XIIQuestions at Issue
THE Sindbad Society at its last meeting—on the night of the full moon, according to custom—met within the hospitable doors of the Ollapod Club. There, in the room with the roses on the ceiling, we had for dinner caviare with limes, a thin mushroom soup, duck roasted over spice-wood, Turinese pepperoni of chilies and preserved grapes, Leghorn coffee, and Turkish sweetmeats.
The archaeologist was hot against such modern abuses as motor boats in Venice, and motor cars on what he called the finest roads in the world—those from Nice to Genoa, Amalfi to Sorrento, and Ragusa to Gravosa. But when the diplomat begged him also to ban the ancient and dishonorable dogs from Constantinople, he became resigned to life’s little ironies, and, in response to a general request, described quite wonderfully how, after years of fruitless digging, he had found a royal tomb in Egypt, and entered its hot silence, to find its stately presences, its furniture and linen, its sacrificial bread and incense and flowers, all with their sense of yesterday enduring through the ages.
This prompted the musician, who was reared in Turkey, to tell how an Arab sheik he used to visit in the desert always bore with him the same atmosphere of untold centuries. The colonel followed, queerly enough, by saying that in his aeroplane tests he always had the same impression of the endless duration of time. Then some one broke the happy spell, as people will, with something clever and distracting, although the joke was good enough—James Howell’s on people who “travel much but see little, like Jonah in the whale.”
At that the talk scattered, the colonel describing Coromandel and Malabar, the biologist a boat he was building, the mountain-climber planning for Alaska, and the painter for Japan, until the psychologist asked the last why he was going there.
The painter bent his head sidewise for a moment, as he does when he is thoughtful, and then said: “Partly for the natural beauty, but chiefly to study an art that does not disturb the truth of its impressions by conscious theories like our perspective; that honors color and emotion as well as line and thought.”
“Your psychology is sound,” commented the other. “Color vision is very organic, which isto say, emotional; being apparently caused by minute chemical changes in the eye, under the action of light. The appreciation of line, on the other hand, seems to be due to mental association with touching and feeling, and therefore is rather a matter of attention and judgment.”
“Will you kindly explain me also?” asked the musician, who had been telling how no one knows his own voice in a phonograph, because every one hears his own speech reverberate through his inner, as well as his outer ear.
“Music is the most emotional and the most rhythmical of the arts,” continued the psychologist, “because the auditory nerve keeps close company in the brain with nerves from the heart and lungs. Melody is merely a series of answers to the body’s expectation of its usual rhythm. As one of your own critics has said, when music seems to be yearning for the unutterable it is only yearning for the next note.”
The musician quelled the psychologist with an imaginary baton, which he then pointed at the biologist, saying, “Pray prove to the psychologist that he is nothing but pulp.”
“He is surely little else,” smiled the biologist, “built by evolution and run by a chemical engine.”
“Out on you scientists and your evolution!” broke in the archaeologist. “Can your mechanism make a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven? Can your evolution show any architecture, sculpture, statecraft, drama, or philosophy equal to those of the age of Pericles? The world will produce nothing fine or permanent so long as you fellows tinker with its machinery. Your heresy of universal progress is merely a contemporary mythology that is falser than—”
“Softly, softly,” said Professor Maturin, shaking his long forefinger at the disputants. “The true philosopher, with Dante, loves every part of wisdom. Why can we not all enjoy knowing that cats hear better than dogs, and, at the same time, appreciate Blake’s saying that the sun is not a round ball of fire, but the glory of the universe?”
Everybody prepared to be mollified until Professor Maturin undid his peacemaking by asking the astronomer to tell us all what a comet looked like. When the astronomer replied that he had not looked through a telescope for years, but spent his time entirely in making calculations, the archaeologist threw up his hands and moved over to the painter and the musician, growling that he was going to spend the rest of the evening talking to somebody he understood.
I heard the two eagerly agree with him that the Nile was the finest river in the world, if you were there in November, but that you ought never go to Japan except in summer, and then I moved to other groups, where the mountaineer was comparing the view of the eternal snows from Darjeeling with that of valley, river, and sea from Mount Wellington, in Tasmania; or the diplomat was telling about Bulgaria; or the importer describing the Taj Mahal by moonlight; or the psychologist quoting, with a twinkle toward the archaeologist, Sir Francis Galton’s saying, that men who are too bad for Europe go to Constantinople, those who are too bad for Constantinople go to Cairo, and those who are too bad for Cairo go to Khartoum.
Everybody talked for a long while, since this was the last meeting for the year, and in spite of the earlier disagreement, which was, perhaps, more apparent than real, I remember the evening as one of especial illumination.