Gluttony tends to cynicism. Coarseness and extravagance of
speech and manners go hand in hand with dietetic excesses, as,
for cognate reasons, the repulsiveness of voracious animals is
generally aggravated by a want of cleanliness. Among the natives
of the arctic regions, where climatic causes make gluttony a
pandemic vice, personal cleanliness is an almost unknown virtue,
and Kane’s anecdotes of polar household habits depict a degree
of squalor that would appal a gorilla.
Habitual abstemiousness, on the other hand, is the concomitant
of modesty, thrift, self-control, and evenness of temper,
and is compatible with heroic perseverance, tho hardly with
great energy of vital vigor. The dietetic self-denials of
Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the sixteenth century,
enabled him to outlive the third generation of his epicurean
relatives. During the latter decades of his long life he boasts
of having enjoyed a peace of mind unattainable by other means.
Within the bounds of reason, occasional fasts are by no means
incompatible with intellectual vigor, tho they are chiefly apt
to stimulate the activity of abstruse speculations. There are
intellectual voluptuaries whose enjoyment of mental triumphs in
controversy or cogitation seem, for the time being, actually
to deaden their craving for material food. Isaac Newton, on
the track of a cosmic secret, would send back plate after
plate of untasted meals. Percy Shelley, in the words of his
sprightly biographer, indignantly refused to alloy the nectar
of poetic inspiration with a “boarding-house soup,” and in his
creative moods rarely answered a dinner call without a sigh
of regret. Benedict Spinoza, amid the parchment piles of his
bachelor den, would fast for days in the ecstacy of his “_Gott
trunken_”--“God-intoxicated”--meditations. Intermittent
denutrition undoubtedly tends to clear off the cobwebs of the
brain. (Text.)--FELIX OSWALD, _Open Court_.
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