Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

by George Meredith

  . . . The intellect is continually expressing its conceptions by the use of words that originated with the senses, but to deem the new use expressive of only the original meaning is analogous to the old factious11 cry that bank notes are only old rags and lampblack.12 But while the conceptions angel and spirit exist probably among all peoples, a like universality is not predicable13 of every conception, civilization influencing the intellect to conceive in some condition what in some other condition may remain unconceived; especially will different degrees of civilization influence the conceptions to which names will be applied. Absent minded is an organic condition of the intellect which must be coextensive with man, but it may not be universally designated verbally; and we may say the same of ennui, which refers to a condition of our feelings. The presence or absence in any language of phrases referring to organic conditions, would yield some indication of the civilization of the people by whom the language was spoken.

  Words that relate to physical objects we are accustomed to interpret by referring to the object named, but words relating to intellections and emotions we are never taught speculatively to interpret by introspection, as in the preceding examples is recommended, though the process is practised universally. The parting benediction of his parent every child thus interprets, though no word of the benediction may be to him significant otherwise. Even the cries of brute animals are understood when they proceed from wants and feelings common to the animals and to us; animals being unintelligible to each other in proportion to only the heterogeneity of their organisms. If I see hot water thrown on a dog and hear outcries from him, my intellect understands his exclamations as well as though they were English words. On the same principle my intellect will recognize the meaning of words uttered by two foreigners who shall meet suddenly in my presence after having been sometime separated. Such an interpretation of unknown words is like the trigonometrical solution by which when two angles of a given triangle are known, the third angle also becomes known. . . . I saw lately some comments on the fancied translation into French, by a Frenchman, of the exclamation “Out, brief candle!” The Frenchman is made to render it, “Get out, you short candle!” The difference in the two exclamations is ridiculous enough, but the ridiculousness depends alone on the different organisms to which the phrases refer; “out, brief candle!” expressing an emotion, and “get out, you short candle!” expressing customarily only a physical action to be performed. Irrespective of these differences in us, the two phrases are verbally much alike. So “hail, horrors hail!” were rendered into French by the same fancied Frenchman, as “how do you do, horrors, how do you do!”—two phrases which differ only in the different emotions to which they are become conventionally connected. . . .

  To thus look inwardly for the subjective meaning of language, rather than outwardly for an objective meaning, will solve many mysteries. Why must time be past, present, or future, and not a continued present? Because our senses perceive by only successive sensations. Our thoughts and feelings are equally successive, and about equally transient. From these unintermitted successions, our intellect knows no continuous present, and can, therefore, conceive time as only present, past, and future, just as it can conceive ice as only hard and cold. . . .

  Notes

  1. Alexander Bryan Johnson, The Physiology of the Senses; or, How and What We See, Hear, Taste, Feel and Smell (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1856).

  2. Ibid., 134.

  3. Ibid., 139–43.

  4. sensible: here, and throughout the essay, sensory

  5. lancinated: acute, piercing

  6. pertinancy: stubbornness

  7. Johnson, The Physiology of the Senses, 184–88, 190–92, 196, 200–5, 206.

  8. From Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.122–23. The actual lines are: “Though you can guess what temperance should be, / You know not what it is.”

  9. organism: For Johnson, organism refers to either the emotions, the intellect, or the senses.

  10. nominative: named. Here Johnson suggests that the verb choice names the organism being used.

  11. factious: divisive

  12. lampblack: black varnish or dye

  13. predicable: able to be affirmed

  George Wilson, from The Five Senses (1860)1

  George Wilson (1818–1859) was a professor at the University of Edinburgh, chemist, celebrated public speaker, museum director, and writer of popular textbooks and scientific treatises. He is perhaps best remembered for his research findings regarding color blindness, research that changed practices in railway and ship signaling. Wilson’s The Five Gateways of Knowledge (as it was initially known) popularized scientific thought about the influence of the senses upon the mind and went through at least seven editions. Using religious rhetoric, Wilson argued against the notion that ignoring the body improves the mind and encouraged his readers to cultivate their sensory perception. Contemporary reviewers called it a “prose poem,” and indeed Wilson appears to have been as fond of quoting poetry as he was of creating his own vivid images. The excerpt that follows is drawn from his introduction and his chapter on the ear. In the latter chapter, Wilson describes the structure of the ear and how it carries sound, compares the sense of hearing to the sense of sight, and concludes by explaining why he finds hearing to be the most poetical of the senses.

  From the Introduction2

  The ivory palace of the skull, which is the central abode of the soul, although it dwells in the whole body, opens to the outer world four gateways, by which its influences may enter; and a fifth, whose alleys are innumerable, unfolds its thousand doors on the surface of every limb. These gateways, which we otherwise name the Organs of the Senses, and call in our mother speech, the Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, and the Skin—are instruments by which we see, and hear, and smell, and taste, and touch: at once loopholes through which the spirit gazes out upon the world, and the world gazes in upon the spirit; porches which the longing, unsatisfied soul would often gladly make wider, that beautiful material nature might come into it more fully and freely; and fenced doors, which the sated and dissatisfied spirit would, if it had the power, often shut and bar altogether.

  I will try to picture each of those living inlets of learning, without stopping at present to inquire how much the soul knows independent of the senses, and how far it controls them. The soul and its servants were not intended to be at war with each other, and the better the wise king is served, the more kingly will he appear. We have a strange fear of our bodies, and are ever speaking as if we could right the spirit, only by wronging the flesh, and could best sharpen our intellects by blunting our senses. But our souls would be only gainers by the perfection of our bodies were they wisely dealt with; and for every human being we should aim at securing, so far as they can be attained, an eye as keen and piercing as that of the eagle; an ear as sensitive to the faintest sound as that of the hare; a nostril as far scenting as that of the wild deer; a tongue as delicate as that of the butterfly; and a touch as acute as that of the spider.

  No man ever was so endowed, and no one ever will be; but all come infinitely short of what they should achieve were they to make their senses what they might be made. The old have outlived their opportunity, and the diseased never had it; but the young, who have still an undimmed eye, an undulled ear, and a soft hand; an unblunted nostril, and a tongue which tastes with relish the plainest fare, can so cultivate their senses as to make the narrow ring which for the old and infirm encircles things sensible, widen for them into an almost limitless horizon.

  There are three points of view from which we are to look at the senses, viz:—

  1st. As ministers to the merely animal wants of the Body.

  2d. As ministers to the cultivation of the Intellect; and,

  3d. As ministers to the gratification of the perception of Beauty

  and its opposite.

  It is to the two last, the Intellectual and Aesthetical offices of the senses, I am mainly to refer, including that
relation to our Moral Instincts which flows from the triple Corporeal, Intellectual, and Aesthetical function which is exercised by each sense.

  From “The Ear”3

  The second of the Gateways of Wisdom is the Ear. The organ or instrument of hearing is in all its more important parts so hidden within the head, that we cannot perceive its construction by a mere external inspection. What in ordinary language we call the ear, is only the outer porch or entrance-vestibule of a curious series of intricate, winding passages, which, like the lobbies of a great building, lead from the outer air into the inner chambers. Certain of these passages are full of air; others are full of liquid; and thin membranes are stretched like parchment curtains across the corridors at different places, and can be thrown into vibration, or made to tremble, as the head of a drum or the surface of a tambourine does when struck with a stick or the fingers. Between two of those parchment-like curtains, a chain of very small bones extends, which serves to tighten or relax these membranes, and to communicate vibrations to them. In the innermost place of all, rows of fine threads, called nerves, stretch like the strings of a piano from the last points to which the tremblings or thrillings reach, and pass inwards to the brain. If these threads or nerves are destroyed, the power of hearing as infallibly departs, as the power to give out sound is lost by a piano or a violin when its strings are broken.

  Without attempting to enter more minutely into a description of the ear, it may now be stated, that in order to produce sound, a solid, a liquid, or a gas, such as air, must in the first place be thrown into vibration. We have an example of a solid body giving a sound, when a bell produces a musical note on being struck; of a liquid, in the dash of a waterfall, or the breaking of the waves; and of the air, in the firing of a cannon, or the blast of a trumpet. Sounds once produced, travel along solid bodies, or through liquids, or through the air, the last being the great conveyor or conductor of sounds.

  The human ear avails itself of all these modes of carrying sound; thus the walls of the skull, like the metal of a bell, convey sounds inwards to the nerves of hearing; whilst within the winding canals referred to, is inclosed a volume of liquid, which pulsates and undulates as the sea does when struck by a paddle-wheel or the blade of an oar. Lastly, two chambers divided from each other by a membrane, the one leading to the external ear, the other opening into the mouth, are filled with air, which can be thrown into vibration. We may thus fitly compare the organ of hearing, considered as a whole, to a musical glass, i.e. a thin glass tumbler containing a little water. If the glass be struck, a sound is emitted, during which, not only the solid wall of the tumbler, but the liquid in it, and the air above it, all tremble or vibrate together, and spread the sound. All this is occurring every moment in our ears; and as a final result of these complex thrillings, the nerves which I likened to the “piano strings” convey an impression inwards to the brain, and in consequence of this we hear.

  We know far less, however, of the ear than of the eye. The eye is a single chamber open to the light, and we can see into it, and observe what happens there. But the ear is many-chambered, and its winding tunnels traversing the rock-like bones of the skull are narrow, and hidden from us as the dungeons of a castle are; like which, also, they are totally dark. Thus much, however, we know, that it is in the innermost recesses of these unilluminated ivory vaults, that the mind is made conscious of sound. Into these gloomy cells, as into the bright chamber of the eye, the soul is ever passing and asking for news from the world without; and ever and anon, as of old in hidden subterranean caverns where men listened in silence and darkness to the utterance of oracles, reverberations echo along the resounding walls, and responses come to the waiting spirit, whilst the world lifts up its voice and speaks to the soul. The sound is that of a hushed voice, a low but clear whisper; for as it is but a dim shadow of the outer world we see, so it is but a faint echo of the outer world we hear.

  Such, then, is the Ear; and it is in some respects a more human organ than the Eye, for it is the counterpart of the human voice; and it is a sorer affliction to be cut off from listening to the tongues of our fellow-men, than it is to be blinded to the sights on which they gaze. . . .

  But conceding all this, those two mighty masters [Milton and Beethoven] may be fitly regarded as furnishing characteristic examples of the relative severity of blindness and deafness, when they befall those who once saw and heard. We should every one of us, I suppose, prefer the lot of Milton to that of Beethoven, and find it more easy to console a blind painter4 than a deaf musician. I speak thus because I presume it is a matter of universal experience, that we can more easily and vividly recall and conceive sights, than we can recall and conceive sounds. It costs us no effort to summon before us, even though destitute of the painter’s gifts, endless landscapes, cities, or processions, and faces innumerable; but even rarely endowed musicians can mentally reproduce few, comparatively, of the melodies or harmonies they know, if debarred from uttering them vocally, or through some instrument. We may test this point by the experience of our dreams.

  If I mistake not, though I would not speak dogmatically on this point, we never fully dream a sound. Coleridge in his “Kubla Khan” declares:—

  A damsel with a dulcimer5

  In a vision once I saw:

  It was an Abyssinian maid,

  And on her dulcimer she played,

  Singing of Mount Abora.

  But this was the visionary vision of a poet; in dreams, I imagine, we hear no sounds, unless it be those of the world without. We carry on many conversations, and marvellous things are told us; but these, like our waking communings with ourselves, and mental hummings of tunes, are uttered by voiceless lips in a speechless tongue. Dreamland is a silent land, and all the dwellers in it are deaf and dumb.

  How different is it with Sight! No objects beheld by our waking eyes impress us so vividly as the splendid and awful dissolving views which pass before us in the visions of the night. So much is this the case, that when in daylight life we encounter some reality more startling, more joyful, or terrible than most, we utter the strange paradox: “It cannot be true; it must be a dream!” I infer from this that the Blind, who must dream or imagine all the sights which they see, are, caeteris paribus,6 more fortunate than the Deaf, who must dream the sounds which they hear. In the Life of Niebuhr7 there is a striking description of the long and happy hours which his blind old father spent in recalling the striking scenes which in early life he had witnessed in the Holy Land and other Eastern countries; and every child who looks into its pillow to see wonders there, could record a parallel experience: but I know of no corresponding fact in the history of the deaf. At all events, an active and joyous memory of sounds is rare among them. The ear is accordingly an organ which we can worse afford to lose than the eye; and one, therefore, which should be all the more cared for. It is still more susceptible of education than the eye, and can be educated more quickly.

  Thus a love of music is much more frequent than a love of painting or sculpture; and you will reach the hearts and touch the feelings of the majority of mankind more quickly by singing them a song, than by showing them a picture. In truth, the sensitiveness of the ear to melody and to harmony is so great, that we not only seek to gratify it when bent upon recreation, but even in the midst of the hardest labor we gratify it if we can. Two carpenters planing the same piece of wood will move their planes alternately; so that, when the one is pushing his forward, the other is drawing his back, thereby securing a recurrence of sounds, which, from their inequality, would be harsh if they were heard simultaneously. In the same way two paviors,8 driving in stones, bring down their mallets time about; and so do working engineers when they are forging a bar; and the smith, when he has dealt a succession of monotonous blows, relieves his ear by letting his hammer ring musically on the anvil; and I need not tell you how sailors, heaving the anchor or hoisting the sails, sing together in chorus; nor remind you that the most serious of all hard work, fighting, is helped on by
the drum and the trumpet.

  This natural inclination of man towards music shows itself from the first. The infant’s eye, we have seen, is aimless for a season; but its ear is alert from the beginning. It enters upon life with a cry; and its first sorrow, expressed in a sound, is soothed by the first sound of its mother’s voice. One half of the nurse’s time, I suppose, is spent in singing; and baby, when not sleeping or drinking, is either making or hearing music.

  Now is it not a thing to be deeply lamented, that the sensitive ears with which almost every one of us has been gifted by God, are so little educated, that they might as well be stuffed with tow,9 or plugged with lead, for any good use we make of them? To be sure we keep them sufficiently open to hear all gossip about us, and can most of us tell when the cannons are firing; but as for training them to that exquisite sense of melody or harmony of which they are susceptible, how few do it!

  Our national music is famous all the world over; our song-tunes and our psalm-tunes are listened to with delight in every clime. Yet how few can sing the ever-welcome songs of Burns:10 in how few churches will you hear psalm-singing that, as music, is other than a grief to an educated ear! This must be mended! Let every one so train, and educate, and fully develop the faculty of hearing that is in those ears of his, that he may listen with full delight and appreciation to the songs of birds, and the roar of the sea, the wailing of the winds, and the roll of the thunder; and may be able to cheer his soul and calm his heart by hearkening to the music of his fellow-men, and in turn rejoice their hearts by making music for them. . . .

  . . . . It is not necessary to enlarge upon the aesthetics of hearing. All great poets have been passionate lovers of music, and it has received due honor at their hands. Most of the great painters and sculptors have been lovers of music also, in this respect being more catholic than their brethren the great musicians, who have often been totally indifferent to the arts which appeal to the eye; and double honor has thus been paid to the ear.