INTELLECTUAL DEAFNESS AND BLINDNESS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15056, 27 July 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

INTELLECTUAL DEAFNESS AND BLINDNESS.

BY LOUISE EUGENIE PBIOKITT.

In a magazine I once read a story about a brilliant pianist who, playing one time before a distinguished gathering, saw among the many fair women present, one whose face had a charm. for him above all the others. So inspired was he by the wistful glance of her soft eyes that he played as never before, so that when he had finished the people* rose in their seats and cheered wildly, It was like the music one might expect in paradise. But the musician thought only of the beautiful lady. "Who," eagerly he asked, "is she?" ".She," was the astounding reply, "is Lady R—, -who is stone deaf."

I like the story. It charms me by its suggestion. Poor musician to have a great talent with which he might enchant all the world but this one lady whom above all others he would charm. Alas, she, was stone deaf, and he was reduced by thq circumstance to the level of the less-gifted men about him. '■"■

Poor lady! all the others around her might feel their souls uplifted on the waves of celestial music. To her alone it;woa as if it had not been. To them th<* musician was as a god with power. to enchant* the hours. To her the docx-of music was forever closed. Perhaps- oven she did not realise there was ». door. Oh, the pity of it! The musician to her was as other men.

That story disclosed to me the weak point contained in the argument of Burns:

Oh, wad some power the gillie gie us To sen oursel's as ithera see us. It wad fra' mony a blunder free us And foolish notion.. This is based upon the belief that "ithers" always see us correctly, while we invariably look upon ourselves by the light of our own foolish conceit. John Keats, history tells us, died crushed by the verdict of the "ithers" who edited the "savage and tart' erly" Quarterly Review. Here was a case of " ithers" intellectually too deaf to recognise that a rare poet was among them.

Everybody's value to the individual is necessarily relative, and our intellectual deafness can shut us out more positively from great company than any physical deafness. "It takes a god to recognise a god," said Emerson, realising that a great man can only transmit his greatness to the world by means of the partial greatness of his hearers. Futile, indeed, would it have been for the most gifted of musicians to play before the dull ear of Theophile Gautier, who could seriously define music as "the most expensive noise" he knew.

Many a man has felt that he depended upon the quality of his listener for the worth of his conversation, for only as he believed his listener was capable of comprehending was he able to give of his treasure. '.'.* ■.

In the legend of the "Holy Grail" it was permitted to "Galahad" alone to see the cup, because he was pure in heart; so art, wit, learning, moral beauty even, can reveal themselves only to the minds of those atune to them. The best part of a man or woman may be invisible except to a favoured few. In the fairy tales,it is quite common for people to become bodily invisible, but in real life a quite opposite rule holds good; for, while our bodies must always be visible, our souls, our real selves, are often quite invisible to our friends and acquaintances. Maeterlink tells of a man who lived 20 years by his sister's side, and yet admitted he "saw her for the first time" at the moment of their mother's death. If only in this life we were not doomed to "see through a glass darkly," how gladly might we recognise the first in the humble place of the last, or rightly estimate the worthlessness of the last though he occupied the proud position of the first. Half the dull people we know might blossom into interest if only we had the sympathetic vision. If "Boxane" had possessed it she would have recognised at once the noble and talented "Cyrano de Bergerac" behind the comic mask that was his face. I once stood at a window beside an old Frenchman. His niece, a stout woman with a rubicund face and countrified clothes, passed, looking to me like a picture out of a comic magazine. "Ah, ma grosso niece," exclaimed my companion, with a world of tender emotion in his voice, "She has a heart of gold." I was astonished, for I had seen only the graceless exterior, but I have always remembered the incident.

The victims of intellectual blindness and deafness are seldom aware of their deficiency, so it comes about that the dull man of one company may be the life of another, and what seems the limitation of one man may be only the proof of another's narrowness of vision. An artist friend of mine had an invitation to lunch. His host, a gentleman of artistic and botanical tastes, had only one other guest who was a professor of agriculture. Agriculture, of which my friend knew nothing, proved to be the chief topic of conversation. The professor of agriculture, appealing to the botanical ado of Ins host, held forth most learnedly and technically upon his subject, and my friend returned home feeling a very dwarf for ignorance, and yet on subjects artistic he was an authority. Had "ithers" been present they might very well have taken him for an unobtrusive nobody, and it was certainly a fact that the agricultural professor found the artist deaf to all his store of learning, and would have chafed uneasily in his turn if my friend could have succeeded in switching the conversation on to the arts. These two men were cut out by their limitations to bore each other and yet were both "men of parts." As for the host, he was no authority on either subject, but ho had that partial greatness ill each subject that enabled him to appreci-ate-both. Figuratively speaking, bo was no poet, but that valuable individual whose praises are not sung half enough, the "brother of the poet" whose sympathetic comprehension is the inspiration and the reward of the poet, and without whom, indeed, the poet could not exist. \ If someone complains of me as a dull' companion, may I not very well reply, "It is you who by your own limitations will not let me be otherwise than dull." "Dr. A—" said a lady in my hearing, to a gentleman standing beside her ''I must introduce you to Dr. B—. You should be good company for each other since you are both professors." "Ah " he protested with a comic air of pathos.'" "but we have different subjects." The lady was like the drake in Hans Andersen's fairy tale, who mistook the little singin* bird or a sparrow and on hearing his mistake, said, "Well, I don't understand the difference and, indeed, it is all the same thing, which it was in fact to him, he being stone deaf. A benevolent but unmusical lady, after' JSP Man Hall play the violin, remarked upon her apparent delicacy of phvsmne. "Poor thing," sa id she/"I wish that some rich man would marry her, so that she might never have to play any more." This speech afforded me mS amusement, for, hitherto, I had thought that the poor clucking hen in the barnyard might reasonably envy the singiTg EL the trees, but I had never conceived of her pitying it. HZ?» A B *'* ears to hear,' let him hear, but let no one be certain that his ears are keen enough to hear all the symr" the w <fd._ There is some nffi. X f rh f PS ' who is playing exquisitely even now to our deaf ears. ' *