Insomnia, the lack of "tired Nature's sweet restorer," is rapidly
becoming the chronic terror of all men of active life who have passed
the age of thirty-five or forty years. In early life, while yet he
"wears the rose of youth upon him," man rarely, except in sickness,
knows the want of sound, undreaming sleep. But as early manhood is left
behind and the cares and perplexities of life weigh upon him, making
far more needful than ever the rest which comes only through unbroken
sleep, this remedial agent cannot longer be wooed and won. Youth would
"fain encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in his arms." To those of
riper years the "blanket of the dark" often ushers in a season of
terrors,--a time of fitful snatches of broken sleep and of tormenting
dreams; of long stretches of wakefulness; of hours when all things
perplexing and troublesome in one's affairs march before him in sombre
procession: in endless disorder, in labyrinths of confusion, in
countless new phases of disagreeableness; and at length the morning
summons him to labor, far more racked and weary than when he sought
repose.
It has been of late years much the fashion in the literature of this
subject to attribute sleeplessness to the rapid growth of facilities for
activities of every kind. The practical annihilation of time and space
by our telegraphs and railroads, the compressing thereby of the labors
of months into hours or even minutes, the terrific competition in all
kinds of business thereby made possible and inevitable, the intense
mental activity engendered in the mad race for fame or wealth, where the
nervous and mental force of man is measured against steam and
lightning,--these are usually credited with having developed what is
considered a modern and even an almost distinctively American disease.
As the maxim, "There is nothing new under the sun," is of general
application, it may be of interest to investigate if an exception occurs
in the case of sleeplessness; if it be true that among our ancestors,
before the days of working steam and electricity, the glorious sleep of
youth was prolonged through all one's three or four score years.
Medical books and literature throw no light upon this subject three
hundred years ago. We must therefore turn to Shakespeare--human
nature's universal solvent--for light on this as we would on any other
question of his time. Was he troubled with insomnia, then, is the first
problem to be solved.
Dr. Holmes, our genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a
philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory
that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or
otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that
when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure his
own, or at least one of which he feels its tendencies and possibilities
belong to himself. Emerson, too, says of Shakespeare, that all his
poetry was first experience.
When we seek to analyze what we mean by the term Shakespeare, to
endeavor to define wherein he was distinct from all others and easily
pre-eminent, to know why to us he ever grows wiser as we grow wise, we
find that his especial characteristic was an unequalled power of
observation and an ability accurately to chronicle his impressions. He
was the only man ever born who lived and wrote absolutely without bias
or prejudice. Emerson says of him that "he reported all things with
impartiality; that he tells the great greatly, the small
subordinately,--he is strong as Nature is strong, who lifts the land
into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats
a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other." Says
he, further: "Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality
will presently appear: he has certain opinions which he disposes other
things to bring into prominence; he crams this part and starves the
other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing but his fitness and
strength." But Shakespeare has no peculiarity; all is duly given.
Thus it is that his dramas are the book of human life. He was an
accurate observer of Nature: he notes the markings of the violet and the
daisy; the haunts of the honeysuckle, the mistletoe, and the woodbine.
He marks the fealty of the marigold to its god the sun, and even touches
the freaks of fashion, condemning in some woman of his time an usage,
long obsolete, in accordance with which she adorned her head with "the
golden tresses of the dead." But it was as an observer and a delineator
of man in all his moods that he was the bright, consummate flower of
humanity. His experiences were wide and varied. He had absorbed into
himself and made his own the pith and wisdom of his day. As the fittest
survives, each age embodies in itself all worthy of preservation in the
ages gone before. In Shakespeare's pages we find a reflection, perfect
and absolute, of the age of Elizabeth, and therefore of all not
transient in the foregone times,--of all which is fixed and permanent
in our own. He "held the mirror up to Nature." So "his eternal summer
shall not fade," because
"He sang of the earth as it will be
When the years have passed away."
If, therefore, insomnia had prevailed in or before his time, in his
pages shall we find it duly set forth. If he had suffered, if the
"fringed curtains of his eyes were all the night undrawn," we shall find
his dreary experiences--his hours of pathetic misery, his nights of
desolation--voiced by the tongues of his men and women.
Shakespeare speaks often of the time in life when men have left behind
them the dreamless sleep of youth. Friar Laurence says:--
"Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye,
And where care lodges, sleep can never lie;
But where unbruisèd youth with unstuffed brain
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign."
Shakespeare describes, too, with lifelike fidelity, the causes of
insomnia, which are not weariness or physical pain, but undue mental
anxiety. He constantly contrasts the troubled sleep of those burdened
with anxieties and cares, with the happy lot of the laborer whose
physical weariness insures him a tranquil night's repose. Henry VI.
says:--
"And to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Are far beyond a prince's delicates."