“I’m thure it would; quite thure to be thure.”
“Take my word for it. When we go to sea we are transposing the functional processes of mind and matter. How, then, to render that exchange nugatory? The sense of it is conveyed through what? The eyes, is it not?”
“O yeth, indeed! You thee the heaving before you heave yourthelf.”
“Exactly—a sympathetic emotion, or motion. Our vision, then, is the direct cause of sea-sickness. Why? Because in pursuing an unstable thing it becomes itself unstable. And there I see light. The eyes are at right angles to the ears, are they not? And we are agreed that the sense of instability is conveyed through the eyes?”
“Through the eyeth.”
“Well, supposing now we introduce a second appeal to the senses through the ears; that second appeal would traverse the first appeal, would it not, at right angles, the two forming together a sort of sensory cross-hatch, or truss, which would immediately produce the stability necessary to keep the otherwise unsupported sight from accommodating itself to the action of the waves? You follow me?”
“I think—— O yeth!”
“Your suggestion was a really very able one, my lord, and it speaks loudly against the folly of scorning all ex-official criticism in these matters. But, to follow our theorizing to a practical end. We are at one, then, in believing it possible that the sense of sight could be trussed and stiffened by the introduction of the sense of sound. To make an effective business of it, however, that sense of sound would have to be compelling enough to arrest and neutralize the visual tendency; it would have to be, that is to say, exceedingly strong and exceedingly sweet. It might be possible to introduce on each of our ships a professional harpist, or lutist, to supply with their music a prophylactic against sea-sickness; but one has to remember that not all musicians are sailors, and that it might prove disastrous to the moral should one fail in his own sea-legs at the very moment he was trying to provide another with his.”
“Yeth; that ith very true.”
“Then, again, as to the force of the appeal. Not all performers have that convincing mastery of their instruments, my lord, which according to what I hear, is peculiarly your own.”