PARTIAL DEAFNESS.
THERE is probably no affliction to which humanity is liable which excites so little sympathy as deafness. Every one helps the lame, and even criminals affect to respect the blind, but deaf- ness too often wearies pity out. Unless it is total, and, therefore, accompanied by a partial failure of utterance, it does not strike those who have not felt it as an unendurable or even very painful anisfortune, while it involves a tax upon all bystanders which to many organizations is exquisitely annoying. It is positive suffering to many persons—unaware that a slight compression of the larynx will doable or treble the impact of their speech—to talk for any time to a deaf person, and they often fail in their -own minds to distinguish between the physical defect and mental stupidity. Even where this feeling is absent men in possession of their full senses often fail to recognize the immensity of the loss -involved in even partial deafness, the enormous deduction it makes -from the sufferer's powers of action, of acquisition, and of enjoy- ment. To realize those things fully it would seem necessary to be -deaf, and as the writer happened recently to fall for a week or so into that condition, having been deaf just long enough to analyze his sensations without acerbity, he thinks his experience may be -of some interest to readers of the Spectator.
The deafness came on suddenly after a severe cold, was nearly -complete in one ear, and though less complete in the other, was .still sufficient to reduce the total power of hearing to an extent which seemed to himself incredible. The first sensation, unques- tionably, was one of intellectual, or rather of nervous relief,—a feel- ing as if the nerves had suddenly become stronger, or life in some mysterious way lighter to bear. To begin with, that roar of Lon- -don, that ceaseless breaking of the waves of sound upon a shore .of brass, of which no Londoner ever ceases to be conscious, and which has of late years been increased at least one- -third by the gradual conversion of our streets into arched -and resonant cylinders—listen for a moment in the New Road— died suddenly away, leaving a sense of comparative peace. It :became possible to study the tide of life iu the Strand without dis- traction, while all manner of smaller annoyances, the patter of -boots on office stairs, the clanging of doors, the jangle of organs, the jar of bad whistling, the resonant calls, all disappeared, leaving -an immensely increased power of coucentrativeness and a strange ,sense of increased courage. This feeling, absurd as'it appears, is probably real. The audacity of the deaf and dumb amid scenes which bewilder other men has often been noticed, and a few _years since a deaf and dumb gentleman saved a number of horses in a great fire — Pickford's, we think, — which had been given up as hopeless. He walked about among the flames and falling rafters and screaming brutes like a being -of another world, and explained to the writer that he fancied his courage was due to his insensibility to the roar which he could -see that other people heard. And finally, all voices became low and muffled, till it seemed as if everybody, even noisy men, spoke -as civilized human beings should speak, with a distinct recognition of the fact that an undisciplined voice is as much worse than a -disciplined one as the wild dog's howl is than a civilized dog's -bark. Will nobody invent a steel compress for the throats of people who speak loudly? It would be a real boon to mankind. The sense of relief, however, soon ceases to be pleasant as the ear :forgets the roar it previously knew, and then the mental suffering begins. The deaf man seems to himself to have been suddenly .struck at once with stupidity and with a new sense of shyness ; it is with pain and by an effort of the will that he catches sentences -addressed in an ordinary tone to himself, while he cannot catch general conversation at all. He listens and listens, but only the beginnings are clearly audible, dying away into a mutter which he half fancies in his irritation is intended to keep them from his ear. We may remark en passant that the result of a week's experi- ence was to convince the.writer that all men drop their voices as they proceed with a sentence, and that the difference of audibility among voices apparently of the same pitch ranges, to misuse a musical term, over more than one octave. The clearest to a deaf man is a deep but soft bass. In his office the deaf man wearies himself with a mental effort to be sure that he has heard all aright, without worrying his interlocutors by repeated questions, and is conscious, if he has many communications to go through, that his temper is beginning to slip beyond his own control. At dinner, if he is dining out, the case is even worse. Everything is more or less confusion. He sees lips moving which say nothing, hears laughter of which he cannot catch the cause, finds footless servants thrusting dishes before him unexpectedly, and could box his next-door neighbour's ears, be she ever so fair, for speaking, as he fancies, so affectedly low. Bits of sentences float towards him which he vainly tries to follow, until at last that curious absorption of thought deaf men seem so often to fall into comes over him, and all mental power is exhausted in useless effort to piece together the broken images constantly offered to his mind. The situation is not very miser- able for a man who believes that it will pass away with the cold which produced it ; but what must it be to the really deaf, to the man who knows that he will never again be as other men are, never more hear a whisper, never catch the exhilarating aroma of lively talk, never again be addressed except at the cost of suffering, no matter how slight, to the man or woman who addresses him? At home it is even worse. The popular notion that accustomed voices are more audible than unaccustomed voices is, the writer suspects from his week's experience, a delusion founded upon this mistake. People brought habitually into contact with the deaf insensibly contract the habit of compressing the larynx as they speak to them, and their voices therefore, even when not raised, are more audible than those of other persons, but mere habit of itself does not increase the ease of conversation. A deaf man hears his wife, if she does not modulate her voice specially for deafness, no better than other people. The annoyance, therefore, of deafness at home is even greater than abroad because there is a greater wish to hear, and conversation naturally takes more of the form of narration. The deaf man, too, being less restrained at home, becomes conscious within very few hours that he is falling into deaf tricks, into a constant demand for repetition, into the sidelong attitude which brings his best ear to the front, into the ugly gesture involved in placing the hand behind the ear, to make a sort of sounding-board for the speaker's voice to rebound against. In fact, the possibility of easy iutercourse, of conversa- tion facile as thinking, of chat in which no one is burdened, of society in which listening is pleasanter than speaking, disappears for him, and with it one-half the pleasure and charm of modern life. He is isolated from his kind with an isolation which has no compensating solitude, or additional power of self-communion. It is all pure loss, loss of power, loss of enjoyment, loss of ease, loss of opportunities of exertion.
To some natures, we suspect, deafness brings with it much active pain. People talking in a room can hardly help glancing at the one man who does not hear, and he therefore, if sensitive, can hardly avoid the suspicion that he is himself the subject of conversation. An old lady told us once that it had cost her five years to overcome that idea, and assure herself that the glances which annoyed her so much were really unconscious invitations to her to join the conversation, and were made timid only by the in- stant recollection that as she could not comply the invitation might give pain. To the timid, too, deafness must be a terrible aggra- vation of nervous suffering. We are hardly aware, until we have lost it, how much we rely on the sense of hearing to protect us from danger, how difficult it is, for example, to cross a London thoroughfare in safety by the aid only of the eyes, how much sound aids us in avoiding a crowd, a falling tile, a shutter rising out of the pavement. A street in London must, to a thoroughly deaf man, be a miserable place, as miserable as an opera house where he can catch no note below a certain pitch, and is bothered to death by the apparent dislocation of all sounds. What with the loss of enjoyment in melody, in society, in home intercourse, and in friendship, with the increase in terror of some kinds, and with the slight sympathetic dullness of brain which we strongly suspect always accompanies a diminution in the faculty of hearing, Heaven keep us, of all the minor miseries of life, from long-continued deafness !
Previous page
