I stood to-day watching harvesters at work, and a foolish envy took hold
upon me. To be one of those brawny, brown-necked men, who can string
their muscles from dawn to sundown, and go home without an ache to the
sound slumber which will make them fresh again for to-morrow's toil! I
am a man in the middle years, with limbs shaped as those of another, and
subject to no prostrating malady, yet I doubt whether I could endure the
lightest part of this field labour even for half an hour. Is that indeed
to be a man? Could I feel surprised if one of these stalwart fellows
turned upon me a look of good-natured contempt? Yet he would never dream
that I envied him; he would think it as probable, no doubt, that I should
compare myself unfavourably with one of the farm horses.
There comes the old idle dream: balance of mind and body, perfect
physical health combined with the fulness of intellectual vigour. Why
should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me, yet none
the less live for thought? Many a theorist holds the thing possible, and
looks to its coming in a better time. If so, two changes must needs come
before it; there will no longer exist a profession of literature, and all
but the whole of every library will be destroyed, leaving only the few
books which are universally recognized as national treasures. Thus, and
thus only, can mental and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.
It is idle to talk to us of "the Greeks." The people we mean when so
naming them were a few little communities, living under very peculiar
conditions, and endowed by Nature with most exceptional characteristics.
The sporadic civilization which we are too much in the habit of regarding
as if it had been no less stable than brilliant, was a succession of the
briefest splendours, gleaming here and there from the coasts of the
Aegean to those of the western Mediterranean. Our heritage of Greek
literature and art is priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for
us not the slightest value. The Greeks had nothing alien to study--not
even a foreign or a dead language. They read hardly at all, preferring
to listen. They were a slave-holding people, much given to social
amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry. Their ignorance was
vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods. Together with their fair
intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses. If we could see and speak
with an average Athenian of the Periclean age, he would cause no little
disappointment--there would be so much more of the barbarian in him, and
at the same time of the decadent, than we had anticipated. More than
possibly, even his physique would be a disillusion. Leave him in that
old world, which is precious to the imagination of a few, but to the
business and bosoms of the modern multitude irrelevant as Memphis or
Babylon.
The man of thought, as we understand him, is all but necessarily the man
of impaired health. The rare exception will be found to come of a stock
which may, indeed, have been distinguished by intelligence, but
represented in all its members the active rather than the studious or
contemplative life; whilst the children of such fortunate thinkers are
sure either to revert to the active type or to exhibit the familiar
sacrifice of body to mind. I am not denying the possibility of _mens
sana in corpore sano_; that is another thing. Nor do I speak of the
healthy people (happily still numerous) who are at the same time bright-
witted and fond of books. The man I have in view is he who pursues the
things of the mind with passion, who turns impatiently from all common
interests or cares which encroach upon his sacred time, who is haunted by
a sense of the infinity of thought and learning, who, sadly aware of the
conditions on which he holds his mental vitality, cannot resist the
hourly temptation to ignore them. Add to these native characteristics
the frequent fact that such a man must make merchandise of his
attainments, must toil under the perpetual menace of destitution; and
what hope remains that his blood will keep the true rhythm, that his
nerves will play as Nature bade them, that his sinews will bide the
strain of exceptional task? Such a man may gaze with envy at those who
"sweat in the eye of Phoebus," but he knows that no choice was offered
him. And if life has so far been benignant as to grant him frequent
tranquillity of studious hours, let him look from the reapers to the
golden harvest, and fare on in thankfulness.