scale, but red and yellow harmonize better, being third in the scale, red and green still better, and so on to red and deep violet, which are sevenths in the scale and do not harmonize. Thus we get the tetrachord red, yellow, blue and violet, which may be represented by the flat seventh of the chord C.” But I leave this theory for some one to elaborate or refute, who has seen color, and return to my inst.i.tution life.
The ear and voice are also trained at these schools for the blind, and music is made one of the chief arts. Piano tuning is also taught in a practical way. If this business is not taught in all the inst.i.tutions, it ought to be, for it comes fairly within the scope of our capabilities. And I will here say for the benefit of my brothers in the dark that I have been very successful as a piano tuner, and the business is a practical one for the blind. Any one with a good ear may learn to tune well, but no one should undertake to repair so delicate a piece of machinery as a piano action without long experience, mechanical ingenuity, great caution and good judgment, having had no opportunity to acquire the requisite skill.
It was not my intention at the outset to write a sketch of my own life, but to demonstrate by my own experience that the inferior senses may be made to perform many of the offices of sight. The eyes have some functions, however, which the ears and fingers cannot perform.
For example, if a piece of silk or woolen goods be handed me for examination the nerves of my fingers will tell me whether it is fine or coa.r.s.e, whether it has a harsh or soft texture, whether it is highly finished or rough and uneven, but they bring me no intelligence of color.
I may p.r.o.nounce the goods beautiful, because I find in it certain qualities that address themselves to my taste, but it is not beauty addressed to the eye. Light and color, to one who has never seen, is as inconceivable as music to the deaf. We may get some faint idea of what light is as a medium of communication, or why color pleases the eye as qualities of texture please the touch, but the conception is vague and unsatisfactory.
I have often had the remark made to me, ”Well, if you have never seen, it is not so bad after all, you have less desire to see.” This, I think, is a mistake and a poor consolation. Has the man who has never visited the great Niagara cataract, but has many times heard and read of its wonders, less desire to see it than one who has witnessed those grand displays of G.o.d's power in the flood? Has the boy who loves to read of travels and strange adventures less desire to see the glaciers of the Alps, the skies of Italy or the jungles of Southern Africa, than the traveler who described them? However well we may see with our mental vision, however well suited to our taste may be our surroundings, however pleasant may be our family relations, and however kind may be our companions, we cannot help that irrepressible desire to know what there is about light and color, about the indescribable beauty of a sunset, the splendor of an evening sky, the glory of a cloudless day, and the awful grandeur of a storm. There is yet one thing we greatly desire to know, which the fingers cannot grasp.
We are told in poetry and romance that the human face divine is the index of the spirit. That its ever changing lines express every mood of the mind and every emotion of the soul, from a smile of ineffable beauty to a midnight frown, from the suns.h.i.+ne of hope, and joy, and gladness, to clouds of wrath and hatred. That the spirit looks out through the eye and melts you with a beam of tenderness, or pierces your heart with a flash of electric love, or charms you by revealing in its crystal depths the pearl of purity, or transfixes you with a glance of displeasure. Is all this talk about sunlit faces and starlit eyes, fine sentiment only, or does the face really express feeling as unmistakably as we hear it in voices? To show that the deaf have as great a desire to hear the music of the human voice as we to see the language of the face, I quote from Dr. Kitto the following touching pa.s.sages of personal history:
”Is there anything on earth so engaging to a parent as to catch the first lispings of his infant's tongue, or so interesting as to listen to its dear prattle, and trace its gradual mastery of speech? If there be any one thing arising out of my condition, which, more than another, fills my heart with grief, it is _this_: it is to _see_ their blessed lips in motion and to _hear_ them not, and to witness others moved to smiles and kisses by the sweet peculiarities of infantile speech which are incommunicable to me, and which pa.s.s by me like the idle wind.”
Although there are but few experiments in common between the deaf and the blind, I am able to sympathize fully with this eminent deaf author in the intense desire he feels to hear the sweet voices of his children. There is no other object this side of heaven I so ardently wish to see as the faces of my family. A feeling sometimes comes over me akin, I fancy, to the impotent rage of a caged lion, who vainly tries to break his prison bars and gain his liberty. The moral certainty that I must finally leave this world of beauty without having enjoyed many of its highest blessings and purest delights often oppresses--so oppresses me, that I can only find relief in prayer for grace to say--”Thy will be done, O G.o.d.” I hear the merry voices of my children, know their step, figure, contour of their heads and faces, and in my day dreams I see them around me, full of life and health, fun and frolic, and I know their little hearts are full of love for me; I know, too, G.o.d has given them to me as some compensation for other blessings he has withheld. Let me trust, then, in His great mercy, that in the far future I may see the faces of my dear ones in the light of eternity; of her who gave me birth, but whose fond look of affection and yearning tenderness I was never able to return; and the face of her who is now to me even more than a mother, who helps me to bear my many burdens with Christian patience and fidelity. Then, if I am permitted to behold the glorified face of Him who hath redeemed us, I shall rejoice that I have lived and suffered, and wept and wept, and prayed that I might dwell with Him forever.
INVOCATION TO LIGHT.
BY MRS. HELEN ALDRICH DE KROYFT.
Oh, holy light! thou art old as the look of G.o.d and eternal as G.o.d. The archangels were rocked in thy lap, and their infant smiles were brightened by thee! Creation is in thy memory. By thy touch the throne of Jehovah was set, and thy hand burnished the myriad stars that glitter in His crown.
Worlds, new from His omnipotent hand, were sprinkled with beams from thy baptismal font. At thy golden urn pale Luna comes to fill her silver horn, and rounding thereat Saturn bathes his sky girt rings, Jupiter lights his waning moons, and Venus dips her queenly robes anew. Thy fountains are sh.o.r.eless as the ocean of heavenly love; thy centre is everywhere, and thy boundary no power has marked. Thy beams gild the illimitable fields of s.p.a.ce, and gladden the farthest verge of the universe. The glories of the Seventh Heaven are open to thy gaze, and thy glare is felt in the woes of the lowest Erebus. The sealed books of heaven by thee are read, and thine eyes like the Infinite can pierce the dark veil of the future, and glance backward through the mystic cycle of the past.
Thy touch gives the lily its whiteness, the rose its tint, and thy kindling ray makes the diamond's light. Thy beams are mighty as the power that binds the spheres. Thou canst change the sleety winds to soothing zephyrs, and thou canst melt the icy mountains of the poles to gentle rains and dewy vapors. The granite rocks of the hills are upturned by thee, volcanoes burst, islands sink and rise, rivers roll and oceans swell at thy look of command. And oh! thou monarch of the skies, bend now thy bow of millioned arrows, and pierce, if thou canst, this darkness that thrice twelve moons has bound me.
Burst now thy emerald gates, O Morn, and let thy dawnings come! Mine eyes roll in vain to find thee, and my soul is weary of this interminable gloom. The past comes back robed in a pall which makes all things dark.
The present blotted out, and the future but a rayless, hopeless, loveless night of years, my heart is but the tomb of blighted hopes, and all the misery of feelings unemployed has settled on me. I am misfortune's child and sorrow long since marked me for her own.
IS IT MORE TO LOSE THE EYES THAN THE EARS?
(From Mrs. De Kroyft's forthcoming work, ent.i.tled ”My Soul and I.”)
Ah no! dark and empty and lonely as the world may be to us, no intelligent blind person could be found who would exchange hearing, and its attendant gift of speech, for a pair of the brightest eyes in the world; while, for myself, I have sometimes even wondered if, after all, it be, in the strictest sense of the word, a misfortune _not to see_.
All of our other senses are certainly not only immeasurably quickened, but is not our whole nature improved, and our immortal being greatly elevated through this darkest of human privations?
Just imagine for a moment a touch like Cynthia Bullock's, so exquisite as to feel with ease the notes, lines and s.p.a.ces of ordinary printed music; then add to that a hearing that almost notes the budding of the flowers, and you will see how little one must possibly lack, even in the scale of pleasurable existence, while perception in us becomes verily _a new sense_. Indeed, what shade of thought or feeling ever escapes us? Almost quicker than a thing has been uttered we have felt or perceived it. What marvelous power, too, memory comes to possess, and how tenaciously she clings to everything, often astonis.h.i.+ng even to ourselves; while imagination, that loftiest and most winged attribute of the soul, not only becomes more fleet, but literally turns creator, reproducing before our spirit eyes not only all that we have lost, clothed in the beautiful ideal, but unbars the gates to every new field of intellectual research, often enabling us to compete even more than successfully with those who see.