WHAT WILL COME OF THE PHONOGRAPH?
WHEN a child of seven can recognise distinctly in the phonograph the voice of a friend which he has not heard since he was five, we may feel pretty sure that that marvellous instrument has at last triumphantly solved the problem which Mr. Edison set himself. We are told that two distinct voices, as well as a great number of musical airs, have passed over the Atlantic and become audible again here after being silent for ten days, to the ears for which they were destined when they were com- mitted to the phonograph in the United States. What are we to expect from this wonderful invention ? Mainly, we fear, an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up, an immense accumulation of those winged words whose wings are best employed in carrying off into nothingness what deserves only tempo- rary life. Men are becoming so vastly ingenious in finding the means of magnifying and embalming every little ripple of human energy, that we tremble for the con- sequences. The earth will soon be made a museum of odds and ends of form and speech ; and unless man suddenly takes a great spring into a moral greatness worthy of all this careful storing, we may have future generations drowned beneath the accumulated scraps of ancestral voices and expressions. Only consider that this wonderful dis- covery will very likely furnish a future Madame Tussaud with the means of reproducing minutely a Parliamentary or Municipal debate, by depositing within the figure of every wax representative a phonogram of some speech which its original had made, and winding these off in turn in the order in which the actual speakers had addressed the assembly. It is quite conceivable that in the year 2000 there may be the means not only of hearing figures like Lord Salisbury or Mr. Gladstone pour forth in the actual tones of those orators speeches which were actually made by them in our own day, not only of hearing Lord Tennyson recite " Maud " in the twentieth or thirtieth century with that rich and peculiar burr with which lie pours it forth to his intimates, but of revivifying every little notoriety of our day, from Dr. Parker to Dr. Tanner,—bottling up their voices for the ears of our posterity, as well as making their forms visible to future generations, till "earth is sick and Heaven is weary," as Wordsworth has it, of the hollow words which phonographs utter for the purpose of recalling a past that is not worth recalling. It will be something, DO doubt, that the Colonies should be able to hear within a few weeks the very voice of the statesman or the Sovereign whose words have turned the balance as it was inclining to either war or peace ; that Germans in Philadelphia should be able to hang on the accents of Prince Bismarck's declarations to the Reichstag on a critical conjuncture ; or that the Australasians should hear with their own ears what Mr. Gladstone says on the Federation of the Empire, or what M. Goblet says of the intentions of the French with regard to New Caledonia or the New Hebrides. It will be a singular satisfaction to many an exile in India to take with him a number of assurances of regard from the voice he loves best, and listen to the reiteration of these assurances thousands of miles away, in days, perhaps, when they have long ceased to represent existing realities ; and to the blind it may prove a constant delight to correspond with friends by an interchange of actual speech, when the speech has been bottled up in phonographs instead of com- mitted to letters which the blind must trust other friends to read aloud to them. The number of small and great gratifications which the phonograph, like the photograph, will afford to those who hunger and thirst for living signs of those from whom land and seas separate them, is likely to be quite limitless. But, nevertheless, we cannot help fearing that all these rapidly multi- plying agencies by which we are enabled to perpetuate the most trivial expressions,—whether visual or audible,— threaten to overwhelm coming generations with the super- abundant vestiges and records of the past. Shall we not come to regard it as a singular virtue when men obliterate voluntarily traces of themselves which, instead of being useful to posterity, would only serve the purpose of the dust in which useful things are so often smothered ? Are we not discovering a great deal too many means of defeating the benefits conferred by oblivion.? Are we not likely to rescue from forgetfulness what. it should be the first duty of human beings who do not wish to miss their way in the steadily accumulating piles of human rubbish, to forget ? We cannot help being appalled at the shrinkage of character which seems to go on simul- taneously with the growth of these manifold devices for erecting massive monuments to character. Are not men daily becoming less and less massive,—less and less impres- sive in proportion to the machinery for taking impressions of them, and recording delicately all the outcome of their much-fretted and subdivided and attenuated lives ? We are often tempted to wish that human nature should be allowed time to overtake the scientific paraphernalia in which it is almost suffocated, before any more discoveries are made by which the pettiness of our lives may gain in artificial importance, the distractions of our posterity may be multiplied, and the complexity of their inherited memories increased.
As it is, we fear that the phonograph may add to the great picture-galleries of our great houses, voice-galleries almost more impressive, from the vivacity with which grandparents and great-grandparents may be made to address the descendants who never knew them, and that, too, in all sorts of contending strains. Imagine a man in the next century whose great-grandfather was a Gladstonian, whose grandfather was entrusted with a command in the war with Ireland to which Home-rule had led, and whose father had sided with the Irish in resisting the oppressions of the restored Government,—and imagine these ancestors addressing their descendant in all the different accents of political passion to which their different situations in life had given rise, while their portraits look severely down upon him, enforcing by their expression the earnestness of their political view,—would not such a man carry into life a consciousness even more hesitating and divided than even that which gives birth to our nineteenth-century vacilla- tions? Or imagine a man in the same century whose great- grandmother was a vehement partisan of women's suffrage, whose grandmother was a lady-doctor who held that the nerves of the women of the day had been ruined by educa- tional over-pressure, and whose mother, after carrying a. law for embodying Amazon regiments and womanning a few ironclads, had emigrated to escape the consequences of the French conquest of our Southern Counties,—and imagine him listening to the most characteristic utterances of each of these ancestresses as they frowned upon him from the living canvas on his walls,—would not he too carry into life a very strange complexity of vivid associations such as might easily embarrass him with the singular conflict of their pathetic eloquence ? We have a very strong belief that the scientific ingenuities of our day, acting under the imperious guidance of sensibilities which are as narrow as they are tender, will contrive to fill the world we leave behind us much too full of us for the free growth of our posterity ; and that a time will come when it will be necessary to preach a sort of iconoclasm towards the pieties of ancestry in order to clear the way for anything like independent growth. One of the most effective of Arabian fairy-tales describes how the prince who is to break the spell of the wicked magician's enchant- ment, has to pass along a way where voices in the greatest confusion address him from every side, in every accent of scorn, or ridicule, or indignation, all appearing to come from the mere stocks and stones beside his path. Was this an unconscious anticipation of the phonograph ? We much doubt whether Edison's wonderful and admirable discovery, and the extensions that must follow, will not tend to bewilder the world in which our children's children live, at least as much as the outcries of the bewitched. valley of rocks bewildered the hero of that Eastern tale.
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