Chapter 12

MUTE ELOQUENCE

AS every traveller knows, there is but one really universal language-the language of gesture. It was spoken in the world’s first morning, and men will still be using it when they are startled by the shocks of doom. It was the language of the Stone Age and it will be the language of the Golden Age. It is spoken all the world over by men of all kinds, colours, classes, and conditions; and, if either Mars or the moon is really inhabited, it is spoken there too.

The little child speaks it before he is able to utter one single word of our clumsier dictionary speech, whilst the aged speak it long after the palsied lip has lost its utterance. The deaf and dumb are experts in its intricacies. It is equally intelligible to the English merchant on the London market, to the Indian trapper in the Western forests, to the Chinese mandarin in the interior of Asia, to the South Sea islander basking in the rays of an equatorial sun, and to the Eskimo in his frozen hut amid the blinding whiteness of the icy North. It is known even to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; they understand it and sometimes even speak it. So universal a thing is the language of gesture!

The shrug of the shoulders, the flash of the eye, the knitting of the brows, the curling of the lip, the stamping of the foot, the clenching of the fist, the nodding of the head, the pointing of the hand-here is a language which is known to everyone! It has no alphabet, no grammar, and no syntax, yet the simplest understand it. Indeed, the simplest understand it best.

The savage is a perfect master of the art of gesture; he speaks with every nerve and sinew. And the little child is no less eloquent. His pushings and pullings; his beckonings and pointings; his smilings and poutings are as expressive as anything in the vocabulary. He has found a speech for which the builders of Babel sighed in vain, a speech that can be understood by men and women of every nation under heaven.

Man is an inveterate signalman. He has a perfect genius for concocting mysterious codes; he revels in flashing out cryptic heliograms; he glories in receiving and deciphering occult messages. He even communicates with himself in this abstruse and recondite fashion.

A man will twist a piece of string round his finger or tie a knot in the corner of his handkerchief, or stick a scrap of stamp paper on the face of his watch, to remind him of some thing that has nothing whatever to do with string or handkerchief or stamp paper. He moves in a welter of mnemonics. The string and the knot represent his secret code; and in the terms of that code this incorrigible signalman is signalling to himself, that is all.

Moreover, we not only signal to ourselves, but we are fascinated by the spectacle of other people signalling to themselves. A novel becomes invested with a new interest when its plot suddenly turns upon the weird phenomena of a witch’s cavern or the mysterious ritual of a ‘gipsy camp’. By means of her viper, her owl, her toad, her cauldron, her tripod, her herbs: and all the rest of it, the withered crone is signalling to herself from morning to night. By means of the crossed sticks where the roads fork, the gipsies leave tokens for themselves and for each other.

Many a man will wear a secret charm hanging round his neck or suspended from his watch chain, or will attach a mascot to his car, although nobody but himself knows the significance of the bauble. Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist, kept on his writing table a small tray containing a number of grotesque figures-a wooden bear, a tiny devil, two or three cats, one of them playing a fiddle, and some rabbits, ‘I never write a single line of any of my dramas,’ Ibsen used to say, ‘without having that tray and its occupants before me on my table. I could not write without them. But why I use them, and how, this is my own secret.’ Here was a notable and brilliant thinker happy in being able to flash covert messages to himself by means of a code which no one but himself could begin to understand.

The universe itself is persistently struggling to express itself through the agency of an intricate system of signals. The stars overhead are signalling; the astronomer, mastering the code, reads the secrets of the skies. The stones that we trample underfoot are signalling; the geologist unravels the cryptogram and interprets the romance of long forgotten ages.

The greatest things that man ever has to say he says, not in the terminology of the dictionary, but in the language of signs. The lover scorns the vocabulary. He can say what he has to say so much more expressively by means of signals. A look, a pressure of the hand, a ring, a kiss-what vocal utterance could compare with a code like this? The same is true of grief and of the sympathy that sorrow elicits. No letter of condolence, however tenderly phrased, can say all that can be said by a hand clasp, a countenance suffused with emotion and a spontaneous moistening of the eyes.

Or, to look in another direction, what man could express in so many words all that he feels when, for example, he waves his country’s flag? It is, as Carlyle says, merely a piece of bunting that could be bought in any market place for a handful of coppers; yet a million men would gladly die for it. And what of the silent symbolism of the faith—the upward pointing spire, the broken bread, the sign of the Cross itself? In his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson glories in the thought that the great commander lies immediately:

Under the cross of gold that shines over city and river. That glowing Cross, lifted high above London’s central roar, has always been regarded as one of the most impressive spectacles in the city. Millions, glancing upward from the surging crowds below, have, in their hour of stress, been made to feel that heaven is not so remote from earth as it sometimes seems. The mute symbol has ministered solace, strength, and sympathy. It is the highest form that the science of signals ever takes.

Dr. F. W. Boreham