Dumbness

“ There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; ”

“ A man born dumb, notwithstanding his great cerebral mass and his inheritance of strong intellectual instincts, would be capable of few higher intellectual manifestations than an Orang or a Chimpanzee, if he were confined to the society of dumb associates. And yet there might not be the slightest discernible difference between his brain and that of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be the result of a defective structure of the mouth, or of the tongue, or a mere defective innervation of these parts ”

“ CLOTEN.
To leave you in your madness ’twere my sin;
I will not.
IMOGEN.
Fools are not mad folks.
CLOTEN.
Do you call me fool?
IMOGEN.
As I am mad, I do;
If you’ll be patient, I’ll no more be mad;
That cures us both. I am much sorry, sir,
You put me to forget a lady’s manners
By being so verbal; and learn now, for all,
That I, which know my heart, do here pronounce,
By th’ very truth of it, I care not for you,
And am so near the lack of charity
To accuse myself I hate you ”

“ But imagine in the case before us the intervals as well—the stupidity, the vacant gaze, the hanging lip, the pale flaccid countenance and bloodshot eyes, idiocy alternated with madness—no voice of human speech, only the animal babble of the uneducated dumb—the misery of his falling down anywhere, now in the fire, now in the water, and the divine shines out as nowhere else—for the father loves his only child even to agony. ”

“ But if the dumb can evoke assistance, assuring of sincerity and disarming doubt, how hushed is the questioning when the blind apply! How much stronger than speech or silence are the sightless eyes that stare unblinking at a darkened world! ”

“ Lies unrequited still. No speck of doubt
Upon to-morrow's promise. Yet a pain
Of some dumb thing is on me, and I feel
How men go mad, how faculties do reel
When these old querns turn round within the brain. ”

“ Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, Delirium is a common name to all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason Pratensis, Savanarola, Guianerius, Montaltus, confound them as differing secundum magis et minus; so doth David, Psal. xxxvii. 5. “I said unto the fools, deal not so madly,” and 'twas an old Stoical paradox, omnes stultos insanire, [179] all fools are mad, though some madder than others. And who is not a fool, who is free from melancholy? Who is not touched more or less in habit or disposition? ”

“ The conception is too bulky to be born alive, and in the torture of thinking, we stand dumb. Our feelings, imprisoned by their magnitude, find no way out—and, in the struggle of expression, every finger tries to be a tongue. The machinery of the body seems too little for the mind, and we look about for helps to show our thoughts by. ”

“ And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?
Are you dumb because you know me not,
Or dumb because you know? ”

“ If he had ever considered them at all it was as cold and conscious creatures who taught themselves to cover up what they felt, so that when their emotions strove to assert themselves they were found, through long disuse, to be dumb and inarticulate. ”

“ So that a change of the minutest kind in the structure of one of these nerves, or in the structure of the part in which it originates, or of the supply of blood to that part, or of one of the muscles to which it is distributed, might render all of us dumb. But a race of dumb men, deprived of all communication with those who could speak, would be little indeed removed from the brutes. ”

“ No image giving of a thing on earth,
Nor thought significant in Reason's reach,
Yet, in their random shadowings give birth
To thoughts and things from other worlds that come,
And fill the soul, and strike the reason dumb. ”

“ How was I enraged at my incredible stupidity, which has frequently given me the appearance of guilt when I was nothing more than a fool and embarrassed! A stupidity, which in a man known to be endowed with some wit, is considered as a false excuse. ”

“ It is singular how the dumb, imprisoned soul, locked within the walls of the body, sometimes gives such a piercing power to the tones of the voice during the access of a great agony. The effect is entirely involuntary and often against the most strenuous opposition of the will; but one sometimes hears another reading or repeating words with an intense vitality, a living force, which tells of some inward anguish or conflict of which the language itself gives no expression. ”

“ Some are gibbering like fiends, others jabbering like idiots. They are there young and old; a few—the maniacs those—are chained; all are crawled over by vermin, most are crusted with excretions. The sight made me feel faint at the time, the very recollection of it to this day makes my flesh creep. ”

“ To be dumb, of course, is, comparatively speaking, nothing; for most of the perplexities of life come from talk. But to be deaf—to live ever in silence, to see laughing lips moving, to see hands wandering over the keys, to see birds exulting, and be denied the resultant harmonies: that must be terrible. ”

“ That he should be my fool, and I his fate.
PRINCESS.
None are so surely caught, when they are catched,
As wit turned fool. Folly, in wisdom hatched,
Hath wisdom’s warrant and the help of school
And wit’s own grace to grace a learned fool.
ROSALINE.
The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As gravity’s revolt to wantonness.
MARIA.
Folly in fools bears not so strong a note
As fool’ry in the wise when wit doth dote,
Since all the power thereof it doth apply
To prove, by wit, worth in simplicity.
Enter Boyet. ”

“ Your mind will be full of ideas; your hands will be perpetually busy to a purpose into which no human creature, beyond the verge of your brotherhood, must pry. Believe me, who have made the experiment, that compared with this task, the task of inviolable secrecy, all others are easy. To be dumb will not suffice; never to know any remission in your zeal or your watchfulness will not suffice. If the sagacity of others detect your occupations, however strenuously you may labour for concealment, your doom is ratified, as well as that of the wretch whose evil destiny led him to pursue you. ”

“ Dumb, not from despair, but from faith; dumb, not like a wretch weary with calling for help which does not come, but dumb like a child sitting at its mother’s feet, and looking up into her face and watching her doings, understanding none of them as yet, but certain that they are all done in love. ”

“ Your poets and your philosophers have no resource against the stupidity that opposes them. “Even the gods,” they complain, “fight unvictorious against stupidity.” But your divines and your preachers have hope beside the dullest and the stupidest and even the most imbruted. They point themselves and their slowest and dullest-witted hearers to Old Honest, this rare old saint; and they set up their pulpit with hope and boldness on the very causeway of the town of Stupidity itself. ”

“ Among other patients, we passed a deaf and dumb man, now afflicted with incurable madness too, of whom they said that it was only when his madness began to develop itself in strongly-marked mad actions, that it began to be suspected. ”

“ O.M. Let us drop that lying phrase, and call them the Unrevealed Creatures; so far as we can know, there is no such thing as a dumb beast.
Y.M. On what grounds do you make that assertion?
O.M. On quite simple ones. “Dumb” beast suggests an animal that has no thought-machinery, no understanding, no speech, no way of communicating what is in its mind. We know that a hen has speech. We cannot understand everything she says, but we easily learn two or three of her phrases. We know when she is saying, “I have laid an egg” ”

“ I’ve had the third-day ague, and the seventh-day ague, the shaking ague, and the dumb ague—though why ’twas ever called ‘dumb’ beats me. If there’s anything calculated to make a man open his mouth and express his mind freely on the way things go in this neck o’ wilderness, it’s that particular kind. ”

“ I am too weary, and also too distressed. There, amid the same social phenomena, there was one vanity that disgusts me more than any other,—literary vanity; one species of stupidity that is lower than any other,—political stupidity. ”

“ All the hideousness of the eternal idiot, all the filthiness of vice and its stupidities, all the spasms and deformities of baptized flesh, all the tears of penitence, all the laughter of license; the mania, the cupidity, the craft, the lust, the fraud, the imbecility, the silent desperation, the sacred choruses, the howls of the possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the neighing, the bleating ”

“ His wisdom was that of the self-deceived fool
Who quits the clear fount for the foul, stagnant pool,
Who puts out his eyes lest the light he descry,
Then shouts 'mid the gloom "how clear-sighted am I!" ”

“ Then the fluent speakers loosened their tongues in thanksgiving and glorification, while the dumb became as hard and lifeless stones; then the souls were purified, the hearts were attracted, the breasts were dilated, the characters were sanctified, the secret thoughts became manifest and the realities stepped into the arena of existence; they sought illumination, were guided, became ablaze, enflamed and enkindled, called forth and proclaimed, saying:
“Glad-tidings be unto the righteous ones! Rejoicing be unto the perceiving ones! Happiness be unto the favored ones! ”

“ It is as mirrored in that consciousness that the gross fools, the headlong fools, the fatal fools play their part for us—they have much less to show us in themselves. The troubled life mostly at the centre of our subject—whatever our subject, for the artistic hour, happens to be—embraces them and deals with them for its amusement and its anguish: they are apt largely indeed, on a near view, to be all the cause of its trouble. ”

“ Or is it but a nameless fear, A wordless joy, that calls the tear In dumb appeal to rise, When, looking on him where he stands, You yield up all into his hands, Pleading into his eyes? For days that laugh or nights that weep You two strike oars across the deep With life's tide at the brim ”

“ Art thou not grown stupid, and senseless of all the hazards that are before thee? Here he insists upon the amazement and confusion of their spirit; and it is very natural for those that are drunk with the terrors of the Almighty, to think themselves stupid, because of the distraction of their thoughts. ”

“ The time and place so thoroughly agree,
'Twill be impossible our freaks to see;
But 'twill be right that one should watch with care;
While t'other with the lad seeks joys to share,
And irksome gloom endeavours to dispel:
He's dumb, you know, and tales can never tell. ”

“ The little mouth laughed.
"Who are you, seigneur dwarf?" she said.
"Bran is my name, and a man am I, and what is more a fool."
"How are you more than a man?"
"I weep when I laugh and laugh when I weep. I see what is not. What I know that I do not believe." ”

“ Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled! I know we seem to have a sort of freedom.... Have you ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them—soul and mind and body! It's fun for a man to jest at our position. ”

“ They are two, neither of them what might or should have been. The dumb man is not said to have used his recovered speech to thank his deliverer, nor is there any sign that he clung to Him, either for fear of being captured again or in passionate gratitude. ”

“ I have an accurate eye and steady hand."
"But how will you explain the sudden change that has turned you from an idiot to a sane man? People will want to know why you pretended to be an idiot. You will be severely punished for the ruse. Oh, my friend, all that makes me tremble."
"After I am married I shall tell you my reasons for my long comedy. As to my transformation from idiocy to sanity, that is to be the subject of a miracle. The thought struck me this morning while I followed your mistress and the Queen to the hermitage of St. Eusebius. ”

“ It is as if the dumb should speak for the first time, as if things should stammer out their own meaning, through the imperfect organs of mere sense. I wish that some of our fluent, plausible declaimers, who have such store of words to cover the want of ideas, could lend their art to this writer. ”

“ Now we must hasten on to our destination; and if you see any of the modish people nudge each other whispering, ‘Old fool!’ as we pass, you will only smile, knowing as you now do that they are the fools and that I am none. ”

“ They have reached the stage when they are the victims of human pity—a lamentable condition. But those dense persons inhabiting the thickly populated region bordering on foolishness—those self-satisfied, uncomprehending egotists occupying the half-way house between wisdom and folly, known as stupidity—against such my wrath burns fiercely. ”

“ Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst:
For they're a sort of fools which fortune makes,
And, after she has made 'em fools, forsakes.
With Nature's oafs 'tis quite a diff'rent case,
For Fortune favours all her idiot race. ”

“ I've been a fool—a thousand times. I've done silly things often and once or twice bad, rotten things, but all these others—these virtuous people who are so ready to judge me, have they been any better? ”

“ They hazard nothing, nothing they assume, But know the useful art of acting dumb. Yet to their eyes each varying look appears, And every word finds entrance at their ears. 320 “Thou art religion’s advocate—take heed, Hurt not the cause thy pleasure ’tis to plead ”

“ These reflections make you feel a little more cheerful, but only for a brief period; for the next moment you think what a fool you must be to imagine for an instant that anybody would be sorry at anything that might happen to you. ”

“ He writes, 'My stupidity in accepting theories and statements of others, concerning spirits, which I could have tested personally, is a source of deep sorrow, and I do not know but it could be called criminal. ”

“ In the beautiful dumb days the strong rent the weak in sacred simplicity. Now the strong make pious speeches to show that the eupepsia of the universe is their appetite’s aim, and the weak must listen to proofs that they are being eaten for their own good. ”