One Louis Brabant turned his ventriloquial talent to profitable account. Rejected by the parents of an heiress as an unsuitable match for their daughter, Louis, on the death of the father, paid a visit to the widow, during which the voice of her deceased husband was all at once heard thus to address her: "Give my daughter in marriage to Louis Brabant:—he is a man of fortune and character, and I endure the pains of purgatory for having refused her to him. Obey this admonition, and give repose to the soul of your departed husband." Of course, the widow complied; but Brabant's difficulties were not yet all overcome. He wanted money to defray the wedding expenses, and resolved to work on the fears of an old usurer, a M. Cornu, of Lyons. Having obtained an evening interview, he contrived to turn the conversation on departed spirits and ghosts. During an interval of silence, the voice of the miser's deceased father was heard, complaining of his situation in purgatory, and calling loudly upon his son to rescue him from his sufferings, by enabling Brabant to redeem the Christians at that time enslaved by the Turks. Not succeeding on the first occasion, Brabant was compelled to make a second visit to the miser, when he took care to enlist not only his father but all his deceased relations in the appeal; and in this way he obtained a thousand crowns.
There have been few female ventriloquists. Effects produced by the female organs of speech have always manifested a deficiency of power. The artificial voices have been few in number, and those imperfectly defined. A woman at Amsterdam possessed considerable powers in this way. Conrad Amman, a Dutch doctor in medicine, who published a Latin treatise at Amsterdam in 1700, observes of her, that the effects she exhibited were produced by a sort of swallowing of the words, or forcing them to retrograde, as it were, by the trachea, by speaking during the inspiration of the breath, and not, as in ordinary speech, during expiration. The same writer notices also the performances of the famous Casimir Schreckenstein.
Different professors of ventriloquism have given different accounts of the manner in which they succeeded in producing their illusions. Baron Mengen, one of the household of Prince Lichtenstein, at Vienna, said that it consisted in a passion for counterfeiting the cries of animals and the voices of different persons. M. St. Gille referred his art to mimicry; and the French Academy, combining these views, defines the art as consisting in an accurate imitation of any given sound as it reaches the ear. Scientific solutions are various. Mr. Nicholson thought that artists in this line, by continual practice from childhood, acquire the power of speaking during inspiration with the same articulation as the ordinary voice, which is formed by expiration. M. Richerand declares that every time a professor exhibits his vocal peculiarities, he suffers distension in the epigastric region; and supposes that the mechanism of the art consists in a slow, gradual expiration, drawn in such a way, that the artist either makes use of the influence exerted by volition over the parietes of the thorax, or that he keeps the epiglottis down by the base of the tongue, the apex of which is not carried beyond the dental arches. He observes, that ventriloquists possess the power of making an exceedingly strong inspiration just before the long expiration, and thus convey into the lungs an immense quantity of air, by the artistical management of the egress of which they produce such astonishing effects upon the hearing and imagination of their auditors.
The theory propounded by Mr. Gough in the "Manchester Memoir," on the principle of reverberated sound, is untenable, because ventriloquism on that theory would be impossible in a crowded theatre, which admits not of the predicated echoes. Mr. Love, in his account of himself, asserts a natural aptitude, a physical predisposition of the vocal organs; which, in his case, discovered itself as early as the age of ten, and gradually improved with practice, without any artistic study whatever. He states that not only his pure ventriloquisms, but nearly all his lighter vocal imitations of miscellaneous sounds, were executed in the first instance on the spur of the moment, and without any pre-meditation. The artist must evidently possess great flexibility of larynx and tongue. Polyphony, according to our modern professor, is produced by compression of the muscles of the chest, and is an act entirely different from any species of vocal deception or modulation. There is no method, he tells us, of manufacturing true ventriloquists. Nature must have commenced the operation, by placing at the artist's disposal a certain quality of voice adapted for the purpose, as the raw material to work upon. It is like a fine ear or voice for singing—the gift of Nature. It follows, therefore, that an expert polyphonist must be as rare a personage as any other man of genius in any particular art.
THE INCENDIARY.
FROM THE REMINISCENCES OF AN ATTORNEY.
I knew James Dutton, as I shall call him, at an early period of life, when my present scanty locks of iron-gray were thick and dark, my now pale and furrowed cheeks were fresh and ruddy, like his own. Time, circumstance, and natural bent of mind, have done their work on both of us; and if his course of life has been less equable than mine, it has been chiefly so because the original impulse, the first start on the great journey, upon which so much depends, was directed by wiser heads in my case than in his. We were school-fellows for a considerable time; and if I acquired—as I certainly did—a larger stock of knowledge than he, it was by no means from any superior capacity on my part, but that his mind was bent on other pursuits. He was a born Nimrod, and his father encouraged this propensity from the earliest moment that his darling and only son could sit a pony or handle a light fowling-piece. Dutton, senior, was one of a then large class of persons, whom Cobbett used to call bull-frog farmers; men who, finding themselves daily increasing in wealth by the operation of circumstances, they neither created nor could insure or control—namely, a rapidly increasing manufacturing population, and tremendous war-prices for their produce—acted as if the chance-blown prosperity they enjoyed was the result of their own forethought, skill, and energy, and therefore, humanly speaking, indestructible. James Dutton was, consequently, denied nothing—not even the luxury of neglecting his own education; and he availed himself of the lamentable privilege to a great extent. It was, however, a remarkable feature in the lad's character, that whatever he himself deemed essential should be done, no amount of indulgence, no love of sport or dissipation, could divert him from thoroughly accomplishing. Thus he saw clearly, that even in the life—that of a sportsman-farmer he had chalked out for himself, it was indispensably necessary that a certain quantum of educational power should be attained; and so he really acquired a knowledge of reading, writing, and spelling, and then withdrew from school to more congenial avocations.
I frequently met James Dutton in after-years; but some nine or ten months had passed since I had last seen him, when I was directed by the chief partner in the firm to which Flint and I subsequently succeeded, to take coach for Romford, Essex, in order to ascertain from a witness there what kind of evidence we might expect him to give in a trial to come off in the then Hilary term at Westminster Hall. It was the first week in January: the weather was bitterly cold; and I experienced an intense satisfaction when, after dispatching the business I had come upon, I found myself in the long dining-room of the chief market-inn, where two blazing fires shed a ruddy, cheerful light over the snow-white damask table-cloth, bright glasses, decanters, and other preparatives for the farmers' market-dinner. Prices had ruled high that day; wheat had reached £30 a load; and the numerous groups of hearty, stalwart yeomen present were in high glee, crowing and exulting alike over their full pockets and the news—of which the papers were just then full—of the burning of Moscow, and the flight and ruin of Bonaparte's army. James Dutton was in the room, but not, I observed, in his usual flow of animal spirits. The crape round his hat might, I thought, account for that, and as he did not see me, I accosted him with an inquiry after his health, and the reason of his being in mourning. He received me very cordially, and in an instant cast off the abstracted manner I had noticed. His father, he informed me, was gone—had died about seven months previously, and he was alone now at Ash Farm—why didn't I run down there to see him sometimes, &c.? Our conversation was interrupted by a summons to dinner, very cheerfully complied with; and we both—at least I can answer for myself—did ample justice to a more than usually capital dinner, even in those capital old market-dinner times. We were very jolly afterward, and amazingly triumphant over the frost-bitten, snow-buried soldier-banditti that had so long lorded it over continental Europe. Dutton did not partake of the general hilarity. There was a sneer upon his lip during the whole time, which, however, found no expression in words.
"How quiet you are, James Dutton!" cried a loud voice from out the dense smoke-cloud that by this time completely enveloped us. On looking toward the spot from whence the ringing tones came, a jolly, round face—like the sun as seen through a London fog—gleamed redly dull from out the thick and choking atmosphere.
"Every body," rejoined Dutton, "hasn't had the luck to sell two hundred quarters of wheat at to-day's price, as you have, Tom Southall."