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Robert Hardley - "A Project for Flying"

Various - "The World's Greatest Books, Vol X"

Various - "Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890"

Baroness Emmuska Orczy - "Castles in the Air"

Engaging the Hard-to-Reach 3 December 2008 Holiday Inn Bloomsbury, London Consultation Institute
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Delsarte System of Oratory by Various

V >> Various >> Delsarte System of Oratory




Thenceforth I had the nucleus of the science I had so vainly asked of my
masters, and I did not despair of formulating it.

Judge of my joy! The facts I then found myself the possessor of, seemed
to me more valuable than all the treasures of the world.




Episode II.



Some time later, I again saw my worthy cousin, the innocent cause of all
my joys. He was a medical student, and came to propose a visit to the
dissecting-room. I did not hesitate to accept; the proposal harmonized
with my desire.

I did not go, as so many go to the morgue, merely to see dead bodies.
No; the curiosity that impelled me, and the avidity with which I pursued
the object of my study, was not to be so easily satisfied.

Dead bodies only attracted me when they were--if not dissected--at least
flayed. Children break their dolls to see what there is inside; so I,
too, wanted to see what there was in a corpse. It seemed to me that
under the mutilations which the scalpel had inflicted on the body, I
should find the answer to more than one enigma--might solve some of the
secrets of life.

The prospect of this visit had the charm of a pleasure party to me. I
made it a holiday and awaited the hour with impatience.

But, on arriving, when I found myself in that place chill and gloomy as
the tomb; when I felt choked by the mephitic gases that arose from this
seat of infection; when I found myself in the presence of a heap of
corpses mutilated by the scalpel, disfigured by putrefaction and
partially devoured by rats and worms; when, beneath tables laden with
these horrible remains, I saw mean tubs filled with human entrails
mingled with limbs and heads severed from their trunks; when I felt
fragments of flesh reduced to the state of filthy mud, clinging to my
feet, my heart throbbed violently, and I was overcome by an
indescribable sense of repulsion.

"What," I said to myself, "those shapeless and putrifying masses have
lived! They have thought, they have loved! And, who would believe it
from the horror and disgust that they inspire, they have been loved,
cherished, perhaps adored! Ah! if, as some think, the soul is not
immortal, if so many aspirations, so many schemes, so many hopes are to
end here--what is man?"

But yet more lamentable food for thought was reserved for me: the
spectacle of a ruin yet more profound than those which my eyes could
scarce endure, was to appear before me in all its hideousness.

In fact, there reigns in these gloomy halls where no tear has ever
fallen, no prayer has ever been heard and no ray of hope has ever
pierced--there reigns something yet colder than death, something more
unwholesome, more nauseous, more deleterious than the putrid miasmas
that infect the air, something more sad to see than the nameless
fragments of extinct life, something more loathsome than those filthy
and disgusting remnants, something more repulsive than those noses eaten
by worms and those empty eyeballs devoured by rats. I mean the cynicism
of the dwellers in that place; I mean their insensibility, their
indifference and calm heedlessness in the presence of such grave
subjects for thought. I mean that lack of perception, that spirit of
negation and revolt of which those wretched men make a boast and which
they obstinately oppose to all religious sentiment, all principle of
tradition or revealed authority. I mean the atheism and ceaseless
mockery with which they invariably meet any generous impulse aroused in
an honest soul by a healthy faith.

This struck me even more sensibly than the spectacle of death and
dissolution which I have striven to describe. Thus the apparently living
men who haunt this spot are more truly dead than the corpses upon which
they exercise their pretended science. They seemed to me ruins far more
terrible than those of the body, ruins which repelled all hope, being
born of doubt and leading to negation.

If the mutilated and half-devoured bodies that lay before me, filled me
with horror and disgust, they, at least, left within me a faint
lingering hope surviving death; but the state of blindness of those
souls who have lost consciousness of their being and even the feeling of
their existence, the shadowy abyss into which they allow themselves
complaisantly to glide, the nullity which they adorn with the title of
science,--all this filled me with fright, for I felt the doubt and
despair into which contact with it would inevitably have plunged me,
if, by a special favor, the tone and mimetics, alike self-sufficient and
mocking, of these free-thinkers, as they are now styled, had not, from
the first, inspired me with aversion for them and a salutary hatred of
their doctrine.

And yet, amidst so many repulsive objects, the faculty of observation to
which I already owed such fruitful remarks was not dormant in me: I had
already asked myself by what evident sign one could recognize a recent
corpse.

From this point of view, I made a rapid exploration, and I questioned
the various corpses left almost intact; I sought in some portion of the
body, common to all, a form or a sign invariably found in all.

The hand furnished me that sign and responded fully to my question.

I noticed, in fact, that in all these corpses the thumb exhibited a
singular attitude--that of adduction or attraction inward, which I had
never noted either in persons waking or sleeping.

This was a flash of light to me. To be yet more sure of my discovery, I
examined a number of arms severed from the trunk; they showed the same
tendency. I even saw hands severed from the forearm; and, in spite of
this severing of the flexor muscles, the thumb still revealed this same
sign. Such persistence in the same fact could not allow of the shadow of
a doubt: I possessed the sign-language of death, the semeiotics of the
dead.

I rejoiced, foreseeing the service which this discovery would render
upon a battle-field, for instance, where more than one man risks being
buried alive. I divined, moreover, something of its artistic importance.

I then questioned my cousin and the other students present in regard to
the symptomatics of death, and I saw with surprise that, not only had
the expression of this phenomenon escaped them hitherto, but that they
had no exact and precise knowledge concerning this grave and important
question.

There remained, in order to complete my discovery and to deduce useful
results from it, to verify the symptom on the dying man. It was
important for me to know in what degree it might become manifest on the
approach of death.

My wishes were gratified as if by magic, for I was led from the school
of anatomy to that of clinical medicine. There a house-student, a friend
of my cousin, placed me beside a dying patient, and I examined with the
utmost attention the hands of the unhappy man struggling against the
clutches of inevitable death.

At first I observed something strange in regard to myself, namely that
the emotion which such a sight would have caused me under any other
circumstances, was absolutely null at this moment; close attention
dulled all feeling in me. I then understood the courage which may
inspire the surgeon in the discharge of his duty; and I drew from this
observation deductions of great artistic interest.

Now I proved that the thumbs of the dying man contracted at first in
almost imperceptible degree; but as the last struggle drew near, and in
the supreme efforts made by the patient to hold fast to the life which
was slipping from him, I saw all his fingers convulsively directed
toward the palm of the hand, thus hiding the thumbs which had previously
approached that centre of convergence. Death speedily followed this
crisis and soon restored to the fingers a more normal position; but the
contraction of the thumb persistently conformed to my previous
observations. The presence and progress of this phenomenon in the dying
was invariably confirmed by numerous tests which I afterward tried.

Thus, I had acquired the proof that, not only does the total adduction
of the thumb characterize death, but that this phenomenon indicates the
approach of death in proportion to its intensity. I, therefore,
possessed the fundamental principle of a system of semeiotics hitherto
unknown to physiologists; but this principle, already so full of
interest, must be made profitable to art.

A multitude of pictures, which in former times I had admired at the
museum, passed before my mind's eye. I recalled battle-scenes where the
dying and the dead are represented; descents from the cross where Christ
is necessarily represented as dead. The idea struck me that I would go
and verify the action of the thumb in these various representations
which the painter's fancy has given us of death.

It was on a Sunday. The Louvre was on my way to the Conservatory,
where, as is well known, I lived as pensioner.

I had often traversed the galleries of the Louvre; but now I was armed
with a criterion that would give my criticisms indisputable authority.

The ignorance of the fact I sought, even among artists of renown, was
not long in being made apparent: all those hands, where they thought
they had depicted death, afforded me nothing but the characteristics of
a more or less peaceful sleep. The correctness of my criticism may be
verified anywhere.

Thus, the mere discovery of a law sufficed to elevate a poor boy of
fifteen years, destitute of all science and deploring the deep ignorance
in which he had hitherto been left, to the height of an infallible
critic in whom the greatest artists found no mercy. I then understood
all the power, all the fertility given by an acquaintance with the laws
that regulate the nature of man, and in how much even genius itself may
be rendered sterile by ignorance of those laws which simple observation
would make them acquainted with. But, I thought, my discovery is not
complete, for if, thanks to it, I have succeeded in proving that all
these pictures of death are false, true only as representing sleep, it
is, on the other hand, impossible for me to prove in how far those
figures live, in which the painter aims to represent life. I must,
therefore, seek the sign of life to complete my standard of criticism.

Suddenly, struck with amazement by the dazzling rays of unexpected
light, I asked myself whether the criterion of death would not reveal to
me, by the law of contraries, the thermometer of life. It should _a
priori_--it does!

Still I felt that it was not here that I might be permitted to
contemplate the vital phenomena attached to the thumb: since death was
so badly rendered here, I had strong reasons for thinking that life was
no better treated.

I left the museum, then, where I had nothing more to learn; and, to
observe living mimetics of the thumb, I went out on the promenade of the
Tuileries thronged by aristocratic people. I carefully examined the
hands of this crowd, but I was not long in discovering that these
elegant idlers had nothing good to offer. "This class," I said to
myself, "is false from head to foot. They live an artificial, unnatural
life. I see in them only artifice, or an art dishonored by using it to
mask their insincerity and artificiality."

The happy idea came to me to mingle with mothers, children and nurses.

"Ah," said I, "in the midst of this throng, laughing and crying at the
same time--singing, shouting, gesticulating, jumping, dancing--here is
life! If the contemplation of this turbulent and affectionate little
world does not instruct me, where shall I find the solution I seek?"

I did not have to wait long for this solution.

I noticed nurses who were distracted and indifferent to the children
under their charge; in these the thumb was invariably drawn toward the
fingers, thus offering some resemblance to the adduction which it
manifests in death. With other nurses, more affectionate, the fingers of
the hand that held the child were visibly parted, displaying a thumb
bent outward; but this eccentration rose to still more startling
proportion in those mothers whom I saw each carrying her own child;
there the thumb was bent violently outward, as if to embrace and clasp a
beloved being.

Thus I was not slow to recognize that the contraction of the thumb is
inversely proportionate, its extension directly proportionate to the
affectional exaltation of the life. "No doubt," I said to myself, "the
thumb is the _thermometer of life_ in its extending progression as it is
of _death_ in its contracting progression."

Countless examples have confirmed this. I could even, on the spot, form
an idea of the degree of affection felt for the children entrusted to
their care, by the women who passed before my eyes.

Sometimes I would say: "There is a servile creature whose heart is dead
to that poor child whom she carries like an inert mass; the position of
the thumb drawn toward the fingers renders that indifference evident,"
Again it was a woman in whom the sources of life swelled high at the
contact with the dear treasure which she clasped; that woman was surely
the mother of the child she carried, the excessive opening of her thumb
left no room for doubt.

Thus my diagnostics were invariably confirmed by exact information, and
I could see to what extent the remarks which I had recorded, were
justified. I drew from them most interesting applications for my special
course of study.

Thus, suppose I had asked the same service from three men, and that each
had answered me with the single word _yes_, accompanied by a gesture of
the hand. If one of them had let his thumb approach the forefinger, it
is plain to me that he would deceive me, for his thumb thus placed tells
me that he is dead to my proposition.

If I observe in the second a slight abduction of the thumb, I must
believe that he, although indisposed to oblige me, will still do so from
submission.

But if the third abducts his thumb forcibly from the other fingers, oh!
I can count on him, he will not deceive me! The abduction of his thumb
tells me more in regard to his loyalty than all the assurances which he
might give me.

Behold, then, an intuition whose correctness the experience of forty
years has not contradicted.

It is hard to imagine the joy I felt at my discovery produced and
verified in a single day by so many examples, differing so greatly one
from another and of such diverse interest.

All the emotions of this extraordinary and fertile day had so
over-excited my imagination that I had great difficulty in calming my
poor brain, and far from being able to enjoy the rest which I so much
needed, I was a prey to wakefulness in which the turmoil of my ideas at
one time made me fear that I was going mad. I then felt for the first
time the frailty of the instrument of thought in regard to the faculty
which rules and governs it.

In brief, I was--thanks to my double discovery--in possession of a law
whose deductions ought to touch the loftiest questions of science and
art,--and I was enabled thenceforth to affirm upon strong and
irrefragable proof that the thumb, in its double sphere of action, is
the thermometer of life as well as of death.




Episode III.



The day after that which had been so fruitful both in emotions and
discoveries, a thousand recollections tumultuously besieged my mind and
still disturbed me. I saw that if I could not contrive to classify them
in strict order of succession, I should never be able to derive any
practical value from them. I therefore took up link by link the chain of
events of the previous day, but in inverse order. That is, I began my
course where I left off the day before, and thus proceeded toward the
Tuileries to end at the Medical School.

At the retrospective sight of all that merry, noisy little world, of all
those fat, cheerful nurses, careless and laughing as they were, of those
mothers each so tenderly expansive in contemplation of her child, so
happy in its health and strength, so joyous and so proud of its small
progress, the recollection of a phenomenon which I had not at first
observed struck me with all the force of a vivid actuality.

I should say, by the way, that it is much more to the strength of my
memory than to the present observation of facts, that I owe these
remarks. Stability is the _sine qua non_ of the things one proposes to
examine, and the memory must possess the singular power of communicating
fixity to fugitive things, permanence to instantaneousness, and
actuality to the past.

Now, the phenomena of life occurring with the rapidity of lightning can
only be studied retrospectively; that is to say, in the domain of
memory, except to be verified if the attention, free from all other
preoeccupation, allows us to seize them on the wing once more. The remark
suggested to me by memory seemed all the more interesting because it
formed in a new order of facts a flagrant opposition to the opinion
formulated by my masters under the title of theory. Thus nature once
more proved to me that the only point in which I had found them to
agree, rested upon a fundamental error. I have since recognized that it
is thus in the majority of cases, so that one may almost certainly
pronounce erroneous any statement in regard to which all the masters of
art agree.

This proposition at first seems inexplicable, but its reason is readily
understood by those who know the sway of falsehood over a society
perverted in its opinions as in its tastes; to those who know the
deplorable facility with which error is spread and the tenacity with
which it clings to our poor mind. Error, moreover, owes to our abasement
which it flatters and crushes, the privilege of freedom from
contradiction, and it is only in regard to truth that the minds of men
are divided and contend.

On retracing in my memory the walks I had taken in the Tuileries, I was
struck by an important fact amidst the phenomena called up: the voice
of the nurse or mother, when she caressed her child, invariably assumed
the double character of tenuity and acuteness. It was in a voice equally
sweet and high-pitched that she uttered such words as these: "How lovely
he is!" ... "Smile a little bit for mamma!" Now this caressing
intonation, impressed by nature upon the upper notes of all these
voices, forms a strange contrast to the direction which all
singing-teachers agree in formulating; a direction which consists in
augmenting the intensity of the sound in direct ratio to its acuteness.
Thus, to them, strange to say, the entire law of vocal shades would
consist in augmenting progressively the sound of the ascending phrase or
scale, and diminishing in the same proportion for a descending scale.
Now, nature, by a thousand irrefutable examples, directs us to do the
contrary, that is, she prescribes a decrease of intensity (in music,
_decrescendo_) proportionate to the ascensional force of the sounds.

Another blow, I thought, for my masters, or rather I receive it for
them, for they, poor fellows, do not feel it. But how can these
phenomena of nature have escaped them, and by what indescribable
aberration can they direct, under the name of law, a process absolutely
contrary to that so plainly followed by those same phenomena? However, I
added, every supreme error under penalty of being self-evident, must, to
endure, necessarily rest upon some truth or other. Now, on what truth do
so many masters claim to base so manifest an error? This is what we
must discover.

I was now convinced that caressing, tender and gentle emotions find
their normal expression in _high_ notes. This is beyond all doubt. Thus,
according to the foregoing examples, if we propose to say to a child in
a caressing tone that he is a darling, it would clearly be very bad
taste to bellow the words at him on the pretext that, according to
singing-teachers, the intensity of the sound is augmented in direct
ratio to its acuteness.

But my memory, as if to confirm this principle, and to show its contrast
with the custom admitted by those gentlemen, suggests to me other
instances derived from the same source. Let a mother be _angry_ with her
child and threaten him with punishment; she instantly assumes a grave
tone which she strives to render powerful and intense. Here, then, on
the one hand (and nature proclaims it), the voice decreases in intensity
in proportion as it rises higher; and, on the other hand, it increases
in proportion as it sinks. This double fact, undeniably established,
constitutes an unanswerable argument against the system in question. But
it is not, therefore, necessarily its radical and absolute refutation.
No, doubtless, whatever may be the significance and the number of the
facts opposed to the directions of those gentlemen, these facts do not
seem to exclude exceptions upon which they may be founded. In fact, I
find in my memory many examples favorable to those masters. Thus, I
have seen many nurses lose their temper and still use the higher tones
of their voice; and, on the other hand, I also remark (and the remark is
important) a certain form, the appellative form, where all the
characters agree without exception in producing the greatest intensity
possible upon the high notes.

The professors of singing triumph, for they find in this appellative
form, always and necessarily sharp and boisterous at the same time, a
striking confirmation of their system. Here I seem to stray far from the
solution which I thought I already grasped! Far from it; the light is
breaking. Hitherto the examples evoked had only increased my obscurity
by their multiplicity, and I saw nothing in all these remarks but a
series of contradictions whence it seemed impossible to deduce anything
but confusion, into which I found myself plunged.

But was this confusion really in the facts which I examined, or was it
not rather the creation of my own mind? Now, in the matter of principle,
the weakness of individual reason has been too often proved to me to
allow of my attaching any other cause to the contradictions which block
my path and force me to confess my ignorance. I will not, then, here cry
_mea culpa_ for myself or for others to justify that ignorance or excuse
its confession. It must be acknowledged that God knows what He does, and
His omnipotence is assuredly guiltless of the divagations which an
impotent mind finds it convenient to attribute to it.

Now, let others in the blindness of proud reason, forget this truth,
which they contest even by opposing to it the quibbles for which
free-thinkers are never at a loss, and to escape the confusion which
they inevitably derive from the ill-studied work of the Supreme Artist.
Let them venture to attribute to it their own darkness. For my part, I
shall not thereby lose my conviction that all which seems to me
disordered or contradictory in the expression of the facts which I
question, is only apparent and only exist in my own brain.

The profound obscurity into which light plunges us does not prevent the
light from being; and the chaos of ideas which, most generally, results
from our examination of things, proves nothing against the harmonies of
their constitution.

The pebble virtually contains the spark, but we must know how to produce
it. Thus the phenomena of nature contain luminous lessons, but we must
know how to make them speak; and, what is more, understand their
language. Now, I would add, the spirit of God is inherent in all things;
and this spirit should, at a given moment, flash its splendors in the
eyes of an intellect alike submissive, attentive, patient and suppliant.

Moreover, does not the Gospel show us the way to fertilize
investigations such as those to which I have given my life? Does it not
say: "Knock and it shall be opened, ask and it shall be given?" Then
what must I do to find my way out of the maze in which my reason
wanders? What must I do in presence of the contradictions which
nevertheless must needs contain a fecund principle? Finally, what must I
do in order to see light break from the very heart of those obscurities
wherein light is lost?

I will seek anew, night and day, if needful; I will knock incessantly at
the door of the facts which I desire to examine. I will descend into the
secret depths of their organism; there I will patiently question every
phenomenon, every organ, and I will entreat their Author to divulge to
me their purpose, their relations and their very object.

Well! It is thus that those men, proud of their vain knowledge, were
made dizzy by the splendor of that same light which they thought that
they could subject to their investigations, and the blindness which has
fallen upon them is the punishment which God is content to inflict upon
them in this world.

Having said this, where was I in my investigations? Ah! it was here.

The memory of the high inflections invariably affected by the women whom
I had seen on the previous day, caressing their infants, struck me with
the more force that I had learned from my masters that law which had
hitherto ruled uncontested, and now underwent a refutation which
demonstrated the falsity of its applications with a clearness and
minuteness which left no room for doubt.