indigestion that arises from persistent worry, or indulgence in
passion, by one change after another in the dietary. The founder of
homoeopathy insisted that there was no such thing as a physical
"symptom" without corresponding mental and moral symptoms. "Not soul
helps flesh more than flesh helps soul." Thus the Scientist and the
Poet come to the same truth, albeit by different ways.--[EDS.]
PLAIN WORDS AND COLOURED PICTURES.
While most of us would at first sight find fault with Mr G.K.
Chesterton's sweeping advice--
"And don't believe in anything
That can't be told in coloured pictures,"
many would probably end by endorsing it. But we should do so only
because we were able to give a very wide and varied meaning to
"coloured pictures."
No one ever made a coloured picture of the "wild west wind"; but there
are plenty of coloured pictures in which there is no mistaking its
presence. We all believe in wireless telegraphy (now that it is an
accomplished fact) which is, in itself, untranslatable into colour or
line; but its mechanism can be photographed, and its results in the
world of men and ships are in all the illustrated papers. Music, which
is pure sound, is to some the surest path to the Reality behind this
outward show things; yet to some at least of such music is indeed form
and colour, even though the colours be beyond the rainbow. For in
truth, everything worth believing in, all those things, those ideas,
which renew the springs of our life, have form and they have colour.
Even to the colour-blind one word differeth from another in glory.
This is no idle fancy, no mere subject for academic debate: it is the
most practical subject in the world. For even as the body is fed not
by food alone but by the living air, so is the spirit nourished not
alone by right action but by inspiring ideas. Ideas are pictures; and
the best ideas are coloured pictures.
Hence the great value of words. It is idle to speak of "words, idle
words," as though they were the transient froth on the permanent ocean
of thought. They are the vehicle, the body of thought. If the thought
be shallow or silly, the words will indeed be "idle." But if the idea
be inspiring the words will be the channel of that inspiration.
The greater part of this power in words is lost to us to-day.
Everything tempts us to hurry over words. We talk too quickly to be
able to pay that respect to words which they deserve; and we read the
newspaper, the magazine, the novel, the play, the poem, with the same
disastrous haste. We devour the words but lose their essence. Hence
there is a grave danger that through this neglect we shut out one of
the main streams by which our life must be fed if it is not to shrink
into mere fretful existence.
There is a curious idea in some minds that fine language consists of
long words difficult to understand. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. Most of the great words--the words of power, as the old
Kabalists called them--are short words, words in common use. And how
common is the sound of them in the mouth of the preacher! Not long ago
I heard an intelligent and cultured man reading one of the many
beautiful passages from the English Bible:--
"Ye dragons, and all deeps;
Fire and hail, snow and vapour;
Stormy wind fulfilling his word;
Mountains and all hills;
Fruitful trees and all cedars, ..."
and he read it as though it were a draper's sale bill. And yet it
needs but a very little imagination for such a passage to become a
series of vivid pictures. Fire, hail, snow, vapour, hills, mountains,
cedars, dragons and deeps--every word is "a word of power" if only
there is no hurry, if only each word as it comes is given time to call
up the picture of the real thing before the inward eye.
And you may hear children of fourteen and fifteen who have passed
examinations in "English" recite line after line of, say, Matthew
Arnold's _The Forsaken Merman_ with a glib self-assured colourlessness
due solely to the fact that no teacher has ever taught them respect
for simple words. And what simpler words could there be than these,
for example--
"Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world, for ever and aye"?
Simple, common words; yet if there is that leisurely attention to each
one as it comes what an exhilarating picture arises of the great
sea-beasts, and of "the round ocean and the living air."
I am not pleading for the stylist's concentration on words which
exalts them above the things they body forth. The most vivid and
beautiful description of dawn in the English language--
"Night's candles are burned out, and jocund morn
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops"
though spoken by the most sensitively vibrant voice in the world, can
never come near the real dawn breaking across real mountains. But the
point is that those two lines composed of simple English words have
power, if we pay them respect, to create the dawn within the mind, and
to supply the spirit with that beauty which is its very breath.
If this patience with words, this respect for the familiar fine things
of our native tongue, this desire to make them yield up their strength
and beauty, if this has nothing to do with healthy living I don't know
what has. William Wordsworth's--
"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height"
is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth. You do
not need to be a "Christian Scientist" to know that ideas and emotions
can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth. Other
people besides "Eugenists" have observed that ugly or mean-spirited
parents seldom have beautiful children.
But though the power of ideas is a commonplace, and though
psychologists tell us how much we may improve mental concentration by
letting the words of any sentence call up each its own picture, what
they a omit to do is to recognise the need of the human spirit for
beauty. You can concentrate your thought on the list of pickles in a
grocer's price list: it is doubtless a good exercise. But the same
exercise directed to some great phrase, such as Emerson's _Trust
thyself: ever' heart vibrates to that iron string_; or some vivid
lyrical image such as _All the trees of the field shall clap their
hands_, or even a complete poem of simple words but permanent beauty,
such as that one of Wordsworth's beginning _I wandered lonely as a
Cloud_; this will not only improve concentration and sharpen memory:
it will enrich the mind with ever-available sources of inspiration,
courage and joy.
EDGAR J. SAXON.
THE WORLD'S WANDERERS.
Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now?
Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey
Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way,
In what depth of night or day.
Seekest thou repose now?
Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world's rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS.
Building castles in the air has always been one of the favourite
amusements of mankind. To it we owe much, not only of the zest of
life, but also of motive power for overcoming difficulties and
reaching out towards new possibilities. Yet all literature, and
tradition that is earlier than any written literature, is full of a
deep note of warning; over and over again we see in the dim past the
shadow of a tower that was built in vain, of walls that were piled too
high and toppled into ruin, of crests that tapped the thunder-clouds
and drew down lightning to their own destruction. Evidently man has
seen danger in his own desire! The castle must be built with wisdom as
well as with industry and boldness if it is to escape disaster and to
become a storehouse, a safe defence or a vantage-ground for surveying
earth and sky.
There is one obvious precaution we should observe in building our
castles, and that is to realise that all which we imagine and think
about tends sooner or later to externalise itself and pass into
action. Every idea tends to glide into an ideal. Nearly all thinkers
have recognised this, and have seen that morality lies much farther
back than action, farther back than conscious will. Banquo had dreams
of ambition, as had Macbeth, but they dealt differently with them;
while Macbeth allowed his visions to lead him on to treachery and
murder, Banquo prayed against the temptations that came to him in
sleep. To most of us imagination, sleeping or waking, comes in less
dramatic form, but we should all think more sanely and act more wisely
if we interposed a definite revision by the conscious mind and will of
all our plans and ideals between their (perhaps quite automatic)
formation in our imagination and their translation into fact. Slack
muscle should go with the daydream or picture of the future; we should
not strike or clench or lift until we have decided that the action is
right and just and wise. The girl who counted her chickens and broke
the eggs is a true enough example: every doctor and coroner knows many
instances of results far more tragic.
But sometimes the vision has nothing in it but what is pure and good
and noble. Are there any dangers even here?
There is this danger always, that we find the picture so lovely and so
satisfying that we cannot summon up courage and energy to turn away
from it towards the serious work which it suggests. The castle in the
air is radiant and tall, but it is generally meant as a model for a
tougher building made out of common earth, by toil and pain, amidst
mud and dust. It is so much easier, as Sordello knew, to imagine than
to do. Actual circumstances, real life, other people all this that
lies round us is sterner stuff than our easily moulded material of
dreams. Who has not at some time or other lain sleepily in bed of a
morning and gone through in thought the processes of getting up, until
a louder call or an alarum bell has awakened the realisation that the
task is not yet begun? Who has not been tempted to shirk practice of
some sort in thinking of a prize? Who has not sometimes built
expectation higher and higher until his demands of fate have become so
great that, in despair of making good, he has let the whole plan slip
away into the valley of forgotten dreams?
These dangers, the almost involuntary carrying out of unworthy aims
that have been cherished in thought and the loss of vigour for real
achievement, due to too easy an indulgence in blameless aspiration,
are fairly obvious and have long been recognised.
There is another that has been seen from time to time and occasionally
expressed.[16] We have seen that too loose a dream-world may make the
world in which we live seem dull and ordinary. But is not the converse
at least as often true? If our thought-world is too narrow, too
selfish or too weak, all our ordinary work, sound and compact though
it may be, is stultified, misdirected, often wasted. We all know how
in the industrial world something more than industry is needed; in the
emotional world something more than a clumsy and unapprehending
goodwill. We need a certain insight to turn these solid qualities of
labour and feeling to the best account. "A man's reach should exceed
his grasp," a great poet tells us, and even the birds or beavers do
not go on quite blindly with their building, but, when effort on
effort has been destroyed by wind and water or man's interference,
they at last accommodate their instinct to circumstances so as to give
themselves a better chance of fulfilling their deeper purpose. In many
ways we have hardly outgrown the beaver stage: wars, accidents,
disease, disputes--how many times must we try over again the same path
which has led us before into trouble and disaster before we put our
imagination seriously to work on the problem and try to find some more
complete solution?
Of all the dangers of the use of the imagination, perhaps the greatest
of all is the neglect to use it, the denial of it and its consequent
starvation.
E.M. COBHAM.
[16] Mrs Book sees an allusion to this danger, as well as to the
first, in the warnings against covetousness in the Tenth Commandment.
THE PLAY SPIRIT[17]: A CRITICISM.
[17] See the article, "The Play Spirit," in the November issue.
With your contributor's description of the play spirit, that happy
leisure from self and its responsibilities in order that time and
thought and heart may be filled with wider inspiration, most of your
readers will, I think, entirely agree, and all of us will be grateful
for the spirited claim on behalf of "play."
The one criticism that occurs to the mind is that a touch of
professionalism, of patronage towards the ordinary person, has crept
into the author's thought and peeps out through many of the sentences.
"Common men" ... "ordinary everyday people" ... "average humanity,"
... "a worker" who ... "cannot play"; does the writer of the Play
Spirit really show us what is in their hearts? He is an artist in
words, he is a keen admirer of other arts, he is interested in
thinking; it seems all but impossible to him that anyone can have
"freedom" without the power of expressing it, without even the
consciousness of its possession.
We are all too apt, I think, to imagine that our own discoveries of
the mystery and magic of life are peculiar to ourselves, or shared
only with a sympathetic few, passed on sometimes (by the _very_ few
who have both will and power to do so) to such of the outsiders as are
interested enough to enter into that enchanted garden and take gifts
from it. But has not the supreme discovery of the greatest artists,
philosophers and teachers been that the "everyday people" _do_ live as
deeply and broadly as the thinkers and artists? They are inarticulate
and cannot tell what they see, but to them life is made amusing, or
interesting, or consecrated according to their temperament.
Who can say what the Cornish sea means to that tired worker? At least
it seems a boldness that is almost insolence to decide what it did
_not_ mean to her!
Has not every life its revelations? Is it not because we do _not_ see
as God does that some one particular life which strikes across our
path cannot reveal its revelation over again to us?
Surely "the commonplace is the highest place." Or rather, there are no
hierarchies of the soul. Artist or seamstress or carpenter, we live by
the glory that flows to us through whatever curtains of environment
are round us.
I have not a word of criticism for the writer's ideal. All that I
would suggest is that the ideal is really present in the world,
"common" as the "everyday" flowers at his feet. Not all can sing or
paint or write, but many more can laugh or run and all, perhaps, can
love and pray.
L.E. HAWKS.
ON LEARNING TO BREATHE.[18]
[18] This is article has been specially written as a preface for
_Health Through Breathing_, by Olga Lazarus, shortly to be published
(1s. net).
To breathe correctly and sufficiently is to live more healthily. This
dictum is incontrovertible, and it becomes my pleasant duty herein to
demonstrate its truthfulness. And, after a careful perusal of the
hundred exercises which the authoress has so clearly and succinctly
described, I am still more convinced of the very great, one might
almost say of the tremendous, importance of deep-breathing exercises.
What has struck me so forcibly in this little book is the fact that
there is no undue enthusiasm evident; no embellishment of the subject;
no extravagant claims for the system advocated; just a plain sane,
sober and intelligent description of procedures of immense value to
all who would either keep, or improve, their health. The authoress
has, as it were, laid before the reader a feast of good things in the
way of physical culture, and leaves it at that. She seems to have
brought into purview a splendid variation of the exercises, and indeed
every mode of breathing and exercise likely to be beneficial--to those
in health as out of it.
Reverting for a moment to the supreme importance of the subject, I may
say that it has of late years come home to me more than ever, and with
greater insistency, that innumerable ills of to-day are due to faulty
breathing and lack of correct physical exercises generally. I wonder
how many of us could conscientiously say that we devote fifteen or
twenty minutes regularly every day to the system? And yet such a great
deal could be done for health in that time! No, we "haven't time," or
we "oversleep ourselves so often," or we make some such other flimsy
excuse; but of course we ought to "make time," we ought not to
"oversleep ourselves." The fact is, rather, that most of us are too
lazy to go through the exercises, even though we may know of their
transcendent benefit. In the words of the poet: "Let us, then, be up
and doing"--that is, up in time in the morning in order to be going
through exercises such as described in this little volume.
It is within my personal knowledge, and must be within the personal
knowledge of every actively engaged physician, that but very few of us
yet have any idea, in spite of all the teaching and the advocacy of
it, of really deep and scientific breathing. If the system could be
made quite general and enforced upon us--especially when young or
adolescent--we should not see, as we do now, _thousands_ walking about
the streets whose nostrils are too narrow through insufficient
breathing, whose lungs are not properly inflated as they inspire; and,
as a consequence, who have neither the bloom nor the carriage of
health.
Perhaps if I show here how vastly important it is for us to have our
blood well oxygenated, it may be some sort of encouragement for Mrs
Lazarus's readers to persevere with and _work into their lives_ the
system she advocates and describes.
If we did not renew the oxygen in our lungs to a sufficient extent, we
should die in a few minutes. We can do without food for many days;
without water for less days, but only for a few minutes without
oxygen. Anything which tends to increase the intake of this vitally
important element, whether deeper breathing or exercises, will have a
very pronounced effect upon our general health. Now deep breathing is,
_par excellence_, the way to bring about this desirable condition. It
may interest the readers of this little book if I remind them that in
the ordinary way the total capacity of the lungs is about 340 cubic
inches; as a rule, the amount of air breathed amounts only to some 20
or 30 cubic inches, but this, by special effort, can be increased by
some 110 cubic inches. Thus it is demonstrated how much more air we
could take into the lungs by better and deeper breathing, thereby
securing, sooner or later, a greater natural expansion of the lungs,
with the result, of course, of improved health generally.
It would surprise most people if they tested their breathing capacity
by the aid of the spirometer, to discover how inefficiently they did
breathe; in other words, how much below the normal was the amount of
air they were usually inspiring. Encouragement might also be found in
the matter--incentive, that is, to learn how to breathe and exercise
correctly and scientifically--if mention were here made categorically
of the very profound influences upon certain physiological processes
of our organisation which are brought about if we would but mend our
ways in this respect. Space will only allow of a few such to be
detailed.
1. The circulation is improved and equalised. This implies much more
than appears on the surface: it means that the blood is made to flow
from any congested internal organ (such as the liver, stomach, etc.)
towards the peripheries--that is, the extremities and everywhere where
there is the capillary system--the changing-place between the venous
and the arterial blood; thus we at the same time warm our extremities
and relieve internal congestion. In other words, "to bring the blood
to the surface" in many conditions of ill-health is of paramount
importance.
2. It will strengthen the action of the heart and lungs. For lack of
proper breathing exercises the heart's walls get thin, the expansive
power of the lungs' tissue gets less, and as a consequence, when any
little extra strain is thrown upon either, permanent damage is often
the result.
3. In any tendency to constipation, indigestion and similar
conditions, such exercises are especially beneficial, and that both by
flushing the system with more oxygen and by mechanically exerting
pressure on the different organs--thus giving those latter what is
actually a good massaging!
4. Indirectly, such exercises must of necessity be splendid for
"nerves," as we thus get these supplied with a larger amount of
purified blood, and of course this must result in better and
heightened nerve and brain action.
And all this--and much more which we have not space enough to deal
with--being so, it might now be well asked, who and what class of
individuals would benefit by these exercises. The list is a long one,
and would include practically all growing children and adolescents--in
order that adenoids, narrow chests, debility in general, malnutrition
and a host of other abnormal states might be either cured or
prevented. Innumerable adults would also benefit by such exercises:
those who are in health, in order to keep so; those who are depressed
mentally, or who are suffering from constipation, dyspepsia, anaemia,
obesity, debility, etc.
Even those who are "getting on" in years could, with care and caution,
go through such exercises to advantage, providing, that is, that their
heart, lungs and blood vessels are fairly normal; it is only where
there is serious organic disease such exercises must be withheld.
Thus we have a big field for such a system which Mrs Lazarus has
described so fully in this little work of hers; it deserves wide
recognition, and my final word to the reader is not only to keep the
book as a "boon companion," but to encourage others to purchase it and
to carry out its most excellent teachings.
J. STENSON HOOKER, M.D.
LETTERS OF A LAYMAN.
1.--DOCTORS AND HEALTH.
Medicine is a progressive science--and art, if we judge by the
statistics given of the fall in the rate of mortality. Even this,
however, must be carefully analysed, because a good deal of the fall
of mortality is due to the great reduction in the birthrate which has
taken place in the last twenty years. Still, after this has been
allowed for, there is probably a balance in the doctors'
favour--something to the good of the science and art of medicine.
Doubtless the science is improved and the practical advice offered by
medical men is better and more effectual than it used to be.
A layman, nevertheless, may be forgiven if, with all due deference, he
is tempted to believe that many of the benefits attributed to medicine
have been achieved through attention to sanitation--cleanliness and
ventilation. Of course this is due to the work of science, which
necessarily includes the members of the medical profession, but it is
not due to medical science _qua_ medical science.
The terms 'sanitation' and 'sanitary' nearly always connote only ideas
associated with cleanliness, free ventilation, etc. They scarcely
connote ideas of food management, or, if they do, it is only to the
extent of inferring that food shall not be adulterated or of bad
quality--and perhaps that there shall be enough of it.
Such questions as what food shall we eat, and how much; what are the
real reasons for taking food into the body, whether it is to give
strength and heat to the body or only to supply the body's waste, as
Dr Rabagliati contends--these and other relevant questions are usually
left to unorthodox members of the medical profession to declare upon.
They seem to be very important questions, but we do not find that they
were discussed--or ever mentioned--at the thirty-fourth International
Medical Congress, which completed its sittings several months ago.
Obviously, the practical questions of food supply are answered very
differently, according as one _believes_ they must be answered one way
or another, as, for instance, in Dr Rabagliati's or Dr Haig's way. But
that they are questions not worthy of consideration by doctors in
congress may be taken as an ominous sign.