I was coming off a Tube train last evening when some one said to me: "Will
you please give this gentleman an arm to the lift? He is blind." I did so,
and found, as I usually find in the case of the blind, that my companion
was uncommonly talkative and cheerful. This gaiety of the blind is a
perpetual wonder to me. It is as though the outer light being quenched an
inner light of the spirit illuminates the darkness. Outside the night is
black and dread, but inside there is warmth and brightness. The world is
narrowed to the circle of one's own mind, but the very limitation feeds the
flame of the spirit, and makes it leap higher. It was the most famous of
blind Englishmen who in the days of his darkness made the blind Samson
say:--
He that hath light within his own clear breast
May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day.
And it has been remarked in many cases in which men have gone blind that
their cheerfulness so far from being diminished has by some miracle gained
a new strength. In no case of which I have had any knowledge has it
apparently had the contrary effect. The zest of living seems heightened.
Not long ago Mr. Galsworthy wrote to the _Times_ a letter in which he spoke
with pity of the unhappiness of the blind, and there promptly descended on
him an avalanche of protest from the blind themselves. I suppose there was
never a man who seemed to have a more intense pleasure in life than the
late Dr. Campbell, the founder of the Normal School for the Blind, who
worked wonders in extending the range of the activities of the blind, and
himself did such apparently impossible things as riding a bicycle and
climbing mountains.
Nor was the case of Mr. Pulitzer, the famous proprietor of the _New York
World_, less remarkable. Night came down on him with terrible suddenness.
He was watching the sunset from his villa in the Mediterranean one evening
when he said: "How quickly the sun has set." "But it has not set," said his
companion. "Oh, yes, it has; it is quite dark," he answered. In that moment
he had gone stone blind. But I am told by those who knew him that his
vivacity of mind was never greater than in the years of his blindness.
My friend Mr. G.W.E. Russell has a theory that the advantage of the blind
over the deaf and dumb in this matter of cheerfulness is perhaps more
apparent than real. He points out that it is in company that the blind is
least conscious of his misfortune, and that the deaf and dumb is most
conscious of it. That is certainly the case. In conversation the sightless
are on an equality with the seeing, while the deaf and dumb are shut up in
a terrible isolation. The fact that they see is not their gain but their
loss. They watch the movement of the lips and the signs of laughter, but
this only adds to the bitterness of the prison of soundlessness in which
they dwell. Hence the appearance of gloom. On the other hand, in solitude
the deaf and dumb has the advantage. All the colour and movement of life is
before him, while the blind is not only denied that vision of the outside
world, but has a restriction of movement that the other does not share. Mr.
Russell's conclusion, therefore, is that while the happiest moments of the
blind are those when he is observed, the happiest of the deaf and dumb are
when he is not observed.
There is some measure of truth in this, but I believe, nevertheless, that
the common impression is right, and that, judged by the test of the
cheerful acceptance of affliction, the loss of sight is less depressing
than the loss of hearing and speech. And this for a very obvious reason.
After all, the main interest in life is in easy, familiar intercourse with
our fellows. I love to watch a golden sunset, to walk in the high beech
woods in spring--or, for that matter, in summer or autumn or winter--to see
the apples reddening on the trees, and the hedgerows thick with
blackberries. But this is the setting of my drama--the scenery of the play,
not the play itself. It is its human contacts that give life its vivacity
and intensity. And it is the ear and tongue that are the channels of the
cheerful interplay of mind with mind. In that interplay the blind man has
full measure and brimming over. His very affliction intensifies his part in
the human comedy and gives him a peculiar delight in homely intercourse. He
is not merely at his ease in the human family: he is the centre of it. He
fulfils Johnson's test of a good fellow: he is "a clubbable man."
And even in the enjoyment of the external world it may be doubted whether
he does not find as much mental stimulus as the deaf-and-dumb. He cannot
see the sunset, but he hears the shout of the cuckoo, the song of the lark,
"the hum of bees, and rustle of the bladed corn." And if, as usually
happens, he has music in his soul, he has a realm of gold for his
inheritance that makes life a perpetual holiday. Have you heard Mr. William
Wolstenholme, the composer, improvising on the piano? If not, you have no
idea what a jolly world the world of sounds can be to the blind. Of course,
the case of the musician is hardly a fair test. With him, hearing is life
and deafness death. There is no more pathetic story than that of Beethoven
breaking the strings of the piano in his vain efforts to make his immortal
harmonies penetrate his soundless ears. Can we doubt that had he been
afflicted with blindness instead of deafness the tragedy of his life would
have been immeasurably relieved? What peace, could he have heard his Ninth
Symphony, would have slid into his soul. Blind Milton, sitting at his
organ, was a less tragic figure and probably a happier man than Milton with
a useless ear-trumpet would have been. Perhaps without the stimulus of the
organ he could not have fashioned that song which, as Macaulay says in his
grandiloquent way, "would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal
beings whom he saw with that inner eye, which no calamity could darken,
flinging down on the jasper pavements their crowns of amaranth and gold."
It is probable that in a material sense blindness is the most terrible
affliction that can befall us; but I am here speaking only of its spiritual
effects, and in this respect the deprivation of hearing and speech seems to
involve a more forlorn state than the deprivation of sight. The one
affliction means spiritual loneliness: the other deepens the spiritual
intimacies of life. It was a man who had gone blind late in life who said:
"I am thankful it is my sight which has gone rather than my hearing. The
one has shut me off from the sun: the other would have shut me off from
life."