MR. SULLY ON NOISE.
IN the November number of the Fortnightly Review, Mr. James Sully discourses with much unction on what he calls "the whole Iliad of afflictions" to which sensitive ears are exposed in great modern cities. These afflictions, he tells us, consist, for the most part, in "a jerky or jarring excitation of some of the nervous fibres ;" and these, as Mr. Sully sees with regret, cannot possibly be avoided to any considerable extent in great cities. Mr. Sully's object in writing the paper appears to be, first, to promote a more conscientious feeling amongst those who are the chief causes of these "jerky or jarring excitations of the nervous fibres ;" and next, to embolden legislative reformers to take up a stronger attitude in proposing to the Legislature to threaten and punish the most reckless of these noise-producers. Mr. Sully hopes that as the auditory sensibilities of men become more delicate, builders may be compelled, by the demand for quiet houses, habitually to construct party-walls thick enough to be non-conductors of sound ; and also, that the growth of moral scruple on the subject of invading your neighbours' ears with sounds to which they have no means of refusing admission, may be rapid and steady. If we understand the paper aright, Mr. Sully puts sins against the ears of your neigh- bours in quite a different category from sins against any other ozgan of sense. He regards offences against the ear as crimes of the first magnitude, offences against the eye as, comparatively speaking, mere misdemeanours, while of offences against the nose he is absolutely silent. But if we are to make so much of our
‘. auditory sensibilities " as Mr. Sully proposes, we do not think that they can be regarded alone. It is more or less a matter of incidental personal constitution, whether one sense or another be the more delicate. And though Mr. Sully evidently wants to insist on our giving the first consideration to the ear, we are quite sure that if once we begin to humour the ear, as he in- clines to do, the eye and the nose of delicate people will put in their claim to be equally or even preferentially regarded. The plea that you can shut your eyes when you please, but not your ears, is of very little value. You cannot shut your eyes when you please with safety to yourself. If you shut your eyes whenever you see a squalid butcher's shop, or a slaughter-house, or a chimney-sweep, or a dirty and blear-eyed beggar, you will be in the greatest possible danger of getting yourself run over or seriously jostled in the streets ; and as for the vile scents with which a great many people saturate I themselves, under the impression that they are delightfal,—the horrible musk, for instance, which not unfrequently renders a play or an opera, that might have been delightful, perfectly in- tolerable,—there is no power of closing your senses against it at all. Mr. Sully himself would admit that a man who deliberately obstructed his own sense of smell through the whole of any public amusement, would be the cause of at least as great offence to his neighbours as the unfortunate person who might be the occasion of that laborious effort in consequence of the delusion that some of the close and fatty scents of the perfumers' shops, are as delightful to all the world as fragrant breezes from an open rose-garden or from a bed of lilies of the valley. If we are to have a new moral law preached against offences to the ear, we may be very sure that the other senses of our fastidious body will soon claim their equal right to the protection of these new moral and legislative sanc- tions, and that as soon as we have admitted the stringency of the commandment, "Thou shalt not offend thy neighbour's ear," these other commandments, "Thou shalt not offend thy neigh- bour's eye," and "Thou shall not offend thy neighbour's nose," are sure to follow. We live in an age when the leaders of thought seem to pay a good deal more attention to sins against the nerves, than they are at all disposed to pay to sins against the moral law, even if they do not resolve all the latter into mere cases of the former ; and if Mr. Sully's suggestions are to be taken seriously, the ancient casuistry, concerning itself with the morality of truth and falsehood, of oaths and their obli- gations, of expediency and principle, will soon be neglected for cases of conscience such as these,—' Was it right to crack the walnuts for A, when B obviously winced at the jarring sound produced by the nut-cracking?' ' Is C justified in supplying D with clean clothes at the cost of E and F, who cannot bear to see drying-lines hung with wet linen?' or 'Ought G to use scented note-paper without previously ascertaining that H and K are not rendered uncomfortable by its fumes?' And as the anxiety about such scruples grows, we think we may assume that the interest in the old casuistic questions concerning veracity, purity, and patriotism will be very apt to die away. We cannot be at the same time both manly and superfine. If we are to elevate questions of minute sensibility into questions of morality, we shall soon pass over questions of morality, as of relatively even less importance than questions of minute sensibility.
Of course we quite agree with Mr. Sully, that wherever the new question is one merely between considering the sensibilities of others and failing to consider them, it is not only common kindness, but common justice to respect these sensibilities. A man who puts his piano against a thin party-wall, when he might put it where it would be of comparatively little inconvenience to his neighbours, is an unneighbourly man, who could not be expected to refuse him- self anything at all for the benefit of others. Nor do we object to a certain limitation of the rights of those who enjoy coarse and noisy music, on behalf of those who are distracted and revolted by it. Such a matter is, of course, a question of the greatest happiness of the greatest number ; and if the majority have a right to enjoy what are to them delightful noises, they should enjoy them in such places as those who find them perfectly odious noises may be able to avoid. But Mr. Sully's argument virtually goes far beyond this. He wants us to forbid people the companionship of dogs, in deference to those neighbours who cannot bear the bark of a dog ; to forbid townspeople, apparently, a supply of fresh eggs, in deference to those who cannot endure to hear the cackling of the hens,—at least, we suppose this to be his meaning, for though Mr. Sully speaks of the harsh crowing of the cocks, he surely does not suppose either that the cocks lay the eggs, or that their presence is even essential to the laying of such eggs as are pro.. vided for the breakfast-table. In one place, he even refers to the nuisance to the neighbours of proximate nurses and nurseries,— and we quite admit that if offences against the ear are really to take rank at all as moral wrongs, no wrongs can be so great as those due to the crying of a querulous or sick baby. But even Mr. Sully, we suppose, would hardly venture to put a tax on babies solely for the sake of saving the ears of those who cannot endure to hear the wail of a baby. Yet he would tax dogs,—though what he says is applicable chiefly to town dogs,—for the sake of those who cannot endure the bark of a dog. Now how, we should like to know, is the injury caused by a sharp bark to the "auditory sensibilities" of the fastidious student, to be weighed against the injury to the moral sus- ceptibilities of a family of children, which must arise from the absence of those habits of interest in, and sympathy with, the lower animals that the association with dogs excites ? If Mr. Sully only means that the keeping of those wretched dogs who are tied up in a London kennel all day, is to be discouraged, we are quite with him, for the sake of the dogs, for the sake of the men who so misuse the dogs, and finally, for the sake of the students tormented by the howls and barks of the poor imprisoned crea- tures. But Mr. Sully's chief point is not to put down this abuse of the practice of keeping dogs, but the offence to the ears of the neighbours caused by their sharp bark. He would be as indig- nant against the joyous bark of a dog rushing out for his daily walk, as against the mournful bark of the creature tied up in a dismal kennel. It is the injury to our "auditory sensibilities" he is so great upon, and not the injury to the sense of humanity. He appears to speak of the suspicion that Goethe once poisoned a favourite dog of a youthful neighbour, solely from the annoyance its bark gave him, with a sort of historical complacency, as if it were a final testimony to the sinfulness of keeping a dog which could by any habit of barking trouble a man of genius. Yet it is clear, we think, that the sympathy with the lower animals which is fostered by the careful and kind treatment of such companions, is of infinitely more moral advantage to the world, than the injury which their noise may cause to the nerves of sensitive students, is moral injury to the world. If ever Mr. Sully's proposals came to be seriously criticised, we should be obliged to weigh against the anguish caused to the nerves of the sensitive by the noises which he so angrily condemns, the stimulus given to the good-feelings of the community by the habits of life with which these noises are often inseparably bound up. As he will hardly propose to put an embargo on the birth of babies, even on the ground that their cries are more disturb- ing to sensitive nerves than all the other noises of civilisation put together, so he will hardly succeed, we trust, in his proposal to put an end to the domestication of dogs, and cats, and birds, on the ground,—certainly sound enough, though quite insuffi- cient,--that the sharp noises to which they give rise are ex- ceedingly, though in a much less degree, trying to the same class of nerves. Indeed, we note with surprise that Mr. Sully, though he so strongly attacks barking dogs and screaming parrots, has nothing to say against the nocturnal noises of cats, which, in volume and in horror, exceed, we should say, all the other animal outcries put together.
The simple truth is, that the masses of men can never conform their habits of life to the needs of the superfine ; so that the super- fine must either go into retirement, or adapt themselves to the average habits of their fellow-creatures. We should recommend Mr. Sully, and literary men in general, first of all, to be very care- ful in selecting their abodes, and especially in not selecting one where the party-walls are thin and the neighbourhood noisy ; next, to cultivate not only that power of abstracting their minds from distracting noises on which Mr. Sully proudly dwells as one of the remedies for noise most worthy of human nature, but also that very homely virtue of patience, in cases where it is impossible so to ab- stract their minds, which is perhaps a remedy of too common a character to deserve the notice of a philosopher ; and last of all, if none of these remedies be adequate, to condescend still further, and try a little cotton-wool. A philosopher with cotton-wool in his ears is, no doubt, a homely sight ; but after all, such an ex- pedient may be preferable to continuous fretfulness on the one hand, or to moving heaven and earth to deprive common people of their most innocent pleasures, on the other.
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