The Story of My Life
and give speech half its meaning. On the other hand she does not know
another's expression. When she is talking with an intimate friend,
however, her hand goes quickly to her friend's 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 complete unconsciously 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 person's 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."
When she met 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 Keller's humour is that deeper kind of humour which is courage.
Thirteen years ago she made up her mind to learn to speak, and she gave
her teacher no rest until she was allowed to take lessons, although wise
people, even Miss Sullivan, the wisest of them all, regarded it as an
experiment unlikely to succeed and almost sure to make her unhappy. It
was this same perseverance that 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
accordingly delayed a year. But she was not satisfied until she had
carried out her purpose and entered 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 complete, for in trying to
be like other people she has come most fully to be herself. Her
unwillingness to be beaten has developed her courage. Where another
can go, she can go. Her respect for physical bravery is like
Stevenson's--the boy's contempt 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 next time.
So when people try experiments with her, she displays a sportsmanlike
determination to win in any test, however unreasonable, that one may
wish to put her to.
If she does not know the answer to a question, she guesses with
mischievous assurance. Ask her the colour of your coat (no blind person
can tell colour), she will feel it and say "black." If it happens to be
blue, and you tell her so triumphantly, she is likely to answer, "Thank
you. I am glad you know. Why did you ask me?"
Her whimsical and adventuresome spirit puts her so much on 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 investigation of the scientist, 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
consequence.
Miss Keller likes to be part of the company. If any one whom she is
touching 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 minutely that she responds to her moods, and so she
seems to know what is going on, even though the conversation has not
been spelled to her for some time. In the same way her response to music
is in part sympathetic, although she enjoys it for its own sake.
Music probably can mean little to her but beat and pulsation. She cannot
sing and she cannot play the piano, although, as some early experiments
show, she could learn mechanically to beat out a tune on the keys. Her
enjoyment of music, however, is very genuine, for she has a tactile
recognition of sound when the waves of air beat against her. Part of her
experience of the rhythm of music comes, no doubt, from the vibration
of solid objects which she is touching: the floor, or, what is more
evident, the case of the piano, on which her hand rests. But she seems
to feel the pulsation of the air itself. When the organ was played for
her in St. Bartholomew's, the whole building shook with the great
pedal notes, but that does not altogether account for what she felt and
enjoyed. The vibration of the air as the organ notes swelled made her
sway in answer. Sometimes she puts her hand on a singer's throat to
feel the muscular thrill and contraction, 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 composers from having
literally felt their music, Schumann being her favourite." If she knows
the difference between Schumann and Beethoven, it is because she has
read it, and if she has read it, she remembers it and can tell any one
who asks her.
Miss Keller's effort to reach out and meet other people on their own
intellectual ground has kept her informed of daily affairs. When her
education became more systematic and 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 inclined. 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
conversation, the friend next to her has ceased for some moments to
spell into her hand, the question comes inevitably, "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 on the little occasional affairs of
life.
Much of her knowledge comes 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 interesting place like
Niagara, whoever accompanies her--usually, of course, Miss Sullivan--is
kept busy giving her an idea of visible details. Miss Sullivan, who
knows her pupil's mind, selects from the passing landscape essential
elements, which give a certain clearness to Miss Keller's imagined
view of an outer world that to our eyes is confused and overloaded with
particulars. If her companion does not give her enough details,
Miss Keller asks questions until she has completed the view to her
satisfaction.
She does not see with her eyes, but through the inner faculty to serve
which eyes were given to us. When she returns from a walk and tells some
one about it, her descriptions are accurate and vivid. A comparative
experience drawn from written descriptions and from her teacher's 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 incomplete as one
might suppose. Occasionally she astonishes you by ignorance of some fact
which no one happens to have told her; for instance, she did not know,
until her first plunge into the sea, that it is salt. Many of the
detached incidents and facts of our daily life pass around and over her
unobserved; but she has enough detailed acquaintance with the world to
keep her view of it from being essentially defective.
Most that she knows at first hand comes 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 difference in 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
accomplishments, her sense of touch has not been used enough to develop
it very far beyond normal acuteness. A friend tried Miss Keller one
day with several coins. She was slower than he expected her to be in
identifying them by their relative weight and size. But it should be
said she almost never handles money--one of the many sordid and petty
details of life, by the way, which she has been spared.
She recognizes the subject and general intention 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 can feel the sweep of line with her whole hand, she knows in
their higher esthetic value. She suggests herself that she can know
them better than we do, because she can get the true dimensions and
appreciate more immediately the solid nature of a sculptured figure.
When she was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston she stood on a
step-ladder and let both hands play over the statues. When she felt a
bas-relief of dancing 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 can best measure the delicacy
of her senses and her manual skill. She seems to have very little sense
of direction. 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 comparison is hard to make, except with other
deaf-blind persons. Her dexterity is not notable either in comparison
with the normal person, whose movements are guided by the eye, or, I am
told, with other blind people. She has practised no single constructive
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 managed to
make, after models, some conventional designs of the outlines of leaves
and rosettes. The only thing she does which requires skill with
the hands is her work on the typewriter. 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 contain typographical errors when she hands them to Miss Sullivan
to read. Her typewriter has no special attachments. She keeps the
relative position of the keys by an occasional touch of the little
finger on the outer edge of the board.
Miss Keller's 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 Sullivan's "mysterious telegraphic