All doubtless remember the story which is told of the witty Charles II.
and the Royal Society: How one day the King brought to the attention of
its members a most curious and inexplicable phenomenon, which he stated
thus: "When you put a trout into a pail full of water, why does not the
water overflow?" The savans, naturally enough, were surprised, and
suggested many wise, but fruitless explanations; until at last one of
their number, having no proper reverence for royalty in his heart,
demanded that the experiment should actually be tried. Then, of course,
it was proved that there was no phenomenon to be explained. The water
overflowed fast enough. Indeed, it is chronicled that the evolutions of
this lively member of the piscatory tribe were so brisk, that the
difficulty was the exact opposite of what was anticipated, namely, how
to keep the water in.
This story may be a pure fable, but the lesson it teaches is true and
important. It illustrates forcibly the facility with which even wise men
accept doubtful propositions, and then apply the whole power of their
minds to explain them, and perhaps to defend them. Latterly one hears
constantly of the physical decay which threatens the American people,
because of their unwise and disproportioned stimulation of the brain. It
is assumed, almost as an axiom, that there is "a deficiency of physical
health in America." Especially is it assumed that great mental progress,
either of races or of individuals, has been generally purchased at the
expense of the physical frame. Indeed, it is one of the questions of the
day, how the saints, that is, those devoted to literary and professional
pursuits, shall obtain good and serviceable bodies; or, to widen the
query, how the finest intellectual culture can exist side by side with
the noblest physical development; or, to bring this question into a form
that shall touch us most sharply, how our boys and girls can obtain all
needful knowledge and mental discipline, and yet keep full of graceful
and buoyant vitality.
What do we say to the theories and convictions which are underneath this
language? What answer shall we make to these questions? What answer
ought we to make? Our first reply would be, We doubt the proposition.
We ask for the broad and firm basis of undoubted facts upon which it
rests. And we enter an opposite plea. We affirm that the saints have as
good bodies as other people, and that they always did have. We deny that
they need to be patched up or watched over any more than their
neighbors. They live as long and enjoy as much as the rest of mankind.
They can endure as many hard buffets, and come out as tough and strong,
as the veriest dolt whose intellectual bark foundered in the unsounded
depths of his primer. The world's history through, the races which are
best taught have the best endowment of health. Nay, in our own New
England, with just such influences, physical, mental, and moral, as
actually exist, there is no deterioration in real vitality to weep over.
We hold, then, on this subject very different opinions from those which
prevail in many quarters. We believe in the essential healthfulness of
literary culture, and in the invigorating power of sound knowledge.
Emphatically do we believe that our common schools have been in the
aggregate a positive physical benefit. We are confident, that, just to
the degree that the unseen force within a man receives its rightful
development, does vigorous life flow in every current that beats from
heart to extremities. With entire respect for the opinions of others,
even while we cannot concur with them, with a readiness to admit that
the assertion of those opinions may have been indirectly beneficial, we
wish to state the truth as it looks to us, to exhibit the facts which
bear upon this subject in the shape and hue they have to our own minds,
and to give the grounds of our conviction that a cultivated mind is the
best friend and ally of the body.
* * * * *
Would it not be singular, if anything different were true? You say, and
you say rightly, that the best part of a man is his mind and soul, those
spiritual elements which divide him from all the rest of the creation,
animate or inanimate, and make him lord and sovereign over them all. You
say, and you say wisely, that the body, however strong and beautiful, is
nothing,--that the senses, however keen and vigorous, are nothing,--that
the outward glories, however much they may minister to sensual
gratification, are nothing,--unless they all become the instruments for
the upbuilding of the immortal part in man. But what a tremendous
impeachment of the wisdom or power of the Creator you are bringing, if
you assert that the development of this highest part, whether by its
direct influence on the body, or indirectly by the habits of life which
it creates, is destructive of all the rest, nay, self-destructive! You
may show that every opening bud in spring, and every joint, nerve, and
muscle in every animate creature, are full of proofs of wise designs
accomplishing their purposes, and it shall all count for less than
nothing, if you can demonstrate that the mind, in its highest, broadest
development, brings anarchy into the system,--or, mark it well,
produces, or tends to produce, habits of living ruinous to health, and
so ruinous to true usefulness. At the outset, therefore, the very fact
that the mind is the highest creation of Divine wisdom would force us to
believe that that development of it, that increase of knowledge, that
sharpening of the faculties, that feeding of intellectual hunger, which
does not promote joy and health in every part, must be false and
illegitimate indeed.
And it is hardly too much to say, that, in a rational being, thought is
almost synonymous with vitality of all sorts. The brain throws out its
network of nerves to every part of the body; and those nerves are the
pathways along which it sends, not alone physical volitions, but its
mental force and high intelligence, to mingle by a subtile chemistry
with every fibre, and give it a finer life and a more bounding
elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of
experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no
thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and
inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less
defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had
high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain
a magazine of reserved power wherewith to support the faltering body: a
prophecy not wide apart, perhaps, from any broad and candid observation
of human life.
And who can fail to remember what superior resources a cultivated mind
has over one sunk in sloth and ignorance,--how much wider an outlook,
how much larger and more varied interests, and how these things support
when outward props fail, how they strengthen in misfortune and pain, and
keep the heart from anxieties which might wear out the body? Scott,
dictating "Ivanhoe" in the midst of a torturing sickness, and so rising,
by force of a cultivated imagination, above all physical anguish, to
revel in visions of chivalric splendor, is but the type of men
everywhere, who, but for resources supplied by the mind, would have sunk
beneath the blows of adverse fortune, or else sought forgetfulness in
brutalizing and destructive pleasures. Sometimes a book is better far
than medicine, and more truly soothing than the best anodyne. Sometimes
a rich-freighted memory is more genial than many companions. Sometimes a
firm mind, that has all it needs within itself, is a watchtower to which
we may flee, and from which look down calmly upon our own losses and
misfortunes. He who does not understand this has either had a most
fortunate experience, or else has no culture, which is really a part of
himself, woven into the very texture of the soul. So, if there were no
facts, considering the mind, and who made it, and how it is related to
the body, and how, when it is a good mind and a well-stored mind, it
seems to stand for all else, to be food and shelter and comfort and
friend and hope, who could believe anything else than that a
well-instructed soul could do nought but good to its servant the body?
* * * * *
After all, we cannot evade, and we ought not to seek to evade, the
testimony of facts. No cause can properly stand on any theory, however
pleasant and cheering, or however plausible. What, then, of the facts,
of the painful facts of experience, which are said to tell so different
a tale? This,--that the physical value of education is in no way so
clearly demonstrated as by these very facts. We know what is the
traditional picture of the scholar,--pale, stooping, hectic, hurrying
with unsteady feet to a predestined early grave; or else morbid,
dyspeptic, cadaverous, putting into his works the dark tints of his own
inward nature. At best, he is painted as a mere bookworm, bleached and
almost mildewed in some learned retirement beneath the shadow of great
folios, until he is out of joint with the world, and all fresh and
hearty life has gone out of him. Who cannot recall just such pictures,
wherein one knows not which predominates, the ludicrous or the pitiful?
We protest against them all. In the name of truth and common-sense
alike, we indignantly reject them. We have a vision of a sturdier
manhood: of the genial, open countenance of an Irving; of the homely,
honest strength that shone in every feature of a Walter Scott; of the
massive vigor of a Goethe or a Humboldt. How much, too, is said of the
physical degeneracy of our own people,--how the jaw is retreating, how
the frame is growing slender and gaunt, how the chest flattens, and how
tenderly we ought to cherish every octogenarian among us, for that we
are seeing the last of them! If this is intended to be a piece of
pleasant badinage, far be it from us to arrest a single smile it may
awaken. But if it is given as a serious description, from which serious
deductions can be drawn, then we say, that, as a delineation, it is, to
a considerable extent, purely fanciful,--as an argument, utterly so. The
facts, so far as they are ascertained, point unwaveringly to this
conclusion,--that every advance of a people in knowledge and refinement
is accompanied by as striking an advance in health and strength.
Try this question, if you please, on the largest possible scale. Compare
the uneducated savage with his civilized brother. His form has never
been bent by confinement in the school-room. Overburdening thoughts have
never wasted his frame. And if unremitting exercise amid the free airs
of heaven will alone make one strong, then he will be strong. Is the
savage stronger? Does he live more years? Can he compete side by side
with civilized races in the struggle for existence? Just the opposite is
true. Our puny boys, as we sometimes call them, in our colleges, will
weigh more, lift more, endure more than any barbarian race of them all.
This day the gentle Sandwich-Islanders are wasting like snow-wreaths, in
contact with educated races. This day our red men are being swept before
advancing civilization like leaves before the breath of the hurricane.
And it requires no prophet's eye to see, that, if we do not give the
black man education as well as freedom, an unshackled mind as well as
unshackled limbs, he, too, will share the same fate.
To all this it may naturally be objected, that the reason so many savage
races do not display the greatest physical stamina is not so much
intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,--or because
they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts,
eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to
starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of
savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which
diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what
have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? For what
are self-control and self-care, but the just fruits of intelligence? But
in truth it is a combination of all these influences, and not any of
them alone, that enables the civilized man to outlive and outrival his
barbarian brother. He succeeds, not simply because of the superior
address and sagacity which education gives him, though that, no doubt,
has much to do with it; not altogether because his habits of life are
better, though we would not underrate their value; but equally because
the culture of the brain gives a finer life to every red drop in his
arteries, and greater hardihood to every fibre which is woven into his
flesh. If it is not so, how do you explain the fact that our colored
soldier, fighting in his native climate, with the same exposure in
health and the same care in sickness, succumbs to wounds and diseases
over which his white comrade triumphs? Or how will you explain analogous
facts in the history of disease among other uneducated races? Our
explanation is simple. As the slightest interfusion of carbon may change
the dull iron into trenchant steel, so intelligence working through
invisible channels may add a new temper to the physical nature. And thus
it may be strictly true that it is not only the mind and soul which
slavery and ignorance wrong, but the body just as much.
* * * * *
It may be said, and perhaps justly, that a comparison between races so
unlike is not a fair comparison. Take, then, if you prefer, the
intelligent and unintelligent periods in the history of the same race.
The old knights! Those men with mail-clad bodies and iron natures, who
stand out in imagination as symbols of masculine strength! The old
knights! They were not scholars. Their constitutions were not ruined by
study, or by superfluous sainthood of any kind. They were more at home
with the sword than the pen. They loved better "to hear the lark sing
than the mouse squeak." So their minds were sufficiently dormant. How
was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier
on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the
armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their
degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London
Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of
those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept
the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them
has a hilt large enough to be grasped by a man of this generation. Of
races who have left behind them no methodical records, and whose story
is preserved only in the rude rhymes of their poets and ruder
chronicles, it is not safe to make positive affirmations; but all the
indications are that the student of to-day is a larger and stronger man
than the warrior of the Middle Ages.
If we come down to periods of historical certainty, no one will doubt
that the England of the present hour is more educated than the England
of fifty years ago, or that the England of fifty years since had a
broader diffusion of intelligence than the England of a century
previous. Yet that very intelligence has prolonged life. An Englishman
lives longer to-day than he did in 1800, and longer yet than in 1700.
Here is a curious proof. Annuities calculated on a certain rate of life
in 1694 would yield a fortune to those who issued them. Calculated at
the same rate in 1794, they would ruin them; for the more general
diffusion of knowledge and refinement had added, I am not able to say
how many years to the average British life. Observe how this statement
is confirmed by some wonderful statistics preserved at Geneva. From 1600
to 1700 the average length of life in that city was 13 years 3 months.
From 1700 to 1750 it was 27 years 9 months. From 1750 to 1800, 31 years
3 months. From 1800 to 1833, 43 years 6 months.
One more pertinent fact. Take in England any number of families you
please, whose parents can read and write, and an equal number of
families whose parents cannot read and write, and the number of children
in the latter class of families who will die before the age of five
years will greatly exceed that in the former class,--some thirty or
forty per cent. So surely does a thoughtful ordering of life come in the
train of intelligence. If faith is to be placed in statistics of any
sort, then it holds true in foreign countries that human life is long in
proportion to the degree that knowledge, refinement, and virtue are
diffused. That is, sainthood, so far from destroying the body, preserves
it.
* * * * *
I anticipate the objection which may be made to our last argument.
Abroad, we are told, there is such an element of healthy, out-door life,
that any ill effects which might naturally follow in the train of
general education are neutralized. Abroad, too, education with the
masses is elementary, and advanced also with more moderation than with
us. Abroad, moreover, the whole social being is not pervaded with the
intense intellectual activity and fervor which are so characteristic
especially of New England life.
Come home, then, to our own Massachusetts, which some will have is
school-mad. What do you find? Here, in a climate proverbially changeable
and rigorous,--here, where mental and moral excitements rise to
fever-heat,--here, where churches adorn every landscape, and
school-houses greet us at every corner, and lyceums are established in
every village,--here, where newspapers circulate by the hundred
thousand, and magazines for our old folks, and "Our Young Folks," too,
reach fifty thousand,--here, in Massachusetts, health is at its climax:
greater and more enduring than in bonnie England, or vine-clad France,
or sunny Italy. I read some statistics the other day, and I have ever
since had a greater respect for the land of "east-winds, and salt-fish
and school-houses," as scandalous people have termed Massachusetts. What
do these statistics say? That, while in England the deaths reach
annually 2.21 per cent of the whole population, and in France 2.36 per
cent, and in Italy 2.94 per cent, and in Austria 3.34 per cent, in
Massachusetts, the deaths are only 1.82 per cent annually. Even in
Boston, with its large proportion of foreign elements, the percentage of
deaths is only 2.35. It may be said, in criticism of these statements,
that in our country statistics are not kept with sufficient accuracy to
furnish correct data. However this may be in our rural districts, it
certainly is not true of the metropolis. The figures are not at hand,
but they exist, and they prove conclusively that those wards in Boston
which have a population most purely native reach a salubrity unexcelled.
So that, with all the real drawbacks of climate, and the pretended
drawbacks of unnatural or excessive mental stimulus, the health here is
absolutely unequalled by that of any country in Europe. Certainly, if
the mental and moral sainthood which we have does not build up the body,
it cannot be said that it does any injury to it.
Have we noted what a splendid testimony the war which has just closed
has given to the physical results of our New England villages and put
into the ranks of our army--young men who learned the alphabet at four,
who all through boyhood had the advantages of our common-school system,
who had felt to the full the excitement of the intellectual life about
them--have stood taller, weighed heavier, fought more bravely and
intelligently, won victory out of more adverse circumstances, and, what
is more to the point, endured more hardship with less sickness, than a
like number of any other race on earth. We care not where you look for
comparison, whether to Britain, or to France, or to Russia, where the
spelling-book has almost been tabooed, or to Spain, where in times past
the capacity to read the Bible was scarcely less than rank heresy, at
least for the common people. This war has been brought to a successful
issue by the best educated army that ever fought on battle-field, or, as
the new book has it, by "the thinking bayonet," by men whose physical
manhood has received no detriment from their intellectual culture.
These assertions are founded upon statistics which have been preserved
regiments whose members were almost exclusively native-born. And the
results are certainly in accordance with all candid observation. It may,
indeed, be said that the better health of our army has been after all
the result of the better care which the soldier has taken of himself. We
answer, the better care was the product of his education. It may be said
again that this health was owing in a great measure to the superior
watchfulness exercised over the soldier by others, by the Government, by
the Sanitary Commission, and by State agencies. Then we reply, that this
tenderness of the soldier, if tenderness it be, and this sagacity, if
sagacity prompted the care, were both the offspring of that high
intelligence which is the proper result of popular education.
* * * * *
There is but one possible mode of escape from such testimony. This whole
train of argument is inconclusive, it may be asserted, because what is
maintained is not that intellectual culture is unhealthful, where it is
woven into the web of active life, but only where the pursuit of
knowledge is one's business. It may be readily allowed, that, where the
whole nature is kept alive by the breath of outward enterprise, when the
great waves of this world's excitements are permitted to roll with
purifying tides into the inmost recesses of the soul, the results of
mental culture may be modified. But what of the saints? What of the
literary men _par excellence_?
Ah! if you restrain us to that line of inquiry, the argument will be
trebly strong, and the facts grow overwhelmingly pertinent and
conclusive. Will you examine the careful registry of deaths in
Massachusetts which has been kept the last twenty years? It will inform
you that the classes whose average of life is high up, almost the
highest up, are with us the classes that work with the brain,--the
judges, the lawyers, the physicians, the clergymen, the professors in
your colleges. The very exception to this statement rather confirms than
contradicts our general position, that intellectual culture is
absolutely invigorating. The cultivators of the soil live longest. But
note that it is the educated, intelligent farmers, the farmers of
Massachusetts, the farmers of a State of common schools, the farmers who
link thought to labor, who live long. And doubtless, if they carried
more thought into their labor, if they were more intelligent, if they
were better educated, they would live yet longer. At any rate, in
England the cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry,
sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely
the farmer's lot, _plus_ education and _plus_ habits of mental activity,
is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless,
considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is
the advantage which he has even then over the purely literary classes.
Will you go to Harvard University and ascertain what becomes of her
children? Take up, then, Dr. Palmer's Necrology of the Alumni of Harvard
from 1851 to 1863. You will learn, that, while the average age of all
persons who in Massachusetts die after they have attained the period of
twenty years is but fifty years, the average age of Harvard graduates,
who die in like manner, is fifty-eight years. Thus you have, in favor of
the highest form of public education known in the State, a clear average
of eight years. You may examine backward the Triennial Catalogue as far
as you please, and you will not find the testimony essentially
different. The statement will stand impregnable, that, from the time
John Harvard founded our little College in the wilderness, to this hour,
when it is fast becoming a great University, with its schools in every
department, and its lectures covering the whole field of human
knowledge, the graduates have always attained a longevity surpassing
that of their generation.
And you are to observe that this comparison is a strictly just
comparison. We contrast not the whole community, old and young, with
those who must necessarily have attained manhood before they are a class
at all; but adults with adults, graduates with those of other avocations
who have arrived at the period of twenty years. Neither do we compare
the bright and peculiar luminaries of Harvard with the mass of
men,--though, in fact, it is well known that the best scholars live the
most years,--but we compare the whole body of the graduates, bright and
dull, studious and unstudious, with the whole body of the community.
* * * * *
To the array of evidence which may be brought from all the registries of
all the states and universities under heaven, some may triumphantly
exclaim, "Statistics are unworthy of trust." "To lie like statistics,"
"false as a fact," these are the stalest of witticisms. But the
objection to which they give point is practically frivolous. Grant that
statistics are to a certain degree doubtful, are they not the most
trustworthy evidence we have? And in the question at issue, are they not
the only evidence which has real force? And allowing their general
defectiveness, how shall we explain, that, though gathered from all
sides and by all kinds of people, they so uniformly favor education?
Why, if they must err, do they err so pertinaciously in one direction?
How does it happen, that, summon as many witnesses as you please, and
cross-question them as severely as you can, they never falter in this
testimony, that, where intelligence abounds, there physical vigor does
much more abound? that, where education is broad and generous, there the
years are many and happy?
If, therefore, facts can prove anything, it is that just such a
condition of life as that which is growing more and more general among
us, and which our common-school system directly fosters, where every man
is becoming an educated man,--where the farmer upon his acres, the
merchant at his desk, and the mechanic in his shop, no less than the
scholar poring over his books shall be in the truest sense
educated,--that such a condition is the one of all others which promotes
habits of thought and action, an elasticity of temper and a breadth of
vision and interest most conducive to health and vigor. It is the
fashion to talk of the appearance of superior robustness so
characteristic of our English brethren. But we suspect that in this
case, too, appearances are deceitful. That climate may produce in us a
restless energy inconsistent with rounded forms and rosy cheeks we
freely allow. But in strength and real endurance the New England
constitution will yield to none. And the stern logic of facts shows
beyond a peradventure, that here there are no influences, climatic or
intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the
future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education,
we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of
ever-increasing knowledge.
* * * * *
We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special
classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war
between the mind and the body,--for we consider that point to be already
demonstrated,--but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of
inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the
substantial truth of our position.
We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the
English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all.
Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose
names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits
would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when
human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long
did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured
their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of
fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only
the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the
dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and
marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton,
struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with
blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights
of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if
you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which
shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of
the century,--Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay,
Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,--all these, with scarcely an
exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it
with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living
the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted
to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry,
broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have
destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw
off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than
sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length
of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.
You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of
purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers.
You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of
excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid
notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of
erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just
the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the
thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we
could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at
the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must
figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the
Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That
resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose
names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy Taylor,
and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last
century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The
Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdalouë, and
Fénelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley
and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded
to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just
sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion
that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and
paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year
1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own
vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his
profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will
produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a
life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old
Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men
who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.
If now any one has a lurking doubt of the physical value of an active
and well-stored mind, let him pass from the preachers to the statesmen,
from the men who teach the wisdom of the world to come to the men who
administer the things of this world. Let him begin with the grand names
of the Long Parliament,--Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell,--and then gather
up all the great administrators of the next two centuries, down to the
octogenarians who are now foremost in the conduct of British affairs;
and if he wishes to widen his observation, let him pass over the Channel
to the Continent, and in France recall such names as Sully and
Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, Talleyrand and Guizot; in Austria,
Kaunitz and Metternich. And when he has made his list as broad, as
inclusive of all really great statesmanship everywhere as he can, find
his average; and if he can bring it much beneath seventy, he will be
more fortunate than we were when we tried the experiment.
Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,--these are the
royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
which for so many years they searched with telescopic eye. And yet
neither of them lived less than seventy-eight years. As for the men of
natural science, it looks as though they were spared by some
Providential provision, in order that they might observe and report for
long epochs the changes of this old earth of ours. Cuvier dying at
seventy-five, Sir Joseph Banks at seventy-seven, Buffon at eighty-one,
Blumenbach at eighty-eight, and Humboldt at fourscore and ten, are some
of the cases which make such a supposition altogether reasonable.
Cross the ocean, and you will find the same testimony, that mental
culture is absolutely favorable to physical endurance. The greatest men
in our nation's history, whether in walks of statesmanship, science, or
literature, almost without exception, have lived long. Franklin,
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the elder Adams, and Patrick Henry, in
earlier periods,--the younger Adams, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Choate, and
Everett, Irving, Prescott, Cooper, and Hawthorne, in later times,--are
cases in point. These men did not die prematurely. They grew strong by
the toil of the brain. And to-day the quartette of our truest
poets--Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes--are with us in the hale
years of a green age, never singing sweeter songs, never harping more
inspiring strains. Long may our ears hear their melodies!
* * * * *
If now we could enter the walks of private life, and study widely the
experience of individual men, we should have an interesting record
indeed, and a manifold and wellnigh irresistible testimony. Consider a
few remarkable, yet widely differing cases.
Who can read attentively the life of John Wesley, and not exclaim, if
varied and exhausting labor, if perpetual excitement and constant drafts
upon the brain, would ever wear a man out, he would have worn out? It
was his creative energy that called into existence a denomination, his
ardent piety that inspired it, his clear mind that legislated for it,
his heroic industry that did no mean part of the incessant daily toil
needful for its establishment. Yet this man of many labors, who through
a long life never knew practically the meaning of the word _leisure_,
says, at seventy-two, "How is it that I find the same strength that I
did thirty years ago, that my nerves are firmer, that I have none of the
infirmities of old age, and have lost several that I had in youth." And
ten years later, he devoutly records, "Is anything too hard for God? It
is now eleven years since I have felt such a thing as weariness." And he
continued till eighty-eight in full possession of his faculties,
laboring with body and mind alike to within a week of his death.
Joseph Priestley was certainly a very different man, but scarcely less
remarkable. No mean student in all branches of literature, a
metaphysician, a theologian, a man of science, he began life with a
feeble frame, and ended a hearty old age at seventy-one. He himself
declares at fifty-four, that, "so far from suffering from application to
study, I have found my health steadily improve from the age of eighteen
to the present time."
You would scarcely find a life more widely divided from these than that
of Washington Irving. Nevertheless, it is like them in one respect, that
it bears emphatic testimony to the real healthiness of mental exertion.
He was the feeblest of striplings at eighteen. At nineteen, Judge Kent
said, "He is not long for this world." His friends sent him abroad at
twenty-one, to see if a sea voyage would not husband his strength. So
pale, so broken, was he, that, when he stepped on board the ship, the
captain whispered, "There is a chap who will be overboard before we are
across!" Irving had, too, his share of misfortunes,--failure in
business, loss of investments, in earlier life some anxiety as to the
ways and means of support. Even his habits of study were hardly what the
highest wisdom would direct. While he was always genial and social, and
at times easy almost to indolence, when the mood seized him, he would
write incessantly for weeks and even for months, sometimes fourteen,
fifteen, or sixteen hours in a day. But he grew robust for half a
century, and writes, at seventy-five, that he has now "a streak of old
age."
* * * * *
The example of some of those who are said to have been worn out by
intense mental application furnishes perhaps the most convincing proof
of all that no reasonable activity of the mind ever warred with the best
health of the body. Walter Scott, we are told, wore out. And very
likely, to a certain extent, the statement is true. But what had he not
accomplished before he wore out? He had astonished the world with that
wonderful series of romances which place him scarcely second to any name
in English literature. He had sung those border legends which delighted
the ears of his generation. He had produced histories which show, that,
had he chosen, he might have been as much a master in the region of
historic fact as in the realm of imagination. He had edited other men's
works; he had written essays; he had lent himself with a royal
generosity to every one who asked his time or influence; and when,
almost an old man, commercial bankruptcy overtook him, and he sought to
lift the mountain of his debt by pure intellectual toil, he wore out.
But declining years, disappointed hopes, desperate exertions, may wear
anybody out. He wore out, but it was at more than threescore years, when
nine tenths of his generation had long slept in quiet graves,--when the
crowd of the thoughtless and indolent, who began life with him, had
rusted out in inglorious repose. Yes, Walter Scott wore out, if you call
that wearing out.
John Calvin, all his biographers say, wore out. Perhaps so;--but not
without a prolonged resistance. Commencing life with the frailest
constitution, he was, as early as twenty-five, a model of erudition, and
had already written his immortal work. For thirty years he was in the
heat and ferment of a great religious revolution. For thirty years he
was one of the controlling minds of his age. For thirty years he was the
sternest soldier in the Church Militant, bearing down stubborn
resistance by a yet more stubborn will. For thirty years neither his
brain nor his pen knew rest. And so at fifty-six this man of broken body
and many labors laid down the weapons of his warfare; but it was at
Geneva, where the public registers tell us that the average of human
life in that century was only nine years.
One writes words like these:--"John Kitto died, and his death was the
judgment for overwork, and overwork of a single organ,--the brain." And
who was John Kitto? A poor boy, the son a drunken father, subject from
infancy to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled
industry, and with an equally unparalleled neglect of the laws of
health; of whom it is scarcely too much to say literally, that he knew
no change, but from his desk to his bed, and from his bed to his desk
again. A voluminous writer, who, if he produced no work of positive
genius, has done more than any other man to illustrate the Scriptures,
and to make familiar and vivid the scenery, the life, the geography, and
the natural history of the Holy Land. And he died in the harness,--but
not so very early,--at fifty. And we say that he would have lived much
longer, had he given his constitution a fair chance. But when we
remember his passionate fondness for books, how they compensated him for
the want of wealth, comforts, and the pleasant voices of wife and
children that he could not hear, we grow doubtful. And we hear him
exclaim almost in rhapsody,--"If I were blind as well as deaf, in what a
wretched situation should I be! If I could not read, how deplorable
would be my condition! What earthly pleasure equal to the reading of a
good book? O dearest tomes! O princely and august folios! to obtain you,
I would work night and day, and forbid myself every sensual joy!" When
we behold the forlorn man, shut out by his misfortune from so many
resources, and finding more than recompense for this privation within
the four walls of his library, we are tempted to say, No, he would not
have lived as long; had he studied less, he would have remembered his
griefs more.
Of course it is easy to take exception to all evidence drawn from the
life and experience of individual men,--natural to say that one must
needs be somewhat old before he can acquire a great name at all, and
that our estimate considers those alone to whom mere prolongation of day
has given reputation, and forgets "the village Hampdens, the mute,
inglorious Miltons," the unrecorded Newtons, the voiceless orators,
sages, or saints who have died and made no sign. To this the simple
reply is, that individual cases, however numerous and striking, are not
relied upon to prove any position, but only to illustrate and confirm
one which general data have already demonstrated. Grant the full force
of every criticism, and then it remains true that the widest record of
literary life exhibits no tendency of mental culture to shorten human
life or to create habits which would shorten it. Indeed, we do not know
where to look for any broad range of facts which would indicate that
education here or anywhere else has decreased or is likely to decrease
health. And were it not for the respect which we cherish towards those
who hold it, we should say that such a position was as nearly pure
theory or prejudice or opinion founded on fragmentary data as any view
well could be.
* * * * *
But do you mean to assert that there is no such thing as intellectual
excess? that intellectual activity never injures? that unremitting
attention to mental pursuits, with an entire abstinence from proper
exercise and recreation, is positively invigorating? that robbing the
body of sleep, and bending it sixteen or eighteen hours over the desk,
is the best way to build it up in grace and strength? Of course no one
would say any such absurd things. There is a right and wrong use of
everything. Any part of the system will wear out with excessive use.
Overwork kills, but certainly not any quicker when it is overwork of the
mind than when it is overwork of the body. Overwork in the study is just
as healthful as overwork on the farm or at the ledger or in the smoky
shop, toiling and moiling, with no rest and no quickening thoughts.
Especially is it true that education does not peculiarly tempt a man to
excess.
But are you ready to maintain that there is no element of excess infused
into our common-school system? Certainly. Most emphatically there is
not. What, then, is there to put over against these terrible statements
of excessive labor of six or seven hours a day, under which young brains
are reeling and young spines are bending until there are no rosy-checked
urchins and blooming maids left among us? The inexorable logic of facts.
The public schools of Massachusetts were taught in the years 1863-4 on
an average just thirty-two weeks, just five days in a week, and, making
proper allowance for recesses and opening exercises, just five and a
quarter hours in a day. Granting now that all the boys and girls studied
during these hours faithfully, you have an average for the three hundred
and thirteen working days of the year of two hours and forty-one minutes
a day,--an amount of study that never injured any healthy child. But,
going back a little to youthful recollections, and considering the
amazing proclivity of the young mind to idleness, whispering, and fun
and frolic in general, it seems doubtful whether our children ever yet
attained to so high an average of actual study as two hours a day. As a
modification of this statement, it may be granted that in the cities and
larger towns the school term reaches forty weeks in a year. If you add
one hour as the average amount of study at home, given by pupils of over
twelve years, (and the allowance is certainly ample,) you have four
hours as the utmost period ever given by any considerable class of
children. That there is excess we freely admit. That there are easy
committee-men who permit too high a pressure, and infatuated teachers
who insist upon it, that there are ambitious children whom nobody can
stop, and silly parents who fondly wish to see their children
monstrosities of brightness, lisping Latin and Greek in their cradles,
respiring mathematics as they would the atmosphere, and bristling all
over with facts of natural science like porcupines, till every bit of
childhood is worked out of them,--that such things are, we are not
inclined to deny. But they are rare exceptions,--no more a part of the
system than white crows are proper representatives of the dusky and
cawing brotherhood.
Or yet again, do we mean to assert that no attention need be given to
the formation of right physical habits? or that bodily exercise ought
not to be joined to mental toils? or that the walk in the woods, the row
upon the quiet river, the stroll with rod in hand by the babbling brook,
or with gun on shoulder over the green prairies, or the skating in the
crisp December air on the glistening lake, ought to be discouraged? Do
we speak disrespectfully of dumb-bells and clubs and parallel bars, and
all the paraphernalia of the gymnasium? Are we aggrieved at the mention
of boxing-gloves or single-stick or foils? Would it shock our nervous
sensibilities, if our next-door neighbor the philosopher, or some
near-by grave and reverend doctor of divinity, or even the learned judge
himself, should give unmistakable evidence that he had in his body the
two hundred and odd bones and the five hundred and more muscles, with
all their fit accompaniments of joints and sinews, of which the
anatomists tell us? Not at all. Far from it. We exercise, no doubt, too
little. We know of God's fair world too much by description, too little
by the sight of our own eyes. Welcome anything which leads us out into
this goodly and glorious universe! Welcome all that tends to give the
human frame higher grace and symmetry! Welcome the gymnastics, too,
heavy or light either, if they will guide us to a more harmonious
physical development.
We ourselves own a set of heavy Indian-clubs, of middling Indian-clubs,
and of light Indian-clubs. We have iron dumb-bells and wooden
dumb-bells. We recollect with considerable satisfaction a veritable
bean-bag which did good service in the household until it unfortunately
sprung a-leak. In an amateur way we have tried both systems, and felt
the better for them. We have a dim remembrance of rowing sundry leagues,
and even of dabbling with the rod and line. We always look with friendly
eye upon the Harvard Gymnasium, whenever it looms up in actual or mental
vision. Never yet could we get by an honest game of cricket or base-ball
without losing some ten minutes in admiring contemplation. We bow with
deep respect to Dr. Windship and his heavy weights. We bow, if anything,
with a trifle more of cordiality to Dr. Lewis and his light weights.
They both have our good word. We think that they would have our example,
were it not for the fatal proclivity of solitary gymnastics to dulness.
If we have not risen to the high degrees in this noble order of muscular
Christians, we claim at least to be a humble craftsman and faithful
brother.
Speaking with all seriousness, we have no faith in mental activity
purchased at the expense of physical sloth. It is well to introduce into
the school, into the family, and into the neighborhood any movement
system which will exercise all the muscles of the body. But the educated
man is not any more likely to need this general physical development
than anybody else. Establish your gymnasium in any village, and the
farmer fresh from the plough, the mechanic from swinging the hammer or
driving the plane, will be just as sure to find new muscles that he
never dreamed of as the palest scholar of them all. And the diffusion of
knowledge and refinement, so far from promoting inactivity and banishing
recreations from life, directly feeds that craving for variety out of
which healthful changes come, and awakens that noble curiosity which at
fit seasons sends a man out to see how the wild-flower grows in the
woods, how the green buds open in the spring, how the foliage takes on
its painted autumn glory, which leads him to struggle through tangled
thickets or through pathless woods that he may behold the brook laughing
in cascade from rock to rock, or to breast the steep mountain that he
may behold from a higher outlook the wonders of the visible creation.
Other things being equal, the educated man in any vocation is quite as
likely as another to be active, quick in every motion and free in every
limb.
* * * * *
But admit all that is claimed. Admit that increasing intelligence has
changed the average of man's life from the twenty-five years of the
seventeenth century to the thirty-five of the eighteenth or the
forty-five years of the nineteenth century. Admit, too, that the best
educated men of this generation will live five or ten years more than
the least educated men. Ought we to be satisfied with things as they
are? Should we not look for more than the forty or fifty years of human
life? Assuredly. But it is not our superfluous sainthood which is
destroying life. It is not that we have too much saintliness, but too
little, too limited wisdom, too narrow intelligence, too small an
endowment of virtue and conscience. It is our fierce absorption in
outward plans which plants anxieties like thorns in the heart. It is out
sloth and gluttony which eat out vitality. It is our unbridled appetites
and passions which burn like a consuming fire in our breasts. It is our
unwise exposure which saps the strength and gives energy and force to
latent disease. These, tenfold more than any intense application of the
brain to its legitimate work, limit and destroy human life. The truly
cultivated mind tends to give just aims, moderate desires, and good
habits.
Ay, and when the true sainthood shall possess and rule humanity,--when
the fields of knowledge with their wholesome fruits shall tempt every
foot away from the forbidden paths of vice and sensual indulgence,--when
a wise intelligence shall cool the hot passions which dry up the
refreshing fountains of peace and joy in the heart,--when a heavenly
wisdom shall lift us above any bondage to this world's fortunes, and
when a good conscience and a lofty trust shall forbid us to be slaves to
any occupation lower than the highest,--when we stand erect and free,
clothed with a real saintliness,--then the years of our life may
increase, and man may go down to his grave "in a full age, like as a
shock of corn cometh in in his season."
Meanwhile we must stand firmly on this assertion, that, the more of
mental and moral sainthood our people achieve, the more that sainthood
will write fair inscriptions on their bodies, will shine out in
intelligence in their faces, will exhibit itself in graceful form and
motion, and thus add to the deeper and more lasting virtues physical
power, a body which shall be at once a good servant and the proper
representative of a refined and elevated soul.