A BENIGN INVENTION
THE phonograph has not accomplished all that was expected of it, yet it has proved a most interesting and valuable invention. One of its achievements is of the nature of a revelation: it has proved that even the most loquacious person is unacquainted with the sound of his own voice. As reproduced by the machine, one’s voice seems to be that of a stranger: his ear does not recognize it, and he is with difficulty convinced that he hears himself as others hear him. Commonly, it is said, the effect is deeply disappointing; the tones are not so rich and mellow as he had a right to expect, and he leaves the instrument with a chastened spirit and a broken pride.
The instrument has herein a broad field of usefulness. As a teacher of humility it takes rank with the parson, the flirt, the mirror and the banana peel on the sidewalk. It humbles the orator and strews repentant ashes on thehead of the ardent young woman who has taken lessons in elocution but none in forbearance. The amateur who has always a cold when pressed to sing takes on an added reluctance having in it an element of sincerity. In the meek taciturnity of the “good conversationalist” society finds a new edification and delight.
For these and similar benefactions let us be truly thankful; but we should not hope for too much. The blessing is bright, but it may not be lasting. It is not in human nature to wear sackcloth and ashes as a permanent apparel. In the valley of humility are no old residents. As much as is herein affirmed of the phonograph might with equal reason have been expected from its elder brother, the photograph. “Who,” it might once have been asked, “will have the hardihood to go unveiled and unblushing after experiencing the awful revelations of the camera?” Alas! man was created upright, but he has sought out many improvements. No sooner had the merciless sun-picture begun to take the conceit out of us than some ingenious malefactor rushed to the rescue with a process called “retouching,” whereby the once honest camera was made to lie like a lover; men and womenresumed their vanity, revised and enlarged it, and made it a means of afflicting their friends with portraits that shall have their part in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.
The ingenuity that invented the phonograph can adapt it to our need and our hope by taking the sting out of it. Mr. Edison will doubtless discern a commercial advantage in devising a method of “retouching” the little waxen cylinder—so smoothing its asperities that it will give off tones and cadences radically different from, and infinitely superior to, those that it received. The most rasping nasal twang will be transmuted “into something rich and strange.” The catarrhal accent of the Boston maiden will reappear as that “vocal velvet” wherewith the British blondes of the “Black Crook” period enravished the soul of Richard Grant White. The irritating stammerer will ejaculate into the machine his impedimentary utterances and get them back in a smooth rill of speech—a fluent, flute-like warble. We shall easily learn to accept these pleasing vocal fictions, deriving from the falsified record a rich and high delight. Enamored of what we conceive to be the music of our own voices, and persuaded of their happy effect upon others,we shall cultivate loquacity as an art and practice prolixity as a virtue. In the retouched phonogram lurk the promise and potency of a pleasure incomparably more mischievous than the confusion of tongues on the plain of Shinar.
There appears to be no reason to doubt that Mr. Edison’s most remarkable invention, the theoscope, has a great future before it. An instrument that enables us to see another as he sees himself must accomplish great good by promoting clear understandings between man and man, and subjecting estimates of personal character to the chance of revision. As matters now stand, and have stood from time immemorial, our opinion of even a man whom we have known from infancy is formed by a series of what are known to journalism as “Star Chamber proceedings,” in which the man himself is not heard with that fulness and frankness that are desirable. It is hardly fair either to convict or to acquit him—nay, even to honor or reward him—upon indirect testimony, introduced by him for another purpose. True justice obviously requires that Ain making up his mind about B should in some way, if possible, avail himself of the advantage of looking into a mind already made up—a mind enriched and instructed by longer and nearer observation of the subject upon which light is sought: in short, B’s mind. If Mr. Edison’s invention make this as practicable as (if practicable) it is imperative, he has indeed brought “joy to the afflicted” in a way to make the proprietor of a patent medicine grow green with envy.
That he should call his marvelous and delicate appliance a theoscope appears at first thought a reasonless and wanton exercise of the right of nomenclature; but on reflection the name seems singularly appropriate. “Theoscope,” I venture to inform the reader unacquainted with Greek, is from the words Θεός, god, and σκοπειν, to view. The theoscope is therefore an instrument with which to look at gods. When one man sees another as the other sees himself, the image, naturally, is one of supernatural dignity and importance—one worthy of divine honors, even if ’tis not in mortals to command them. One hardly knows which to admire the more, the ingenuity that invented the theoscope or the inspiration that named it.
Most readers are more or less disposed to agree with Burns that the gift to see ourselves as others see us would from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion; but few, probably, have reflected on the considerable advantage of seeing others as they see themselves. It seems certain, for example, that it would notably minish the acerbities of debate if each of two disputants could behold in the other, not an obstinate, pig-headed malefactor endeavoring by unfair means to establish an idiotic proposition, but a high-hearted philanthropist, benevolent and infallible, tenderly concerned for an erring opponent’s reclamation and intellectual prosperity. The general use of the theoscope in newspaper offices can hardly fail profoundly to modify and mollify discussion, in range and heat. When the editor of theCow County Opinionatorhas written down the editor of theHog’s-Back Allegationistas “a loathsome contemporary whose moral depravity is only exceeded by his social degradation, and whose skill in horse-stealing has been thought worthy of record in the books of a court which his ill-gotten gold was unable to corrupt,” it may occur to him to ring up his enemy and inveigle him to the other end of the apparatus.The god-like image of a blameless man and generous rival which will then confront him he may know in his soul to be an incredibly counterfeit presentment, but the moral effect of looking at a noble work of the imagination is to soften the heart and elevate the sentiments: he will probably find something in his written censure which he would willingly let die save for the precious example of its incomparable style.
If the theoscope may be expected to work so desirable moral changes in the man at the receiving instrument, what may we not hope as to its influence on the person before the transmitter? To be seen at last as one really is (according to one’s own belief) must necessarily be supremely gratifying to all who have known and bewailed the opacity of the glass through which they have hitherto been seen darkly. No longer doomed to chafe under the disability that forbids expression, our natures must expand to something nearly as great and good as that other self which we can send over the wire by merely touching a button. When a famous cartoonist had the justice to offset his weekly caricatures by representing his favorite victims once as they would have represented themselves he doubtlessdid something toward discrediting his own conceptions and justifying theirs. There are persons whom nothing will reform, but it would be possible to make a long list of “prominent citizens” who would be lifted to the breezy altitudes of a higher and better life by the consciousness, however erroneous, of the power so to present their true personalities that he who runs may read, instead of so that he who reads runs, as now.