The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-12-18
EVERY MAN HIS OWN TUNER.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN TUNER.
 When Darwin openly confessed with a certain plaintive sadness that so ab- sorbed had he been for years in science as to have lost all appreciation of mu- sic and poetry, in both of which he had once delighted, people threw up hands and eyes in blank amazement. And yet the astonishing man frankly declared he could no longer force himself either to hear Beethoven or to read Shakes peare, the one havng become as weary, stale, flat and unprofitable to hm as the other, while in the same breath ac- knowledging that the sudden discovery of a new trait in a wriggling earthworm would shoot thrills of scientific rapture through him. The earthworm had something positive and verifiable to sQuirm into his soul, while Shakespeare, with his Hamlets, Ophelias, Malvolios, Mrs. Quicklys and Bottoms had none. These all dwelt outside his own private realm of reality, in a fairyIand or a badlam of their own. And Beethoven was no better!
 Now, why in the world should these self-elated people have thus thrown up their hands and eyes in blank amaze ment, and thanked God they were not as other men are, or even as this scien- tific publican, Darwin? What was there so novel in the everyday specta- l cle the man of science thus presented? Had they not themselves a hndred times encountered by the seashore or among the mountains Q like specimen of an absorbed and desiccated business man to whom all the glories of peak and ocean were now an intolerable weariness called vacation, and yet who once, when on his honeymoon trip to Nahant or Jefferson Highlands, had ac- tually indited six sonnets to the sound ing pillows of the Atlantic or to the sky-piercing summits of the Presiden- tial range, as lit up by the love light oi somebody's bridal eyes? For so long now, however, have ledgers driven Tyr ics out of the mind of this unhappy be. ing that his appreciation of sonnets even his own, has grown as absolutely flat as that of Darwin for Shakespeare Where's the difference between the 1.-two?
 When once man has lost keen zest in any given thing, no matter whether it be dancing or trouting or society ol the drama or the church, or sunsets ol the midnight heavens, it is in each and every case for precisely the same req 1 son-unless, perhaps, in the one excep' tional instance of the two blind mer who went to see two lame men run 2 race" He himself has become blind ol deaf or praalyzed in some one or other quarter of his being, and that from tht memorable law of disease which rele. gates to extinction and atrophy every faculty not kept in exercise by the spe' cific inspiring objects 1t was made tc delight in.
 Now all this opens up question of a: papable practical concern as any in. volved in the loss of physical sigh through blindness, or of physical hear. ing through deafness, or of free elastic motion through paralysis, So marvel. ous is the harmoniuos unity of the hu- man body that no one can lose so much as the tip of little finger without jusi in so far becoming mutilated being--ii a pianist or an acrobat, probably a ru- ined one. Equally with the mind. Only let one's endowment, however limited of observation and reflection, of wit and humor of affection and desire of ser vice, be in any quarter dulled or par tially distorted or outright destroyed and as marked an i'll is wrought in the whole human organism as in the entire gamut of 8 grand piano by the muf- fling or total extinction of here and there an individual note. It is not merely that one agreeable note is gone It Is that the melody and harmony of the whole instrument is gravely i'm paired, as we'll as the effect of every nocturne or sonata rendered on it. And to just this disastrous result is every man continually exposed through fall ure to keep each individual note of his scale tuned up to perfect accord of pitch with all the others; through suf- fering here a string and there string to sag and sag till there is no longer resonance of response in 1t to the im- pact of any hammer. Inevitably, the total music of the man becomes discor- dant or monotonously doleful or triv- ial as ragtime. A sag in cheerfulness, sagin zest of interest in truth or beauty or sympathetic love, and heaven pity the family that has to listen every day