The World As I Have Found It Part 16

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.

Alas! if there could be only a seat of learning for the blind, with all its lessons oral or in the form of lectures, as at most of the German Universities, what could we not achieve?

But, as it is, enough renowned have arisen from our ranks to prove that, while blindness fetters the hands and the feet, it verily adds wings to _thought_. Indeed, the world has but one Homer, who sits forever shrouded in darkness, _the veiled G.o.d_ and father of song; and but one Milton, who gave to the world its "Paradise Lost" and its "Paradise Regained," while he bequeathed to the blind of all ages the glory and the beacon light of his name.

EDUCATION OF THE BLIND.

A brief description of the methods employed in their literary, artistic and industrial education.

I should not consider this work finished without a chapter on the mode of educating those who have been so unfortunate as to be deprived of the readiest medium through which education is imparted--the sight. The systems, although some of them are in use in nearly every State in the Union, are very little understood, and are always inquired into with every evidence of interest by visitors to the inst.i.tutions, where they often express quite as much surprise as gratification at what they see. I have therefore, in the following, endeavored to give as full a description as possible of the various methods and appliances employed to convey through the sense of feeling, information to which our eyes are closed.

On entering the schools the children are generally wholly uneducated, and have first to be taught the form and value of letters. To effect this the letters are raised, and the pupil learns their form by pa.s.sing the fingers over them till their forms, names and their use are fully understood. With some this is a long and tedious task, but others master it in a short time. I mastered the alphabet in one day, but I was not a child and had a mind sharpened by experience. By constant exercise the sense of feeling becomes so acute that very slight differences of form are readily detected, and reading by the touch becomes an easily mastered art. Having thus the key of knowledge the subsequent progress of the student is in his own hands, and, to the credit of the afflicted, it must be said it is generally very rapid, one reason for which is that loss of sight shuts off one fruitful source of distraction, and the mind is more easily concentrated. Another reason is that the necessity for education is generally appreciated, and the student is eager to acquire it.

The form and use of figures is taught in a similar manner, but the teaching of arithmetic is largely mental, on account of the difficulty of producing raised figures with sufficient rapidity, and the study of higher mathematics is pursued even more strictly from oral teaching.

The art of writing, which, to those not acquainted with the educating of the blind, is considered the most difficult task, becomes comparatively easy. It is a two-fold art, including the art of writing for blind readers and the ordinary Roman script. Of the "blind writing" there are several systems, but in this I shall be content to describe but two--the pin type and the "New York Point System." The first consists of movable types, the letters on which are formed of pin points, and with which the writer impresses the paper one letter at a time, producing the letter raised on the opposite side of the paper, which, on being reversed, may be read with eye or fingers. The point system is the arrangement and combination of six dots on two lines. Those on the upper line are numbered 1, 3 and 5, and those on the lower 2, 4 and 6. These are made within s.p.a.ces about three-sixteenths of an inch square each, by a styles which resembles a small, dull awl or centre punch. To prevent the dots being confused the writer uses a writing board, to which the paper is clamped by a metallic guide-rule perforated with two or more rows of these squares. The pupils make these punctured letters with great precision and rapidity, and frequently conduct their correspondence with their friends by that means, giving them the alphabet and key by which to learn to read them.

The writing of ordinary script is performed with more difficulty. A grooved pasteboard is used for the purpose, the grooves being of the width of the smaller letters. The letters extending above or below the line are gauged by the ridge. The right hand is followed close by the left, which guards the written lines from a second tracing of the pencil, and marks the s.p.a.ces. By these methods correspondence is maintained between the blind and their distant friends, and it is even possible for a blind merchant to keep his own books if necessary.

In writing the common script the pencil is always used, the pen never.

Care has to be taken to keep the pencil pointed, or much care and labor may be lost. An incident which Mr. Loughery, founder of the Maryland Inst.i.tution, used to relate of himself, shows how necessary it is to observe great care in this matter. When a student he wrote a long, gossipy letter to a friend, and in a short time was surprised, and for the time greatly annoyed, at receiving a reply asking him if he had gone mad. It enclosed his own letter, and on examination of it the two words "Dear Ed."

were found to be its sole contents. In his absorbed condition of mind he had not noticed the breaking of his pencil, and had proceeded with his writing, as the scratched paper, on which the traces of the wood of the pencil were visible, but not legible, indicated.

The most interesting things seen in an Inst.i.tution for the Blind are the apparatus for teaching geography, philosophy and physiology. For geography miniature continents, states, hemispheres, etc., are used, in which, the political divisions, the physical conformation and characteristics, the rivers, lakes, seas, etc., etc., are reproduced as nearly as possible. The boundaries are described by rows of raised dots, the capital cities by studs of peculiar shape, the larger cities by studs different in size or shape, the rivers by grooves in the surface, deserts by s.p.a.ces being sanded on the surface, the lakes, seas, etc., by depressions, and the islands by spots elevated above the seas' surface.

Mountain ranges are shown by raised models or miniature mountains, and that volcanoes may be fully understood, separate models of these and of other remarkable formations are used, that the student, by a thorough manual examination, may get a correct knowledge of them. In nearly every school I have visited there were maps, the sub-divisions of which consisted of movable blocks. Supported like a table, these maps would be studied by the pupils taking out the blocks and returning them to their places as they learned their names, etc. It is no uncommon thing to see a pupil throw these blocks into a confused heap, mix them all up, and, then picking them up one by one, put each in its place with as much accuracy as the most accomplished pianist will strike each key in a simple march or polka.

The philosophical apparatus consists of miniature machinery: the spring, the simple and compound lever, the wheel, the cog, the cam, etc., even to the miniature engine are brought into use, and the pupils examine them by themselves, and in their various applications and relations to each other.

In teaching those who never could see great difficulty is experienced in conveying the nature and properties of gases, vapors, etc., but with those who have any recollection of what they have seen the task is comparatively easy.

Where the apparatus is possessed the teaching of physiology and natural history are comparatively easy, the pupil handling and examining skeletons, skulls and models of the various parts of the human system, learning their various offices, etc., but many schools do not possess them, while others have fine collections including busts of eminent or notorious personages, zoological collections, plaster models, etc., by which the loss of sight is largely compensated for.

Music is taught by raised notes until the rudiments are mastered. It forms a great part of the course in all the inst.i.tutions, and is cultivated with great a.s.siduity. When the rudiments have been mastered and the pupil is familiar with the instrument, the music is read to them, the notes indicated by names and value, and they memorize the music. So thoroughly do many of the blind master the art that several are now, within my knowledge, successful teachers of the art to large numbers of seeing pupils. On the other hand much valuable time is wasted in the effort to teach music to those who have no talent for it, and whose time might be more profitably employed in the pursuit of other studies.

In the education of the blind the greatest care is given to the cultivation and strengthening of the memory and the success that is met with is truly marvelous, for the amount and variety of knowledge with which some minds have been stored is to many almost incredible.

The industrial education of the blind is perhaps the most important of all, and all the inst.i.tutions are provided with workshops, in which the inmates learn some useful mechanical or domestic art. The female pupils are taught to make all kinds of ornamental bead-work, to crochet and knit woolen and worsted goods, to sew by hand and with machines, and some of them acquire surprising skill, though my own experience does not give me a high opinion of the efficacy of attempting to teach sewing, so very few ever practice it after leaving school, though I have found it convenient to sew on a b.u.t.ton or repair a rent on occasion. Sewing by the blind, though it may surprise the beholder for the skill acquired under difficulties, will seldom claim their admiration for its own merit.

I have more faith in the efficiency of the industrial education of the boys and men, because, in the course of my travels, I have found numbers of them prospering in the pursuit of the trades learned in the inst.i.tutions, and some of them carrying on quite extensive operations.

Boys are taught to make brooms, brushes, cane seats for chairs, mattresses, door mats, to weave carpets and do many other forms of useful work. It looks strange to be shown a brush in which black and colored bristles are formed into lines of beauty--initials, flowers, etc., and to be told that a blind man made it. It looks like a miracle, but when you learn that the forms were traced on the block by cutting grooves in its surface to form the figures, and that the black bristles were kept in a round box, and white ones in a square box, near the maker's hand, the mystery disappears.

Connected with the Philadelphia Inst.i.tution are extensive manufactories, in which large numbers of workmen are employed. They are the largest in the United States that are operated almost exclusively by the blind. These shops enable numbers of men to support themselves and their families in decency and comfort.

The great interest manifested in the education and training of the blind, by thousands of n.o.ble people and earnest workers throughout the country, deserves the grat.i.tude of not only those who suffer the great deprivation, but of the whole people; for the benefits they have conferred on us by educating and rendering us useful and independent, rank in the scale of beneficence next to giving us sight.