So long as we are, nationally, what we are, and so long as there are
those who see filth because it hangs like a film forever before their
eyes, there are parts and chapters, paragraphs and quotations and
passages in Burton which we must pass over with a mere nod lest evil
befall the man who writes and he who publishes this book. For, from
a discussion of over-eating and under-eating, Burton considers what
he calls Retention and Evacuation, weighing the pros and cons in re
sexual gratification and continence. Repression and prohibition too
closely observed are, to the notion of Burton, not conducive to the
higher life. His is akin to the Baxian philosophy, which, rudely put,
compares the _telos_ of life to a kind of game of whist in which the
player, that is, the human race, endeavors with all its might to make
six necessary tricks: (1) good and sufficient food and drink; (2)
satisfactory and comfortable housing; (3) warm and proper clothing;
(4) fuel and light; (5) unhindered locomotion, and (6) adequate sexual
satisfaction. With these accomplished, Bax thinks, the final purpose of
the deal, which is the extended horizon, the vision, the satisfactory
life will be quite impossible. So long as man or woman lacks any one of
these, his or her horizon must necessarily be filled with longing for
the desired or the lacking thing. But when all these have become part
of the ordinary life, then they cease to be objects of interest, so
that the mind is free for higher things. Lacking any one of these real
physical necessities, a man may be compared to one with the stomachache
and unable to rise to any considerations other than his ailment. Cure
him and he is ready to go on with his writing, his making of a sonata,
his painting of a picture. The position seems to be pregnant with
common sense and one recalls Benvenuto Cellini getting hampering things
out the way so that the path for the real business may be open.
Indeed, that a vast field for speculation is open in this respect
seems to be proven by the fact that Americans and English people,
Americans especially, are much occupied with the first of the tricks,
or questions of diet. The names of Upton Sinclair, of Dr. Tilden,
of Dr. Christian, to mention a few, spring to mind. We remember the
advertisements and the chewing gum people claiming health-giving
properties for their product; we see cards in the cars bidding us eat
meat, ham, health bread, yeast; Coca Cola is urged upon us together
with a half hundred other drinks, and ice cream, and mouth washes, and
dentrifices, and near-beer. There is no appeal to other than desire.
And yet, it seems that many of the things urged upon us do not make for
wholesome living. Certainly I get along very well without nine-tenths
of them. Or to tell the truth I find some of the things urged upon us
as being far from desirable. For if that physiology I learned as a lad
has not passed into the realm of superstition, then I should say that
chewing gum, for instance, was a something better avoided than sought.
The idea would interest Burton vastly as it interests me. For as whoso
chews constantly, whether tobacco or gum, must needs use saliva, and,
therefore, there must be constant secretion of ptyalin, so that at meal
times, when a supply of ptyalin is necessary to change starchy matters
into glucose, there must needs be insufficient ptyalin, wherefore
the first act of digestion would not be completed, and, therefore, a
condition of indigestion would be exacerbated and not relieved.
But to return to Burton. Just as he tells us that the people seem
ready to listen to anything that flatters their self esteem, so we
of today lend too ready an ear to the superheated atmosphere men,
to the chautauqua spell-binders and lyceum lecturers, the patriotic
orators and the pinchbeck uplifters. Accordingly we have become as it
were hypnotized into a kind of belief that all men born between the
Canadian border and the Rio Grande are automatically ambitious, brave,
courteous, distinguished, energetic, frank, generous, healthy and
all the rest. Especially healthy. We are, indeed, in our own conceit
possessed of all the good qualities, and are national monopolists of
all desirable temperaments. Wherefore it seems strange that a large
percentage of our advertisements are devoted to the recital of ills
that afflict men, together with an offering of the nostrums to cure
from Ague down to Pyorrhea. So a stranger to our civilization would
certainly be led to judge us as by our advertisements, as a people
on the verge of physical exhaustion. As for that melancholy of which
Burton writes, and of which he seeks a cure, what of the pictures as
given in such more or less true to life books and stories as _Many
Marriages_, as _One of Ours_, as _Dust_, as Ruth Suckow’s _Renters_, as
the people of Ben Hecht, or of Miss Winslow. Do you find pictures of
a nation gay and jovial? Of a people jealous of liberty and quick on
the trigger to resent encroachment? Of men and women and children full
of gladness because of sunlight and shadow, of mountain and valley,
of sunrise and sunset? Not by any means. On the contrary, you find
pictures of people worried, discontented, oppressed, full of _ennui_,
eager to escape from themselves and at outs with their surroundings.
Just such a melancholy people as Burton tells of.
And another thing is important, bearing as it does on those six
words with which Burton offers his anodyne, for, obviously, the book
of Burton is but as dust and ashes if it bears no relation to your
life and mine, and deals with a something in which we are not at all
interested. This is that other thing. Seeing ourselves, we behold a
people priding itself on a purely theoretical activity, while at heart
the people should rather be styled physically lazy. Consider. Ten,
twenty, thirty thousand of us will sit watching a league game, or a
prize fight, or a football match, but few, very few of that same crowd
will join in a scrub game, or put on the gloves and take a pounding.
That is so true as to need no demonstration. We do not play, but we
look on at play. We take our exercise by proxy. Or on a Sunday, will
your tired businessman walk five or ten miles into the country? Or
will he drop into a street car, or into a Ford, or into another man’s
car? Nor are things different with the man in the country. Given a
spare hour and there is a squatting in the shade of the barn, or a
buggy ride to the nearest brush arbor preacher, or on week day a
dragging to the nearest picture show where he sits in vitiated air
gazing idly at shadows satisfied to waste time looking at what is
almost never an accurate and truthful representation of life. So, if
you will but go about with open eyes, you will see a widespread spirit
of unrest and semi-melancholia but no enthusiastic or joyous spirit.
Mind you, we must exclude exciting things such as Coney Islands and
Electric parks, for they, after all, are but commercialized things
to make those overcome by dreariness forget, and he who mistakes
such excitements for pleasure has a mean and wretched point of view.
Foolish wastefulness and ugly riot is not joy. That is true joy which
helps us, invigorates us, enriches our lives. If we realized that, if
we determined to live life more on our own terms, to enjoy the world
about us, the natural world and not the artificial, the real thing and
not the froth and ripple, there would be fewer books written about
sulky, moody wives, dull, preoccupied and discontented youths, Main
Streets of hopelessness, Spoon Rivers of pessimism, cities of grotesque
dullness--for such are the dominant notes in present-day literature.
I reject the obviously false pictures made by O. Henry for popular
consumption, for such can hardly be called true pictures, being
conventional and rather unpleasing representations of an impossible
world of youthful innocence and manly perfection.
I shall not spend time in drawing parallels between the social
conditions of Burton’s time and our own. The application is easy.
Burton lived and made his book in the midst of a kind of buzzing
religious confusion. The full splendor of the Elizabethan dramatist
had not burst on the world in glory and there was all the gloomy
shadowland of religious intolerance. His book was published in 1621
and the writing and preparation took, we know not how many years. So
we think of influences and of social atmosphere. We remember that
uncheerful thoughts occupied the minds of men because of many things.
The ponderous and seriously stupid man was abroad and things were
looming up that made later for all that puritanical prohibition under
the Commonwealth; that resulted in the closing of all theaters in 1642,
and much more. Again, there were too many bibles for comfort, each
bible with its fanatic ready to make others fight for it--the Douay
bible in 1609, the King James bible in 1611; Miles Coverdale’s bible
in 1535; Cramer’s bible in 1540. There were other burdening things,
too--Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the dull tragedians Greene and
Peele, and Kyd, and Nash, and Marlowe; John Lyly’s _Euphues_; burnings
and pressings to death, public whippings, lifelong imprisonments,
the suppression of expressed opinion, the see-sawing of Catholic and
Protestant tyrannies. With all this there were none of the glories
to be found abroad, none of the magnificencies of Michael Angelo, of
Titian, of Raphael, of Palestrina, of Montaigne. And there was the echo
and fruit of European wars and that more or less acute _malaise_ that
affects all nations following any wholesale man-killing. For they were
days of the French religious wars, of the lively career of Philip II
of Spain, of the Dutch rebellion, or the Armada. They were the days
following the stir created by Luther and Calvin and Loyola. Not that
all these happened at once, nor in the same years, but the disturbances
created by them were rife.
Looking about then, on the society around him, the old divine and
student saw much that seemed to him very like hopeless confusion, much
that looked perilous. Above all there was interference--fulminations
against the manner of living, against the manner of dressing, against
anything and everything. Then, as now, there were complaints anent the
growing levity. You may read them in Burton and you may read them in
old Harrison’s _Chronologie_. “... women’s ... staring attire as in
time past was supposed meet for none but light housewives only now is
become a habit for chaste and sober matrons. What shall I say of their
doublets with pendant cod-pieces on the breast full of jags and cuts,
and sleeves of sundry colors? Their galligascons to beat out their bums
and make their attire to fit plum round (as they term it) about them.”
The same old complaints, you see. The main difference I find between
that day and ours was in the case of the farmer who seems to have had
the best of it in the sixteenth and seventeenth century before all
the things that he had to buy were taxed to support infant industry.
Harrison comments on the fact that though rents had risen, “the farmer
... thinks his gains very small toward the end of his term if he have
not six or seven years rent lying by him therewith to purchase a
new lease.” In short, so well situated was the farmer in the day of
Harrison, and matters had not changed for the worse up to the days of
Burton, that it was written that the farmer’s affairs “shall never
trouble him more than the hair of his beard when the barber hath washed
and shaved it from his chin.”
So in the interference all about, Burton stood for moderation, not
furiously denouncing at any time, but frowning upon those who are
forever laying down rules and regulations as to this, that and the
other; denouncing those who overeat, mildly; denouncing mildly too
those “who draw ... mischief on their heads by too ceremonious and
strict diet, being over precise, Cockney like and curious in their
observation of meats, times ... just so many ounces at dinner ... so
much at supper, not a little more, not a little less of such meat
and at such hours.” He sees danger too rolling up for those who are
“tired of everything, displeased with it all, weary of life,” and he
is no less suspicious of those who mistake a feverish activity for
real busy-ness, thus coming close to the aforementioned Dr. Strahan
who holds that “it is not probable that the civilization of any of
the nations of antiquity had anything like the same injurious effect
upon the people that our modern Western civilization has. None of the
earlier peoples ever experienced the feverish haste, the terrible wear
and tear, and the prolonged mental strain suffered by most of the
civilized peoples of this latter part of the century. Tranquillity
and repose have almost become unknown. The news of yesterday from the
whole known world is presented to us each morning with our coffee....
We take our rest as we fly through space at fifty or sixty miles an
hour, and expect to find ourselves fitted for the labors of another day
on rising.” But it is significant that while the alienist wrote that
thirty years ago, since then the speeds that he deplores have increased
and man has tried to absorb automobiles, flying machines, radios and
what not. But we bear in mind that he held that the feverish life thus
described produced suicides, lunatics, criminals, and recruited the
inmates for the asylums for the blind, deaf, dumb and idiotic. Then
there is a Dr. O’Dee, much quoted by Strahan, who pointed out that
“white men destroy themselves (by committing suicide) in the United
States at the average rate of 40 to a million inhabitants, while
negroes, living in the same environment but not under the same strain,
have a suicide record of ten times less frequent.” So the complaint
rings through the ages--Strahan bemoaning the feverish haste before the
advent of automobiles, Burton doing the same before the days of stage
coaches or newspapers. Is it then a world growing steadily more mad?
Perhaps the truth is that man of today is much as man was thirty years
ago, and the man of thirty years ago was much as was the man in 1621.
Mere material advancement has made no change in him and your man of an
excitable temperament can get as much feverish excitement by dancing
about a May pole as another could in riding a merry-go-round, or still
another by shooting along a road in a racing auto. There is quite as
much excitement in shooting craps as in playing Ma Jong, and it is
quite possible to become hilarious over a game of ping-pong.
But the high road to melancholia, in Burton’s opinion, is what he calls
“voluntary solitariness,” and he is all against day dreaming and the
idle building of castles in the air. Well enough at the beginning,
he holds, but “so delightsome these toys are at first, they could
spend days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such
contemplation, phantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams,
and they will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt. So
pleasant their vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks
and necessary business, they cannot address themselves to them, or
almost to any study of employment, these phantastical and bewitching
thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually, set
upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, etc., and
detain them, they cannot, I say, go about their necessary business,
stave off or extricate themselves, but are forever musing, moralizing,
melancholizing and carried along ... they run on in this labyrinth
of anxious and solicitous melancholy meditations, and cannot well
or willingly refrain, or easily leave off, winding and unwinding
themselves, as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until
at last the scene is turned all of a sudden, by some bad object, and
they, being now habituated in such vain meditations and solitary
places, can endure no company, can ruminate of nothing but harsh and
distasteful objects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, discontent and weariness
of life surprise them in a moment, and they can think of nothing else;
continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes opened but this
infernal plague of melancholy seizeth upon them, and terrifies their
souls, representing some dismal object to their minds, which now by no
means, by no labor can they avoid, _haeret lateri letalis arundo_--the
deadly arrow remains in their sides--they cannot be rid of it, they
cannot resist.”
A remarkable passage that, I think, and one which well describes the
gradual sinking into the slough of despondency of the recluse. Yet
Burton discriminates. He is careful to show that there is a profitable
solitude, a withdrawing from the noise and confusion to the end that
minds may be free to find themselves and to work out desired problems.
For Euclid, it is clear, could never resolve his mathematical problems
in the ruck of the market place. There is such a thing as rigorous
thinking which is not to be confused with mooning. Between the two
is a gulf fixed and the one way leads to strength, the other to the
madhouse. There was no madness in the solitude of Thoreau, though
there certainly was not sanity in the solitude of Simeon Stylites on
his pillar.
_En passant_, it seems well to say here that there has been cited the
melancholy of certain great men as proof of the theory that genius
and madness are allied. But that is pernicious nonsense. True we know
that Chateaubriand, Napoleon, Cowper, Rousseau, Lamartine and many
others tried to put an end to their lives. True too that the Epicurean
as well as the Stoics preached the freedom to terminate life when
the cloud of despair and melancholy was upon them. True also that by
their own hands died Charondas, and Themistocles, and Demosthenes,
and Zeno, and Hannibal, and Cato, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and
Chatterton, and Clive, and Boulanger, and a half hundred others. But
the cases have special features and there is a rational as well as an
irrational suicide. As for others, men of genius who have allowed their
melancholy to overcome them, there is food for thought in the fact that
the expenditure of energy in one direction left them weak in another.
Generalization will not do, is unsafe, and leads nowhere.
So we pass to the self-pitying folk, the “half idiots” of Burton,
those who allow themselves to slide to the border line, who coddle
themselves into madness, the auto-hypnotizers that he has in mind. For
the world is full of them--half baked intelligentsia. They are the
decadents. They are the emotionalists. You see their kind pictured
in the sorry hero of Sherwood Anderson’s _Many Marriages_, a fellow
who, did he live next house to yours, you would regard with keen
suspicion, knowing his queerness. Certainly no healthy specimen. Or
remember the character Des Essintes in Huysman’s _A Rebours_, one all
wrapped in idle meditation who banishes everything that is wholesome
and natural from his life. Or see the black side of Baudelaire in his
_Reve Parisien_. No. It will not do to sheer from the line in thought
or in deed. We must, we must and we must believe in discipline of
self. We must hold fast to a belief in self reliance and independence.
And we must cleave to that habit which Burton sums up in a half dozen
words. Seeing Rossini mooning until he became a victim of his own
self-manufactured devil, we wish that he had been possessed of more
self-reliance, but we do not attribute his folly to his genius. So
also learning that Voltaire was on occasion hypochrondriacal and that
Moliere at one period of his life suffered from melancholia, we do not
generalize, saying, thus they were because they were great, but rather,
if we are wise, look upon the misfortunes of both exactly as we regard
the club foot of Byron, or the unfortunate accident that deprived the
Count de Zichy of an arm and so hampered an extraordinary pianist. That
is what Burton holds too, and we mark his closing words in the passage
on Solitude: “Thou hast lost thyself wilfully, cast away thyself, thou
thyself are the efficient cause of thine own misery, by not resisting
such vain cogitations, but giving way unto them.” For we may discover
men without mental aberration whose names we place high. I cite
William Morris, Galileo, Thackeray, Huxley, Thoreau, Henry George,
Leonardo da Vinci, Moses, Whitman--masculine men all, fellows without
fads, who did a day’s work and faced the little trivialities of life
too. For each of them, and more, was given to rigorous thinking and not
to mooning. That is important to remember.