We are all musicians, not that we all compose or play—except on each
other’s feelings. The nervous system is the one marvellous harmonium. Its
strings are more in number than those of a thousand harps, and all that
is most exquisite, most exalted, and beautiful, can be performed upon it
with a vehemence that incites to merriment or rends the heart. It can
receive and realize the concert of a thousand voices!
All this we experience in our intercourse of every day; at the sight of a
beloved one, we extemporize some pleasing harmony.
But this human harp has not all its rich notes attuned and struck by
others; it is more often Eolian, and spontaneously pours out its emotions
in the solitude of its sorrow and its joy; and it is not always music
set in words or confined to our own sphere of being. This the poet feels
when, resting in his chamber, his spirit passes into that of others,
drawn by a divine sympathy. It becomes a concert then with many others’
trials. The sufferings are reverberated within him, like the sound of
distant music.
How easy is it in this way to enter another’s soul, to share in its
tribulation, to sink as deeply into it as to reach its self-love, and
learn how like it is to our own!
My friend Dr. Ewart, a physician now to St. George’s Hospital, and a
distinguished writer on chest-affections, sent me a friendly letter to
Professor Schiff of Florence, of which I availed myself largely. It was
at that time, too, that Madox Brown sent me a letter to Colonel Gillum,
at whose house I first met Madame Mazzini. Dr. Schiff had the lead in
science on nerve-function, and I constantly attended his demonstrations.
They were always performed on anæstheticized dogs. I learned much of him.
He was greatly esteemed by the Florentine Government, by whom he was
given apartments in the vacated convent of Sta. Annunciata, together with
the extensive garden.
Professor Schiff was not a man of the Majendie kind who could drown all
consciousness of animal suffering in the pleasure of reading science
out of a living book; he was benevolent, and he guarded carefully
against the creature on which he operated being alive to pain. But his
emotional enemies were too strong for him; they were chiefly some English
of fashion, and they got Capponi on their side; the most deservedly
esteemed of Florentine nobles, whose residence was opposite to that of
the professor.
This led to a correspondence between the neighbours, which ended for a
time in Schiff convincing Capponi that no cruelty was practised, and that
the operations on animals were painless.
However, Schiff had many animals; the municipality had ordered the
police to supply the professor with all stray dogs, for which they could
discover no owner. There was one dog amongst these that would bay the
moon in spite of every effort to silence its superstitious moanings; and
the enemy hearing this, interviewed Capponi again, and told him that
Schiff was known to torture his dogs in the night season.
Capponi, in his palace opposite, had only too surely heard those midnight
wailings.
The appointment of Professor Schiff to a chair of physiology and to the
hospital was a Government one; his diagnosis of disease was regarded as
remarkably rapid and successful. At his house, which was graced by Madame
Schiff and her daughter, ladies of high culture, I met many interesting
persons, one especially, a Moscow lady, who every year went to St.
Petersburg, thence to Florence, thence to the Isle of Wight, where she
had grandchildren at school and where she visited her friends, Lord and
Lady Cottenham.
I speak of this lady because her love of our country almost amounted to
a passion. The people, she said, were so kind; strangers would stop to
help her from a railway carriage! Then the Isle of Wight, how lovely!
Fuchsias flowering in the hedgerows, and climbing up the cottage walls!
As in Germany the “Vicar of Wakefield” is in every cottage, so, she said,
is “Paradise Lost” in every Russian home.