BRAWN OR BRAIN.
Governor Wiseman (our oracular friend who talked in the style of an
oration) was with us this evening at the tea-table, and we were mentioning
the fact that about thirty colleges last summer in the United States
contested for the championship in boat-racing. About two hundred thousand
young ladies could not sleep nights, so anxious were they to know whether
Yale or Williams would be the winner. The newspapers gave three and four
columns to the particulars, the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all
parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair,
enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric
animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial
Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of Criticism for the other.
For the most part, we sympathized with the boys, and confess that at our
hotel we kept careful watch of the bulletin to see whose boat came in
ahead. We are disposed to applaud anything that will give our young men
muscular development. Students have such a tendency to lounge, and mope,
and chew, and eat almond-nuts at midnight, and read novels after they go to
bed, the candlestick set up on Webster's dictionary or the Bible, that we
prize anything that makes them cautious about their health, as they must be
if they would enter the list of contestants. How many of our country boys
enter the freshman class of college in robust health, which lasts them
about a twelvemonth; then in the sophomore they lose their liver; in the
junior they lose their stomach; in the senior they lose their back bone;
graduating skeletons, more fit for an anatomical museum than the bar or
pulpit.
"Midnight oil," so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene. Where
hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred. Kirk White, while
at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten
o'clock that night instead of three o'clock the next morning, he would have
been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all
collegians. Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the
religion bilious. We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong
stomach. Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric
juices. Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.
But, after all, there was something wrong about those summer boat-races. A
student with a stout arm, and great girth, and full chest, and nothing
else, is not at all admirable. Mind and body need to be driven tandem, the
body for the wheel horse and the intellect the leader. We want what is now
proposed in some directions--a grand collegiate literary race. Let the
mental contest be on the same week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard
and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among
scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and
mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors
McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt.
About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow,
oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters to swell the river of
knowledge on which they row. Right foot on right rib of the boat, and left
foot on the left rib--bend into it, my hearties, bend!--and our craft come
out four lengths ahead.
Give the brain a chance as well as the arm. Do not let the animal eat up
the soul. Let the body be the well-fashioned hulk, and the mind the white
sails, all hoisted, everything, from flying jib to spanker, bearing on
toward the harbor of glorious achievement. When that boat starts, we want
to be on the bank to cheer, and after sundown help fill the air with
sky-rockets.
"By the way," I said, "Governor Wiseman, do you not think that we need more
out-door exercise, and that contact with the natural world would have a
cheering tendency? Governor, do you ever have the blues?"
The governor, putting his knife across the plate and throwing his
spectacles up on his forehead, replied:
Almost every nature, however sprightly, sometimes will drop into a minor
key, or a subdued mood that in common parlance is recognized as "the
blues." There may be no adverse causes at work, but somehow the bells of
the soul stop ringing, and you feel like sitting quiet, and you strike off
fifty per cent from all your worldly and spiritual prospects. The immediate
cause may be a northeast wind, or a balky liver, or an enlarged spleen, or
pickled oysters at twelve o'clock the night before.
In such depressed state no one can afford to sit for an hour. First of all
let him get up and go out of doors. Fresh air, and the faces of cheerful
men, and pleasant women, and frolicsome children, will in fifteen minutes
kill moping. The first moment your friend strikes the keyboard of your soul
it will ring music. A hen might as well try on populous Broadway to hatch
out a feathery group as for a man to successfully brood over his ills in
lively society. Do not go for relief among those who feel as badly as you
do. Let not toothache, and rheumatism, and hypochondria go to see
toothache, rheumatism and hypochondria. On one block in Brooklyn live a
doctor, an undertaker and a clergyman. That is not the row for a nervous
man to walk on, lest he soon need all three. Throw back all the shutters of
your soul and let the sunlight of genial faces shine in.
Besides that, why sit ye here with the blues, ye favored sons and daughters
of men? Shone upon by such stars, and breathed on by such air, and sung to
by so many pleasant sounds, you ought not to be seen moping. Especially if
light from the better world strikes its aurora through your night sky,
ought you be cheerful. You can afford to have a rough luncheon by the way
if it is soon to end amid the banqueters in white. Sailing toward such a
blessed port, do not have your flag at half mast. Leave to those who take
too much wine "the gloomy raven tapping at the chamber door, on the night's
Plutonian shore," and give us the robin red-breast and the chaffinch. Let
some one with a strong voice give out the long-metre doxology, and the
whole world "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow."
"But do you not suppose, Governor Wiseman, that every man has his irritated
days?"
Yes, yes, responded the governor. There are times when everything seems to
go wrong. From seven o'clock a.m. till ten p.m. affairs are in a twist. You
rise in the morning, and the room is cold, and a button is off, and the
breakfast is tough, and the stove smokes, and the pipes burst, and you
start down the street nettled from head to foot. All day long things are
adverse. Insinuations, petty losses, meanness on the part of customers. The
ink bottle upsets and spoils the carpet. Some one gives a wrong turn to
the damper, and the gas escapes. An agent comes in determined to insure
your life, when it is already insured for more than it is worth, and you
are afraid some one will knock you on the head to get the price of your
policy; but he sticks to you, showing you pictures of old Time and the
hour-glass, and Death's scythe and a skeleton, making it quite certain that
you will die before your time unless you take out papers in his company.
Besides this, you have a cold in your head, and a grain of dirt in your
eye, and you are a walking uneasiness. The day is out of joint, and no
surgeon can set it.
The probability is that if you would look at the weather-vane you would
find that the wind is northeast, and you might remember that you have lost
much sleep lately. It might happen to be that you are out of joint instead
of the day. Be careful and not write many letters while you are in that
irritated mood. You will pen some things that you will be sorry for
afterward.
Let us remember that these spiked nettles of life are part of our
discipline. Life would get nauseating if it were all honey. That table
would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little
vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when
we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never
be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Blustering March and
weeping April prepare us for shining May. This world is a poor hitching
post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, we had better whip up
and hasten on toward the warm inn where our good friends are looking out of
the window, watching to see us come up.
Interrupting the governor at this point, we asked him if he did not think
that rowing, ball playing and other athletic exercises might be made an
antidote to the morbid religion that is sometimes manifest. The governor
replied:
No doubt much of the Christian character of the day lacks in swarthiness
and power. It is gentle enough, and active enough, and well meaning enough,
but is wanting in moral muscle. It can sweetly sing at a prayer meeting,
and smile graciously when it is the right time to smile, and makes an
excellent nurse to pour out with steady hand a few drops of peppermint for
a child that feels disturbances under the waistband, but has no
qualification for the robust Christian work that is demanded.
One reason for this is the ineffable softness of much of what is called
Christian literature. The attempt is to bring us up on tracts made up of
thin exhortations and goodish maxims. A nerveless treatise on commerce or
science in that style would be crumpled up by the first merchant and thrown
into his waste-basket. Religious twaddle is of no more use than worldly
twaddle. If a man has nothing to say, he had better keep his pen wiped and
his tongue still. There needs an infusion of strong Anglo-Saxon into
religious literature, and a brawnier manliness and more impatience with
insipidity, though it be prayerful and sanctimonious. He who stands with
irksome repetitions asking people to "Come to Jesus," while he gives no
strong common-sense reason why they should come, drives back the souls of
men. If, with all the thrilling realities of eternity at hand, a man has
nothing to write which can gather up and master the thoughts and feelings
of men, his writing and speaking are a slander on the religion which he
wishes to eulogize.
Morbidity in religion might be partially cured by more out-door exercise.
There are some duties we can perform better on our feet than on our knees.
If we carry the grace of God with us down into every-day practical
Christian work, we will get more spiritual strength in five minutes than by
ten hours of kneeling. If Daniel had not served God save when three times a
day he worshiped toward the temple, the lions would have surely eaten him
up. The school of Christ is as much out-of-doors as in-doors. Hard, rough
work for God will develop an athletic soul. Religion will not conquer
either the admiration or the affections of men by effeminacy, but by
strength. Because the heart is soft is no reason why the head should be
soft. The spirit of genuine religion is a spirit of great power. When
Christ rides in apocalyptic vision, it is not on a weak and stupid beast,
but on a horse--emblem of majesty and strength: "And he went forth
conquering and to conquer."