Part 5

In his desire to bring relief to the deaf--and his whole life has been devoted to that object--Professor Bell has begun a series of remarkable experiments in this line. Some time ago, he determined to study the effects produced upon the brain by turning an electric current into it through the side of the head. With this end in view, he arranged a dynamo machine with a feeble current, giving a varying number of interruptions per second, and attached one of the poles to a wet sponge which he placed in one of his ears.

"I risked one of my ears," he said simply, "in making this experiment, but I could not risk them both, so I held the second pole of the machine in my hand and turned on the current."

Fortunately no harm resulted, but immediately Professor Bell experienced the sensation of a pleasant sound whose pitch he was able to vary by increasing or diminishing the number of interruptions in the dynamo machine. His assistant standing beside him could detect no sound at all, so that what Professor Bell heard must have been the effect of the electric current upon his brain. This effect he found could be varied by varying the character of the current. Now he argues that greater variations might be produced in the sounds heard by the brain if the current turned into it were varied in the proper manner. For instance, suppose the current from a long distance telephone to be turned through the head of the deaf mute, a sponge connected with either pole being placed in each ear. Then let some one talk into the telephone in the ordinary way, the infinite variations in the current produced by the voice vibrations being passed into the brain directly. Is it not conceivable that such a variety of brain sensations or tones might then be caused in the head of the deaf mute as to make it possible to establish a system of sound signals, so to speak, which would be the equivalent of ordinary language? Indeed, is it not possible that the deaf mute might actually hear spoken words?

Professor Bell's experiments upon himself have been so encouraging as to make him disposed to try more complete experiments in the same line upon persons who have lost all sense of hearing, and who would doubtless be willing to take the inevitable risk for the sake of the great blessing which a successful issue would bring to them.

We talked a long time about these strange fancies, and finally I said to Professor Bell:

"But on this principle of brain tickling, what is to prevent a blind man from seeing by electricity?"

"I do not know that there is anything to prevent it."

FROM TENNYSON'S "LOCKSLEY HALL".

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry, Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint: Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

By permission from "The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate," Macmillan & Co., New York and London, 1893.

A DAY WITH GLADSTONE

FROM THE MORNING AT HAWARDEN TO THE EVENING AT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

BY H. W. MASSINGHAM OF THE "LONDON CHRONICLE."

I am often asked what is the secret of Mr. Gladstone's extraordinary length of days and of the perfection of his unvarying health. It may be partly attributed to the remarkable longevity of the Gladstone family, a hardy Scottish stock with fewer weak shoots and branches than perhaps any of the ruling families of England. But it has depended mainly on Mr. Gladstone himself and on the undeviating regularity of his habits. Most English statesmen have been either free livers or with a touch of the _bon vivant_ in them. Pitt and Fox were men of the first character; Melbourne, Palmerston, and Lord Beaconsfield were of the last. But Mr. Gladstone is a man who has been guilty of no excesses, save perhaps in work. He rises at the same hour every day, uses the same fairly generous, but always carefully regulated, diet, goes to bed about the same hour, pursues the same round of work and intellectual and social pleasure. An extraordinarily varied life is accompanied by a certain rigidity of personal habit I have never seen surpassed. The only change old age has witnessed has been that the House of Commons work has been curtailed, and that Mr. Gladstone has not of late years been seen in the House after the dinner hour, which lasts from eight till ten, except on nights when crucial divisions are expected. With the approach of winter and its accompanying chills, to which he is extremely susceptible, he seeks the blue skies and dry air of the Mediterranean coasts and of his beloved Italy. With this exception his life goes on in its pleasant monotony. At Hawarden, of course, it is simpler and more private than in London. In town to-day Mr. Gladstone avoids all large parties and great crushes and gatherings where he may be expected to be either mobbed or bored or detained beyond his usual bed-time.

HIS PERSONALITY.

Personally Mr. Gladstone is an example of the most winning, the most delicate, and the most minute courtesy. He is a gentleman of the elder English school, and his manners are grand and urbane, always stately, never condescending, and genuinely modest. He affects even the dress of the old school, and I have seen him in the morning wearing an old black evening coat, such as Professor Jowett still affects. The humblest passer-by in Piccadilly, raising his hat to Mr. Gladstone, is sure to get a sweeping salute in return. This courtliness is all the more remarkable, because it accompanies and adorns a very strong temper, a will of iron, and a habit of being regarded for the greater part of his lifetime as a personal force of unequalled magnitude. Yet the most foolish, and perhaps one may add the most impertinent, of Mr. Gladstone's dinner-table questioners is sure of an elaborate reply, delivered with the air of a student in deferential talk with his master. To the cloth Mr. Gladstone shows a reverence that occasionally woos the observer to a smile. The callowest curate is sure of a respectful listener in the foremost Englishman of the day. On the other hand, in private conversation the premier does not often brook contradiction. His temper is high, and though, as George Russell has said, it is under vigilant control, there are subjects on which it is easy to arouse the old lion. Then the grand eyes flash, the torrent of brilliant monologue flows with more rapid sweep, and the dinner table is breathless at the spectacle of Mr. Gladstone angry. As to his relations with his family, they are very charming. It is a pleasure to hear Herbert Gladstone--his youngest, and possibly his favorite son--speak of "my father." All of them, sons and daughters, are absolutely devoted to his cause, wrapped up in his personality, and enthusiastic as to every side of his character. Of children Mr. Gladstone has always been fond, and he has more than one favorite among his grandchildren.

MR. GLADSTONE'S MORNING.

Mr. Gladstone's day begins about 7.30, after seven hours and a half of sound, dreamless sleep, which no disturbing crisis in public affairs was ever known to spoil. At Hawarden it usually opens with a morning walk to church, with which no kind of weather--hail, rain, snow, or frost--is ever allowed to interfere. In his rough slouch hat and gray Inverness cape, the old man plods sturdily to his devotions. To the rain, the danger of sitting in wet clothes, and small troubles of this kind, he is absolutely impervious, and Mrs. Gladstone's solicitude has never availed to change his lifelong custom in this respect. Breakfast over, working time commences. I am often astonished at the manner in which Mr. Gladstone manages to crowd his almost endlessly varied occupations into the forenoon, for when he is in the country he has practically no other continuous and regular work-time. Yet into this space he has to condense his enormous correspondence--for which, when no private secretary is available, he seeks the help of his sons and daughters--his political work, and his varied literary pursuits. The explanation of this extreme orderliness of mind is probably to be found in his unequaled habit of concentration on the business before him. As in matters of policy, so in all his private habits, Mr. Gladstone thinks of one thing and of one thing only at a time. When home rule was up, he had no eyes or ears for any political subject but Ireland, of course excepting his favorite excursions into the twin subjects of Homer and Christian theology. Enter the room when Mr. Gladstone is reading a book; you may move noisily about the chamber, ransack the books on the shelves, stir the furniture, but never for one moment will the reader be conscious of your presence. At Downing Street, during his earlier ministries, these hours of study were often, I might say usually, preceded by the famous breakfast at which the celebrated actor or actress, the rising poet, the well-known artist, the diplomatist halting on his way from one station of the kingdom to another, were welcome guests. Madame Bernhardt, Miss Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, Madame Modjeska, have all assisted at these pleasant feasts.

HIS AFTERNOON.

Lunch with Mr. Gladstone is a very simple meal which neither at Hawarden nor Downing Street admits of much form or publicity. The afternoon which follows is a very much broken and less regular period. At Hawarden a portion of it is usually spent out of doors. In the old days it was devoted to the felling of some giant of the woods. Within the last few years, however, Sir Andrew Clark, Mr. Gladstone's favorite physician and intimate friend, has recommended that tree-felling be given over; and now Mr. Gladstone's recreation, in addition to long walks, in which he still delights, is that of lopping branches off veterans whose trunks have fallen to younger arms.

AS A READER.

Between the afternoon tea and dinner the statesman usually retires again, and gets through some of the lighter and more agreeable of his intellectual tasks. He reads rapidly, and I think I should say that, especially of late years, he does a good deal of skipping. If a book does not interest him, he does not trouble to read it through. He uses a rough kind of _memoria technica_ to enable him to mark passages with which he agrees, from which he dissents, which he desires to qualify, or which he reserves for future reference. I should say the books he reads most of are those dealing with theology, always the first and favorite topic, and the history of Ireland before and after the Act of Union. Indeed, everything dealing with that memorable period is greatly treasured. I remember one hasty glance over Mr. Gladstone's book table in his town house. In addition to the liberal weekly, "The Speaker," and a few political pamphlets, there were, I should say, fifteen or twenty works on theology, none of them, as far as I could see, of first-rate importance. Of science Mr. Gladstone knows little, and it cannot be said that his interest in it is keen. He belongs, in a word, to the old-fashioned Oxford ecclesiastical school, using the controversial weapons which are to be found in the works of Pusey and of Hurrell Froude. In his reading, when a question of more minute and out-of-the-way scholarship arises, he appeals to his constant friend and assistant, Lord Acton, to whose profound learning he bows with a deference which is very touching to note.

MR. GLADSTONE'S LIBRARY.

Mr. Gladstone's library is not what can be called a select or really first-rate collection. It comprises an undue proportion of theological literature, of which he is a large and not over-discriminating buyer. I doubt, indeed, whether there is any larger private bookbuyer in England. All the book-sellers send him their catalogues, especially those of rare and curious books. I have seen many of these lists, with a brief order in Mr. Gladstone's own handwriting on the flyleaf, with his tick against twenty or thirty volumes which he desires to buy. These usually range round classical works, archaeology, special periods of English history, and, above all, works reconciling the Biblical record with science. Of late, as is fairly well known, Mr. Gladstone has built himself an octagonal iron house in Hawarden village, a mile and a half from the castle, for the storage of his specially valuable books and a collection of private papers which traverse a good many of the state secrets of the greater part of the century. The importance of these is great, and the chances are that before Mr. Gladstone dies they will all be grouped and indexed in his upright, a little crabbed, but perfectly plain, handwriting. By the way, a great many statements have been made about Mr. Gladstone's library, and I may as well give the facts which have never before been made public. His original library consisted of about twenty-four thousand volumes. In the seventies, however, he parted with his entire collection of political works, amounting to some eight thousand volumes, to the late Lord Wolverton. The remaining fifteen thousand or so are now distributed between the little iron house to which I have referred, and the Hawarden library. Curiously enough, Mr. Gladstone is not a worshiper of books for the sake of their outward adornments. He loves them for what is inside rather than outside. He even occasionally sells extremely rare and costly editions for which he has no special use. In all money matters, indeed, he is a thrifty, orderly Scotchman. He has never been rich, though his affairs have greatly improved since the time when in his first premiership he had to sell his valuable collection of china.

AT THE DINNER TABLE.

Dinner with Mr. Gladstone is the stately ceremonial meal which it has become to the upper and upper-middle class Englishman. Mr. Gladstone invariably dresses for it, wearing the high crest collar which Harry Furniss has immortalized, and a cutaway coat which strikes one as of a slightly old-fashioned pattern. His digestion never fails him, and he eats and drinks with the healthy appetite of a man of thirty. A glass of champagne is agreeable to him, and if he does not take his glass or two of port at dinner, he makes it up by two or three glasses of claret, which he considers an equivalent. Oysters he never could endure, but, like Schopenhauer and Goethe and many another great man, he is a consistently hearty and unfastidious eater. He talks much in an animated monologue, though the common complaint that he monopolizes the conversation is not a just one. You cannot easily turn Mr. Gladstone into a train of ideas which does not interest him, but he is a courteous and even eager listener; and if the subject is of general interest, he does not bear in it any more than the commanding part which the rest of the company invariably allows him. His speaking voice is a little gruffer and less musical than his oratorical notes, which, in spite of the invading hoarseness, still at times ring out with their old clearness. As a rule he does not talk on politics. On ecclesiastical matters he is a never wearied disputant. Poetry has also a singular charm for him, and no modern topic has interested him more keenly than the discussion as to Tennyson's successor to the laureateship. I remember that at a small dinner at which I recently met him, the conversation ran almost entirely on the two subjects of old English hymns and young English poets. His favorite religious poet is, I should say, Cardinal Newman, and his favorite hymn, Toplady's "Rock of Ages," of which his Latin rendering is to my mind far stronger and purer than the original English. When he is in town, he dines out almost every day, though, as I have said, he eschews formal and mixed gatherings, and affects the small and early dinner party at which he can meet an old friend or two, and see a young face which he may be interested in seeing. One habit of his is quite unvarying. He likes to walk home, and to walk home alone. He declines escort, and slips away for his quiet stroll under the stars, or even through the fog and mist on a London winter's night. Midnight usually brings his busy, happy day to a close. Sleeplessness never has and never does trouble him, and at eighty-three his nights are as dreamless and untroubled as those of a boy of ten.

IN THE HOUSE.

His afternoons when in town and during the season are, of course, given up pretty exclusively to public business and the House of Commons, which he usually reaches about four o'clock. He goes by a side door straight to his private room, where he receives his colleagues, and hears of endless questions and motions, which fall like leaves in Vallambrosa around the head of a prime minister. Probably steps will be taken to remove much of this irksome and somewhat petty burden from the shoulders of the aged minister. But leader Mr. Gladstone must and will be at eighty-three, quite as fully as he was at sixty. Indeed, the complaint of him always has been that he does too much, both for his own health and the smooth manipulation of the great machine which, as was once remarked, creaks and moves rather lumberingly under his masterful but over-minute guidance. During the last two or three years it has been customary for the Whigs to so arrange that Mr. Gladstone speaks early in the evening. He is not always able to do this while the Home Rule Bill is under discussion, but I do not think he will ever again find it necessary to follow the entire course of a Parliamentary debate. He never needed to do as much listening from the Treasury Bench as he was wont to do in his first and second ministries. I do not think that any prime minister ever spent half as much time in the House of Commons as did Mr. Gladstone; certainly no one ever made one-tenth part as many speeches. Indeed, it requires all Mrs. Gladstone's vigilance to avert the physical strain consequent upon overwork. With this purpose she invariably watches him in the House of Commons, from a corner seat in the right hand of the Ladies' Gallery which is always reserved for her, and which I have never known her to miss occupying on any occasion of the slightest importance.

SPEECH-MAKING.

I have before me two or three examples of notes of Mr. Gladstone's speeches; one of them refers to one of the most important of his addresses on the customs question. It was a long speech, extending, if I remember rightly, to considerably over an hour. Yet the memoranda consist purely of four or five sentences of two or three words apiece, written on a single sheet of note paper, and no hint of the course of the oration is given. Occasionally, no doubt, especially in the case of the speech on the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, which was to my mind the finest Mr. Gladstone has ever delivered, the notes were rather more extensive than this, but as a rule they are extremely brief. When Mr. Gladstone addresses a great public meeting, the most elaborate pains are taken to insure his comfort. He can now only read the very largest print, and careful and delicate arrangements are made to provide him with lamps throwing the light on the desk or table near which he stands. Sir Andrew Clark observes the most jealous watchfulness over his patient. A curious instance of this occurred at Newcastle, when Mr. Gladstone was delivering his address to the great liberal caucus which assembles as the annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation. Sir Andrew had insisted that the orator should confine himself to a speech lasting only an hour. Fearing that his charge would forget all about his promise in the excitement of speaking, the physician, slipped onto the platform and timed Mr. Gladstone, watch in hand. The hour passed, but there was no pause in the torrent of words. Sir Andrew was in despair. At last he pencilled a note to Mr. Morley, beseeching him to insist upon the speech coming to an end. But Mr. Morley would not undertake the responsibility of cutting a great oration, and the result was that Mr. Gladstone stole another half hour from time and his physician. The next day a friend of mine went breathlessly up to Sir Andrew, and asked how the statesman had borne the additional strain. "He did not turn a hair," was the reply. Practically the only sign of physical failure which is apparent in recent speeches has been that the voice tends to break and die away after about an hour's exercise, and for a moment the sound of the curiously veiled notes and a glance at the marble pallor of the face gives one the impression that after all Mr. Gladstone is a very, very old man. But there is never anything like a total breakdown. And no one is aware of the enormous stores of physical energy on which the prime minister can draw, who has not sat quite close to him, and measured the wonderful breadth of his shoulders and heard his voice coming straight from his chest in great _bouffees_ of sound. Then you forget all about the heavy wrinkles in the white face, the scanty silver hair, and the patriarchal look of the figure before you.

WHERE MAN GOT HIS EARS.

BY HENRY DRUMMOND, LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.G.S.