Labour and Childhood/The Projection of Sense-Organs

by Margaret McMillan

CHAPTER VI

THE PROJECTION OF SENSE-ORGANS

THE EAR

THIS is an age of prodigies. One child after another appears in the concert room, and amazes the public by his or her powers as a violinist or pianist, and at public exhibitions of child drawings the man in the street hears with wonder that a little child is the artist who drew this or that picture. Yet the child prodigy is not a new thing. He has dazzled people for centuries. He is always an artist, a player, and, in rare cases, a composer. Sometimes he is a philosopher.^[1] But he is never an instrument-maker—an artisan.

Long delay in the development of a musician is unnecessary, because the musical apparatus in his own body is perfected in all its parts soon after birth. For example, that part of the ear which is concerned with hearing more directly than any other, is full grown at birth, and long before a baby can speak, its key board (or Corti's organ) is vibrating with the activity of microscopic strings that analyse and place myriad sounds and tones. What does the baby know of all this? Nothing. He can sing—he can play if there is nothing to hinder. If the right stimulus is given, the music will begin. Tolstoy, Hearn, and many others, have testified, after working among children and peasants, that they are nearly all capable of a wonderful musical development. If this does not take place in many to-day, it is only because there is something that actually hinders it, or because there is nothing to call it forth.

We do not circulate our own blood, but it is circulated in us. We do not consciously make our food change into muscle and nerve, or bone; we are not chemists, and we certainly could not, by taking thought, elaborate all the juices and acids that are formed in us daily. Yet those changes take place in us. Just in the same way the peasants of Russia or Scotland (to whom the greatest composers have gone for their themes) do not "make" this music. It sings in them. An instrument (which is, of course, not a part, but the whole organism and its life) is played on, and it pours forth its strange human music like an æolian harp through which all the winds of life are passing. Sometimes a musical parent, such as Mr. William Platt, listens and hears his babies rediscovering the plagal cadence and canon for themselves, and gathers material for pianoforte pieces from their lips. But much oftener to-day the real music is stopped, and something else is forced on the singer. When the instrument is so fine that it sings or plays in him almost from the first, we have a "prodigy."

The point is that the original of all musical instruments is within us. But when did they, like tools, begin to be projected? Long ago, for in the very oldest books allusion is made to a variety of musical instruments. Perhaps the first was a horn (Mr. Platt's children made one with paper), but it is certain that the first instrument maker did not know that he was shaping the eustachian tube in his own throat.^[2]

This tube, and also the tongue, the larynx, the lungs, the ear-drum, all the outer and more obvious parts of the human mechanism, were projected thousands of years ago, and yet without the aid of such instruments the people of many lands sang their sweetest songs. In the hands of young children, and indeed of older ones, an instrument is merely a hindrance. It may become a substitute, which is worse! Or it is used as a toy, or diverted from its purpose. And it is doubtless for one or other of these reasons that the greatest teachers, such as Tolstoy, do not care to see any instrument in schools.

Perhaps the first horn was a rounded hand. In any case the first horn or trumpet used by most children is their own rounded hands.

For a long time, though they enjoy instrumental music, and even mere noise, they have little impulse to make any other instrument than this. And so the original instruments are well used, and well nourished, they become stronger, and finer with use, and fall more under the control of the will.

From the very first, however, the impulse to project is a symptom of health, of vigour. It is not the child suffering from adenoids, or weakness of chest or throat, who wants to shout through his hands. It is the healthy child who experiences this need.

The instrument is projected then in the first place only because the projection is needed. The musician needs a stronger lung, a larger lip, a bigger larynx. He wants, as does everyone in whom new power is generated, a greater body than his own, but one that is still his own. In this need and power lies the whole history of instrument making; and in spite of disease (which balked so many), and weakness (which prevented myriads), this need seems to have become more imperious and profound, and the power to meet it greater; for not only mouth and tongue, but larynx, windpipe, lungs, tympanum, all were projected in turn; the forms of all these came forth in turn, and now appear, in spite of all disguises, in the orchestral instruments of to-day.

There was no halt in this revelation. Ranging far and farther into the recesses of the hearing organ, instrument makers began at last to make spinnets, then pianos, and piano organs. It did not appear at first that these could possibly have their prototype in the human body. But the physiologist arrived in due time, to show that this "original" existed within. He showed the organ, with three thousand strings, which forms a part of the inner ear. It is called "Corti's organ," after its discoverer. No one can look at it without being reminded of the keyboard of a piano. It is microscopic. No eye had seen it. No one had imagined it. Yet it was flung forth like spray from the wave—in work.

Sometimes, perhaps, the secret is flung forth, but remains a secret. In the violin, for example, there is something that is never recognized, never explained. It is, above all, the old violins, the great old violins, which hold this secret, which is also a spell. Something in the heart of the violinist answers to it, and he loves it as he might love a beautiful mistress without understanding it. It is said that the old violin makers did not want to tell their secrets, and so took them to the grave with them. But perhaps they did not even know them—but projected some wonderful part of themselves which afterwards, in others, never broke a way into the outer chambers of the workaday life.

The ways in which children's condition varies in different classes of the community are not always to be accounted for. It seems, at the first blush, as if the poorest and most neglected were not, after all, having the worst of it in every respect! But in so far as the higher sense-organs are concerned there is no possible room for doubt as regards the symptoms! The poorer and more neglected the group of children the greater percentage of injured eyes and ears does it furnish. We see this more particularly when we come to think of eyes.

Perhaps at first a child with deteriorating senses may strive to overcome his defects—may listen, and look eagerly, obeying an impulse that indicates how the door of the senses must be opened wide, and how this opening is a great part of the whole of the life of childhood. But very soon the effort, so often balked, becomes feebler. He resigns himself. The world narrows round him. He does not need to project that poor, unsatisfactory ear or eye. If in later life any instrument can help him it will be one which can be compared not to a tool, or projected hand and arm, but rather to a crutch that takes the place of a limb that has been lost.

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The Eye!^[3] The part played by vision in mental life appears greater and greater as one looks below the surface and catches some real glimpse of the tissue of thought and also of the real nature of the great triumphs in art, science and literature. "Think of the beauty of the scenes," says Kropotkin, "of Tourgueniéff's masterly novels. Every one of these could be the subject of a picture!" When Tourgueniéff himself thinks of Shakespeare he thinks of him in a picture, and declares it worthy "of the brush of a painter." And what are Shakespeare's works to any of his lovers but a panorama—a series of wonderful pictures—beautiful as Tourgueniéff's own novels? The scenes, the heroes, the heroines, the details of the novel or drama, are seen again by those who read them.

And this power of vision is something altogether distinct from the faculty that makes a bird or a rabbit keep clear of obstacles.

The great teachers know this so well that they almost instinctively pursue the pictorial method of teaching. That they can make the pictures visible is part of their greatness. But they do not despise aids. For example. In teaching geography to children the greatest geographers do not arm themselves with the best charts, models, and maps, before entering the class rooms. These things are useful to them, as students, but they are of use only in so far as the student can see clear pictures, through them, pictures painted in unfading colours; and the child sees in them nothing but paper and clay. So Professor Geddes tries to make it possible for children to see the world by means of the panorama. He strove to get this realistic kind of picture for the children of Dunfermline. Other geographers engage the finest painters of the age to paint pictures of different scenes. The Libyan desert and its burning sands—the Rockies, a revelation in azure, the great prairies and savannahs, the Arctic summer, and the warm splendour of the southern night, are all rendered on canvas by realistic painters, working with the aim of making these things visible to non-travelling children. If the teacher uses a book, it is a book full of pictures—a book written too by literary artists, each describing one place that he knows and has lived in. Such geography primers in Russia bear the names of Tolstoy, Gorky, and other master painters in words, every one of whom has lent his aid to the primary school teacher.^[4]

Tolstoy himself gives us a picture of his evening class. "Come to the school in the twilight; there is no light in the windows; all is peaceful. The snow is on the stairs; there is a faint murmur, a slight movement behind the door, a boy runs upstairs two steps at a time, and enters the class room. It is almost dark behind the frosty panes. …

"It seems as if all were dead; nothing moves. Are they not asleep? You advance in the shadow, and examine the face of one of the smaller boys. He is sitting, devouring the teacher with his eyes, and his intense attention makes him frown. You tickle his neck, he does not even smile, he shakes his head as if to drive away a fly. He is entirely absorbed in the mysterious story of how the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and the sky was darkened. It is at once painful and sweet to them."

The class is seeing pictures. The little boy who has never been far from his own village sees the rent curtain. He sees the sky that darkens with wrath, not with rain.

It is the teacher who has opened his eyes—has flung wide this new door through which so much is visible. He devours this teacher with his eyes, and does not see him. But he will see the vision a thousand times. It is his for ever.

To take an English example now.

Miss Whelan, a teacher near Worthing, is founding all her scheme of education in her school on art—and above all on drama. The children learn history by becoming actors and inventing tableaux vivants. They choose who shall personate different characters, they mount the stage and arrange the scenes.^[5] Geography, too, is taught after the same method. In the Review of Reviews for December, 1906, we have an account of a drama-geography lesson on Canada—some of the children dressed as animals, some as settlers, some as Indians. Literature also is taught by plays and pictures; and it is said that the dullest boys and girls wake up as if by magic when this new way of learning is put within their reach. It is as though light were suddenly flashed into dark chambers. Lo! The dark chambers are roomy and handsome enough, after all, though wofully empty! It was long assumed that they did not exist!

Grown-up people look for pictures in literature, in drama, and travel, and children look for them, and will not care for things of which they have had no vision.

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It was very late in its history that the race wanted eye-instruments. For ages the human eye did its work unassisted save by rude glasses that could hardly be looked upon as eye instruments. Its rich associations with touch were developed by work, and also by modelling and drawing;^[6] but more remarkable than all this was the development of the vast psychic field that is the peculiar feature of human vision—the weaving of what was seen into dreams, visions, Utopias. No doubt it was well that projection was not hurried; and for the same reasons it would be well that it should not be hastened in childhood. When at last it came it was simple enough—and begun, one would say, by chance.

Nearly three hundred years ago John Battista Porta, a Neapolitan, made a hole in a wall in front of a dark room, and noticed that the rays entering, cast a shadow picture of the things outside. The hole was a projected eyeball, and the wall a choroid or curtain behind it. Gazing in wonder through this new order of eyeball, Battista Porta began to think of furnishing it, of putting something more behind it, and he put in—the first thing that he would have met if he had been examining his own eye—a lens! In that hour the long ages of free exercise closed. One eye-instrument maker after another appeared, and the eye unshrouded itself. One of the greatest was Galileo, a doctor, who was not only a great projector of the eye, but was the first projector of the pulse in the clock or timepiece.^[7] "He took an old small organ pipe, jammed a spectacle-glass into either end, and behold! a magnifying glass!" Crowds of people gazed through it, and Galileo went on grinding new lenses—making rude telescopes (such as children might still make and use—could be led on to make spontaneously to-day). From that time the eye-projecting instrument makers multiplied in many lands, and at last from the nation of all others whe see quickly and clearly^[8] (that is, the French) a man arose—Daguerre—who projected the eye so fully that every book on elementary physiology describes the eye by describing his invention, the photographic camera.

Even if the question is considered in detail, and the very latest discoveries with regard to the life taken into account, the fact of projection is driven home. We will cite one out of many. Photographers found that light will break up iodide of silver, and that with the aid of iodide of silver, therefore, they could get negatives; but nature had got negatives by the action of light on eye pigment for aeons. Many years after the silver salts began to be used in photography—in 1876—Ball found that light breaks up the coloured substance in the retina of the eye. He experimented with mice-eyes—kept the mice in a darkened room, then exposed them suddenly in face of objects in a strong light. Then he destroyed the mice and examined the eyes. There he found optograms of the things they had last gazed at printed off like negatives—or rather they formed original negatives in the optogram, or eye photograph.

Within the seeker or worker there is something that always awaits the inventor when he reaches the goal. The really original thing in him is something that was gained in the free period when he used his powers as a child, as a primitive man, and also as an artist.

From all this it appears first that instruments, like tools, should not be made very early in life.

And also that when a boy or girl really begins to require instruments, he or she should make them himself or herself—make, that is to say, rude and simple instruments, which are true projections; should grind his own lenses, when he needs eye-instruments, like Galileo or Herschel, and make the tools he needs like Newton. This seems to be the order of progression followed by the race, and no doubt it will be followed by the individual long after we have ceased to look for "norms" of work in any system, even in systems that bear such names as Froebel and Solomon (the father of sloyd).^[9]

1. The child philosopher is, however, a forced growth, and his philosophy, though borrowed, is a weird product.
2. Mr. William Platt, who has written a short book on this, gives examples of short, single-themed pianoforte pieces, a child's song, a hymn, a double-themed duet, and a three-themed duet, the entire material of which was gathered from the lips of young children. "One terse piano solo of twenty bars is founded on a stirring theme by a youngster of seventeen months, a child just striving to talk, and quite incapable of doing anything with a pencil, except trying to swallow it!"
3. The ascent of eyes is set forth very well by Dr. Mott. The mere film; the independent rabbit-eye, fixed like a window in either side of a house; the cat eyes, moving in harmony, with front limbs, and on to human vision—all the steps are described in a very interesting way.
4. Among school suppliers Holzel of Vienna sends out sets of oleographs—copies of pictures painted for schools by the greatest landscape painters—the larger set of twenty-eight copies costing about £9, the smaller reproductions only 9s.
5. Many years ago, having despaired of creating any real interest for history in two very intelligent little girl pupils, I began to write historical plays for them. The first, "The Princes in the Tower," was acted with tremendous success before an audience of Sussex villagers, and was printed afterwards. Flushed with joy and cheered by the applause of the rustics, we then acted "Lady Jane Grey" and, I think, "Jack Cade's Rebellion," but a paraffin lamp, ill fixed, fell down, and nearly set us all on fire. So the entertainments came to a sudden end. The villagers grieved. They had put out the fire, and were hoping to see more history pictures.
6. It is saddening to see how the rich training of the eye afforded in free drawing is evaded. Even when good ideals are introduced, yet the methods tend continually to be debased. For example, no sooner was free-arm drawing and free design introduced than a great weight of new and expensive "apparatus," sheets of copies, with skeleton lines and coloured flower forms, were flung on the market. These are all substitutes—substitutes for the power to draw, for the courage to trust children and let them trust themselves; substitutes for helpful mistakes even—for the going wrong that helps the beginner to do better; substitutes, in fact, for true hand and eye training!
7. In one of his books Oliver Lodge tells how Galileo, praying one day in the Cathedral like a good Catholic, as he was all his life, saw a great lamp swinging to and fro after the verger had lighted it; and how he (Galileo) began to time the swings by the only watch he possessed—his own pulse; how he noticed that the time of swing remained, as near as he could tell, the same, though the swings were getting smaller; and how he thus discovered the law on which the pendulum and all modern clocks are based. Galileo was at that time a doctor, and wanted to count people's pulses, and the pendulum served, just as watches (or pulsologies, as the first watches were called) still serve all doctors for the same purpose.
8. Thus, as Galton points out, the French are the nation who can speak and write clearly, even where other nations speak and write obscurely. In their scientific books all is clear as daylight. In their poems there is a kind of sharpness of outline that destroys the artistic effect. And their language is full of expressions such as "On voit clair," or "Ca se voit," or "Figurez vous ça?"
9. This does not mean, of course, that a child should not look through a modern microscope or telescope. There is no reason why he should not have the vision made possible by them, any more than there is a reason why he should not see Holzel's wonderful picture of the Sahara or the Rockies. The vision feeds the imagination, and that is the thing that cannot be done too soon, as the child himself proves by his eagerness to look at and hold the pictures!

   And yet the looking at far-off things and through microscopes does not take the place of that outward movement-the self-projection that seems to be as necessary for human growth as is breathing or simple movement.