CHAPTER II.
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PERSONALITY Mark Twain has said that the two most iing characters of the eenth tury are Napoleon and Helen Keller. The admiration with which the world has regarded her is more than justified by what she has done. No one tell any great truth about her which has not already been written, and all that I do is to give a few more facts about Miss Kellers work and add a little to what is known of her personality.Miss Keller is tall and strongly built, and has always had good health. She seems to be more nervous than she really is, because she expresses more with her hands than do most English-speaking people. One reason for this habit of gesture is that her hands have been so long her instruments of unication that they have taken to themselves the quick shiftings of the eye, and express some of the things that we say in a glance. All deaf people naturally gesticulate. Indeed, at oime it was believed that the best way for them to unicate was through systematized gestures, the sign language ied by the Abbe de lEpee.
When Miss Keller speaks, her face is animated and expresses all the modes of her thought--the expressions that make the features eloquent and give speech half its meaning. Oher hand she does not know anothers expression. When she is talking with an intimate friend, however, her hand goes quickly to her friends face to see, as she says, "the twist of the mouth." In this way she is able to get the meaning of those half sentences which we plete unsciously from the tone of the voice or the twinkle of the eye.
Her memory of people is remarkable. She remembers the grasp of fingers she has held before, all the characteristic tightening of the muscles that makes one persons handshake different from that of another.
The trait most characteristic, perhaps, of Miss Keller (and also of Miss Sullivan) is humour. Skill in the use of words and her habit of playing with them make her ready with mots and epigrams.
Some one asked her if she liked to study.
"Yes," she replied, "but I like to play also, and I feel sometimes as if I were a music box with all the play shut up inside me.”
Whe Dr. Furness, the Shakespearean scholar, he warned her not to let the college professors tell her too many assumed facts about the life of Shakespeare; all we know, he said, is that Shakespeare was baptized, married, and died.
"Well," she replied, "he seems to have done all the essential things.”
Once a friend who was learning the manual alphabet kept making "g," which is like the hand of a sign-post, for "h," which is made with two fingers extended. Finally Miss Keller told him to "fire both barrels.”
Mr. Joseph Jefferson was once explaining to Miss Keller what the bumps on her head meant.
"That," he said, "is your prize-fighting bump.”
"I never fight," she replied, "except against difficulties.”
Miss Kellers humour is that deeper kind of humour which is ce.
Thirteen years ago she made up her mind to learn to speak, and she gave her teacher until she was allowed to take lessons, although wise people, even Miss Sullivan, the wisest of them all, regarded it as an
experiment uo succeed and almost sure to make her unhappy. It was this same perseverahat made her go to college. After she had passed her examinations and received her certificate of admission, she was advised by the Dean of Radcliffe and others not to go on. She accly delayed a year. But she was not satisfied until she had carried out her purpose aered college.
Her life has been a series of attempts to do whatever other people do, and to do it as well. Her success has been plete, for in trying to be like other people she has ost fully to be herself. Her unwillio be beaten has developed her ce. Where another go, she go. Her respect for physical bravery is like Stevensons--the boys pt for the fellow who cries, with a touch of young bravado in it. She takes tramps in the woods, plunging through the underbrush, where she is scratched and bruised; yet you could not get her to admit that she is hurt, and you certainly could not persuade her to stay at home ime.
So when people try experiments with her, she displays a sportsmaermination to win in a, however unreasohat one may wish to put her to.
If she does not know the ao a question, she guesses with mischievous assurance. Ask her the colour of your coat (no blind person tell colour), she will feel it and say "black." If it happens to be blue, and you tell her so triumphantly, she is l.ikely to answer, "Thank you. I am glad you know. Why did you ask me?”
Her whimsical and adventuresome spirit puts her so mu her mettle that she makes rather a poor subject for the psychological experimenter. Moreover, Miss Sullivan does not see why Miss Keller should be subjected to the iigation of the stist, and has not herself made many experiments. When a psychologist asked her if Miss Keller spelled on her fingers in her sleep, Miss Sullivan replied that she did not think it worth while to sit up and watch, such matters were of so little sequence.
Miss Keller likes to be part of the pany. If any one whom she is toug laughs at a joke, she laughs, too, just as if she had heard it. If others are aglow with music, a responding glow, caught sympathetically, shines in her face. Indeed, she feels the movements of Miss Sullivan so mihat she responds to her moods, and so she seems to know what is going on, even though the versation has not been spelled to her for some time. In the same way her respoo music is in part sympathetic, although she enjoys it for its own sake.
Music probably mean little to her but beat and pulsation. She ot sing and she ot play the piano, although, as some early experiments show, she could learn meically to beat out a tune on the keys. Her enjoyment of music, however, is very genuine, for she has a tactile reition of sound when the waves of air beat against her. Part of her experience of the rhythm of musies, no doubt, from the vibration of solid objects which she is toug: the floor, or, what is more evident, the case of the piano, on which her has. But she seems to feel the pulsation of the air itself. When the an layed for her in St.
Bartholomews, the whole building shook with the great pedal notes, but that do<s>藏书网</s>es not altogether at for what she felt and ehe vibration of the air as the an notes swelled made her sway in answer.
Sometimes she puts her hand on a sihroat to feel the muscular thrill and tra, and from this she gets genuine pleasure. No one knows, however, just what her sensations are. It is amusing to read in one of the magazines of 1895 that Miss Keller "has a just and intelligent appreciation of different posers from having literally felt their music, Schumann being her favourite." If she knows the differeween Schumann ahoven, it is because she has read it, and if she has read it, she remembers it and tell any one who asks her.
Miss Kellers effort to reach out a other people on their own intellectual ground has kept her informed of daily affairs. When her education became more systematid she was busy with books, it would have been very easy for Miss Sullivan to let her draw into herself, if she had been so ined. But every one who has met her has given his best ideas to her and she has taken them. If, in the course of a versation, the frieo her has ceased for some moments to spell into her hand, the question es iably, "What are you talking about?" Thus she picks up the fragments of the daily intercourse of normal people, so that her
detailed information is singularly full and accurate. She is a good talker otle occasional affairs of life.
Much of her knowledge es to her directly. When she is out walking she often stops suddenly, attracted by the odour of a bit of shrubbery. She reaches out and touches the leaves, and the world of growing things is hers, as truly as it is ours, to enjoy while she holds the leaves in her fingers and smells the blossoms, and to remember when the walk is done.
When she is in a new place, especially an iing place like Niagara, whoever apanies her--usually, of course, Miss Sullivan--is kept busy giving her an idea of visible details. Miss Sullivan, who knows her pupils mind, selects from the passing landscape essential elements, which give a certain clearo Miss Kellers imagined view of an outer world that to our eyes is fused and overloaded with particulars. If her panion does not give her enough details, Miss Keller asks questions until she has pleted the view to her satisfa.
She does not see with her eyes, but through the inner faculty to serve which eyes were given to us. Wheurns from a walk and tells some one about it, her descriptions are accurate and vivid. A parative experience drawn from written descriptions and from her teachers words has kept her free from errors in her use of terms of sound and vision. True, her view of life is highly coloured and full of poetic exaggeration; the universe, as she sees it, is no doubt a little better than it really is. But her knowledge of it is not so inplete as one might suppose. Occasionally she astonishes you by ignorance of some fact whio one happens to have told her; for instance, she did not know, until her first pluo the sea, that it is salt. Many of the detached is and facts of our daily life pass around and over her unobserved; but she has enough detailed acquaintah the world to keep her view of it from being essentially defective.
Most that she knows at first hand es from her sense of touch. This sense is not, however, so finely developed as in some other blind people. Laura Bridgman could tell minute shades of differen the size of thread, and made beautiful lace. Miss Keller used to knit and crochet, but she has had better things to do. With her varied powers and aplishments, her sense of touch has not been used enough to develop it very far beyond normal aess. A friend tried Miss Keller one day with several s. She was slower than he expected her to be iifying them by their relative weight and size. But it should be said she almost never handles money--one of the many sordid ay details of life, by the way, which she has been spared.
She reizes the subjed general iion of a statuette six inches high. Anything shallower than a half-inch bas-relief is a blank to her, so far as it expresses an idea of beauty. Large statues, of which she feel the sweep of lih her whole hand, she knows in their higher esthetic value. She suggests herself that she know them better than we do, because she get the true dimensions and appreciate more immediately the solid nature of a sculptured figure. When she was at the Museum of Fis in Bostoood on a step-ladder a both hands play over the statues. When she felt a bas-relief of dang girls she asked, "Where are the singers?" When she found them she said, "One is silent." The lips of the singer were closed.
It is, however, in her daily life that one best measure the delicacy of her senses and her manual skill. She seems to have very little sense of dire. She gropes her way without much certainty in rooms where she is quite familiar. Most blind people are aided by the sense of sound, so that a fair parison is hard to make, except with other deaf-blind persons. Her dexterity is not notable either in parison with the normal person, whose movements are guided by the eye, or, I am told, with other blind people. She has practised no single structive craft which would call for the use of her hands. When she was twelve, her friend Mr. Albert H.
Munsell, the artist, let her experiment with a wax tablet and a stylus. He says that she did pretty well and mao make, after models, some ventional designs of the outlines of leaves and rosettes. The only thing she does which requires skill with the hands is her work oypewriter. Although she has used the typewriter since she was eleven years old, she is rather careful than rapid. She writes with fair speed and absolute sureness. Her manuscripts seldom tain typographical errors when she hands them to Miss
Sullivan to read. Her typewriter has no special attats. She keeps the relati>99ｌｉb.</a>ve position of the keys by an occasional touch of the little finger oer edge of the board.
Miss Kellers reading of the manual alphabet by her sense of touch seems to cause some perplexity. Even people who know her fairly well have written in the magazines about Miss Sullivans "mysterious telegraphiunications" with her pupil. The manual alphabet is that in use among all educated deaf people. Most diaries tain an engraving of the manual letters. The deaf person with sight looks at the fingers of his panion, but it is also possible to feel them. Miss Keller puts her fingers lightly over the hand ９９ｌｉｂ?of one who is talking to her ahe words as rapidly as they be spelled. As she explains, she is not scious of the siters or of separate words. Miss Sullivan and others who live stantly with the deaf spell very rapidly--fast enough to get a slow lecture, not fast enough to get every word of a rapid speaker.
Anybody learn the manual letters in a few minutes, use them slowly in a day, and in thirty days of stant use talk to Miss Keller or any other deaf person without realizing what his fingers are doing. If more people khis, and the friends aives of deaf children learhe manual alphabet at ohe deaf all over the world would be happier aer educated.
Miss Keller reads by means of embossed print or the various kinds of braille. The ordinary embossed book is made with romaers, both small letters and capitals. These letters are of simple, square, angular design.
The small letters are about three-sixteenths of an inch high, and are raised from the page the thiess of the thumbnail. The books are large, about the size of a volume of an encyclopedia. Greens "Short History of the English People" is in six large volumes. The books are not heavy, because the leaves with the raised type do not lie close. The time that one of Miss Kellers friends realizes most strongly that she is blind is when he es on her suddenly in the dark and hears the rustle of her fingers across the page.
The most ve print for the blind is braille, which has several variations, too many, indeed--English, Ameri, New York Point. Miss Keller reads them all. Most educated blind people know several, but it would save trouble if, as Miss Keller suggests, English braille were universally adopted. The facsimile on page xv [omitted from etext] gives an idea of how the raised dots look. Each character (either a letter or a special braille tra) is a bination made by varying in plad number points in six possible positions. Miss Keller has a braille writer on which she keeps notes and writes letters to her blind friends.
There are six keys, and by pressing different binations at a stroke (as one plays a chord on the piano) the operator makes a character at a time in a sheet of thick paper, and write about half as rapidly as on a typewriter. Braille is especially useful in making single manuscript copies of books.
Books for the blind are very limited in hey cost a great deal to publish and they have not a large enough sale to make them profitable to the publisher; but there are several institutions with special funds to pay for embossed books. Miss Keller is more fortuhan most blind people in the kindness of her friends who have books made especially for her, and in the willingness of gentlemen, like Mr. E. E. Allen of the Pennsylvania Institute for the Instru of the Blind, to print, as he has on several occasioions of books that she has needed.
Miss Keller does not as a rule read very fast, but she reads deliberately, not so much because she feels the words less quickly than we see then, as because it is one of her habits of mind to do things thhly and well. When a passage is her, or she o remember it for some future use, she flutters it off swiftly on the fingers of her right hand. Sometimes this finger-play is unscious. Miss Keller talks to herself absent-mindedly in the manual alphabet. When she is walking up or down the hall or along the veranda, her hands go flying along beside her like a fusion of birds wings.
There is, I am told, tactile memory as well as visual and aural memory. Miss Sullivan says that both she and Miss Keller remember "in their fingers" what they have said. For Miss Keller to spell a senten the manual alphabet impresses it on her mind just as we learn a thing from having heard it many times and call back
the memory of its sound.
Like every deaf or blind person, Miss Keller depends on her sense of smell to an unusual degree. When she was a little girl she smelled everything and knew where she was, what neighbours house she assing, by the distinctive odours. As her intellect grew she became less depe on this seo what extent she now identifies objects by their odour is hard to determihe sense of smell has fallen into disrepute, and a deaf person is relut to speak of it. Miss Kellers acute sense of smell may at, however, in some part for that reition of persons and things which it has been ary to attribute to a special sense, or to an unusual development of the power that we all seem to have of telling when some one is near.
The question of a special "sixth sense," such as people have ascribed. to Miss Keller, is a delicate ohis much is certain, she ot have any sehat other people may not have, and the existence of a special sense is not evident to her or to any one who knows her. Miss Keller is distinctly not a singular proof of occult and mysterious theories, and any attempt to explain her in that way fails to re with her normality. She is no more mysterious and plex than any other person. All that she is, all that she has done, be explained directly, except such things in every human being as never be explained. She does not, it would seem, prove the existence of spirit without matter, or of innate ideas, or of immortality, or anything else that any other human being does not prove. Philosophers have tried to find out what was her ception of abstract ideas before she learned language. If she had any ception, there is no way of disc it now; for she ot remember, and obviously there was no record at the time. She had no ception of God before she heard the word "God," as her ents very clearly show.
Her sense of time is excellent, but whether it would have developed as a special faculty ot be known, for she has had a watch since she was seven years old.
Miss Keller has two watches, which have been givehey are, I think, the only ones of their kind in America. The watch has on the back cover a flat gold indicator which be pushed freely around from left tht until, by means of a pin ihe case, it locks with the hour hand and takes a corresponding position.
The point of this gold indicator bends over the edge of the case, round which are set eleven raised points--the stem forms the twelfth. Thus the watch, an ordinary watch with a white dial for the person who sees, bees for a blind person by this special attat in effee with a single raised hour hand and raised figures.
Though there is less than half an inch between the points--a space which represents sixty minutes--Miss Keller tells the time almost exactly. It should be said that any double-case watch with the crystal removed serves well enough for a blind person whose touch is suffitly delicate to feel the position of the hands and not disturb or ihem.
The firaits of Miss Kellers character are so well known that one needs not say much about them. Good sense, good humour, and imagination keep her scheme of things sane aiful. No attempt is made by those around her either to preserve or to break her illusions. When she was a little girl, a good many unwise and tactless things that were said for her be were not repeated to her, thanks to the wise watchfulness of Miss Sullivan. Now that she has grown up, nobody thinks of being less frank with her than with any other intelligent young woman. What her good friend, Charles Dudley Warner, wrote about her in Harpers Magazine in 1896 was true then, and it remains true now: "I believe she is the purest-minded human ever ience.... The world to her is what her own mind is. She has not even learhat exhibition on whiany pride themselves, hteous indignation. "Some time ago, when a poli shot dead her dog, a dearly loved daily panion, she found in her fivi no nation for the man; she only said, If he had only known what a good dog she was, he wouldnt have shot her. It was said of old time, Lord five them, they know not what they do! "Of course the question will arise whether, if Helen Keller had not been guarded from the knowledge of evil,
she would have been what she is to-day.... Her mind has her been made effeminate by the weak and silly literature, nor has it been vitiated by that which is suggestive of baseness. In sequence her mind is not only vigorous, but it is pure. She is in love with hings, with houghts, and with the characters of noble men and women.”
She still has a childlike aversion tedies. Her imagination is so vital that she falls pletely uhe illusion of a story, and lives in its world. Miss Sullivan writes in a letter of 1891: "Yesterday I read to her the story of Macbeth, as told by Charles and Mary Lamb. She was very greatly excited by it, and said: It is terrible! It makes me tremble! After thinking a little while, she added, I think Shakespeare made it very terrible so that people would see how fearful it is to d.“
Of the real world she knows more of the good and less of the evil than most people seem to know. Her teacher does not harass her with the little unhappy things; but of the important difficulties they have been through, Miss Keller was fully informed, took her share of the suffering, and put her mind to the problems. She is logical and tolerant, most trustful of a world that has treated her kindly.
Once when some one asked her to define "love," she replied, "Why, bless you, that is easy; it is what everybody feels for everybody else.”
"Toleration," she said once, when she was visiting her friend Mrs. Laureton, "is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balaneself on a bicycle.”
She has a large, generous sympathy and absolute fairness of temper. So far as she is noticeably different from other people she is less bound by vention. She has the ce of her metaphors ahem take her skyward when we poor self-scious folk would think them rather too bookish for ordinary versation.
She always says exactly what she thinks, without fear of the plain truth; yet no one is more tactful and adroit than she in turning an unpleasant truth so that it will do the least possible hurt to the feelings of others. Not all the attention that has been paid her since she was a child has made her take herself too seriously. Sometimes she gets started on a very solemn preat. Theeacher calls her an incible little sermonizer, and she laughs at herself. Often, however, her sober ideas are not to be laughed at, for her earness carries her listeners with her. There is he least false seiousness in what she says. She means everything so thhly that her very quotations, her echoes from what she has read, are in truth inal.
Her logid her sympathy are in excellent balance. Her sympathy is of the swift and ministering sort which, fortunately, she has found so often in other people. And her sympathies go further and shape her opinions on political and national movements. She was intensely pro-Boer and wrote a strong argument in favour of Boer independence. When she was told of the surrender of the brave little people, her face clouded and she was silent a few mihen she asked clear, peing questions about the terms of the surrender, and began to discuss them.
Both Mr. Gilman and Mr. Keith, the teachers who prepared her for college, were struck by her power of structive reasoning; and she was excellent in pure mathematics, though she seems o have e much. Some of the best of her writing, apart from her fanciful and imaginative work, is her exposition in examinations and teical themes, and in some letters which she found it necessary to write to clear up misuandings, and which are models of close thinking enforced with sweet vehemence.
She is an optimist and an idealist.
"I hope," she writes in a letter, "that L-- isnt too practical, for if she is, Im afraid shell miss a great deal of pleasure.”
In the diary that she kept at the Wright-Humason School in New York she wrote on October 18, 1894, "I find that I have four things to learn in my school life here, and indeed, in life--to think clearly without hurry or fusion, to love everybody sincerely, to a everything with the highest motives, and to trust in dear God uatingly.”
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