my wife among the number, on whose nervous system tea acts
mischievously, producing inordinate wakefulness, and its continued
use, indigestion. But this is one of the things that people should
learn, and act upon, namely, to take such things as suit them, and
avoid such as do not. It is said that Mithridates could live and
flourish on poisons, and if it be true that tea or coffee is a poison,
so do most of us. William Hutton, the shrewd and humorous author of
the histories of Birmingham and Derby, and also of a life of himself,
scarcely inferior to that of Franklin in lessons of life-wisdom, said
that he had been told that coffee was a slow poison, and, he added,
that he had found it very slow, for he had drunk it more than sixty
years without any ill effect My experience of it has been the same.
Mr. Bryant also has recourse to the use of dumb-bells, and other
gymnastic appliances. For my part, I find no artificial practices
necessary for the maintenance of health and a vigorous circulation of
the blood. My only gymnastics have been those of Nature--walking,
riding, working in field and garden, bathing, swimming, etc. In some
of those practices, or in the amount of their use, Nature, in my later
years, has dictated an abatement. In Mr. Bryant's abhorrence of
tobacco, I fully sympathize. That is a poisoner, a stupefier, a
traitor to the nervous system, and, consequently, to energy and the
spirit of enterprise, which I renounced once and for ever before I
reached my twentieth year. The main causes of the vigor of my
constitution and the retention of sound health, comfort, and activity
to within three years of eighty, I shall point out as I proceed. First
and foremost, it was my good fortune to derive my existence from
parents descended on both sides from a vigorous stock, and of great
longevity. I remember my great-grandmother, an old lady of nearly
ninety; my grandmother of nearly as great an age. My mother lived to
eighty-five, and my father to the same age. They were both of them
temperate in their habits, living a fresh and healthy country life,
and in enjoyment of that tranquillity of mind which is conferred by a
spirit of genuine piety, and which confers, in return, health and
strength.
The great destroyers of life are not labor and exertion, either
physical or intellectual, but care, misery, crime, and dissipation. My
wife derived from her parentage similar advantages, and all the habits
of our lives, both before and since our marriage, have been of a
similar character. My boyhood and youth were, for the most part, spent
in the country; and all country objects, sports, and labors,
horse-racing and hunting excepted, have had a never-failing charm for
me. As a boy, I ranged the country far and wide in curious quest and
study of all the wild creatures of the woods and fields, in great
delight in birds and their nests, climbing the loftiest trees, rocks
and buildings in pursuit of them. In fact, the life described in the
"Boy's Country Book," was my own life. No hours were too early for me,
and in the bright, sunny fields in the early mornings, amid dews and
odour of flowers, I breathed that pure air which gave a life-long tone
to my lungs that I still reap the benefit of. All those daily habits
of climbing, running, and working developed my frame to perfection,
and gave a vigor to nerve and muscle that have stood well the wear and
tear of existence. My brain was not dwarfed by excessive study in
early boyhood, as is too much the case with children of to-day. Nature
says, as plainly as she can speak, that the infancy of all creatures
is sacred to play, to physical action, and the joyousness of mind that
give life to every organ of the system. Lambs, kittens, kids, foals,
even young pigs and donkeys, all teach the great lesson of Nature,
that to have a body healthy and strong, the prompt and efficient
vehicle of the mind, we must not infringe on her ordinations by our
study and cramping sedentariness in life's tender years. We must not
throw away or misappropriate her forces destined to the corporeal
architecture of man, by tasks that belong properly to an after-time.
There is no mistake so fatal to the proper development of man and
woman, as to pile on the immature brain, and on the yet unfinished
fabric of the human body, a weight of premature and, therefore,
unnatural study. In most of those cases where Nature has intended to
produce a first-class intellect, she has guarded her embryo genius by
a stubborn slowness of development. Moderate study and plenty of play
and exercise in early youth are the true requisites for a noble growth
of intellectual powers in man, and for its continuance to old age.
My youth, as my boyhood, was spent in the country, and in the active
exercise of its sports and labors. I was fond of shooting, fishing,
riding, and walking, often making long expeditions on foot for
botanical or other purposes. Bathing and swimming I continued each
year till the frost was in the ground and the ice fringed the banks of
the river. As my father farmed his own land, I delighted in all the
occupations of the field, mowing and reaping with the men through the
harvest, looking after sheep and lambs, and finding never-ceasing
pleasure in the cultivation of the garden.
When our literary engagements drew us to London, we carefully avoided
living in the great Babel, but took up our residence in one of its
healthy suburbs, and, on the introduction of railways, removed to what
was actual country. A very little time showed us the exhausting and
unwholesome nature of city life. Late hours, heavy dinners, the
indulgence of what are called jovial hours, and crowded parties, would
soon have sent us whither they have sent so many of our literary
contemporaries, long, long ago. After an evening spent in one of the
crowded parties of London, I have always found myself literally
poisoned. My whole nervous system has been distressed and vitiated. I
have been miserable and incapable the next day of intellectual labor.
Nor is there any mystery about this matter. To pass some four or five
hours in a town, itself badly ventilated, amid a throng of people just
come from dinner, loaded with a medley of viands, and reeking with the
fumes of hot wines--no few of them, probably, of very moral habits,
was simply undergoing a process of asphyxia. The air was speedily
decomposed by so many lungs. Its ozone and oxygen were rapidly
absorbed, and in return the atmosphere was loaded with carbonic acid,
carbon, nitrogen, and other effluvia, from the lungs and pores of the
dense and heated company; this mischievous matter being much increased
from the products of the combustion of numerous lamps, candles, and
gas-jets.
The same effect was uniformly produced on me by evenings passed in
theatres, or crowded concert or lecture rooms. These facts are now
well understood by those who have studied the causes of health and
disease in modern society; and I am assured by medical men that no
source of consumption is so great as that occasioned by the breathing
of these lethal atmospheres of fashionable parties, fashionable
theatres, and concert and lecture halls; and then returning home at
midnight by an abrupt plunge from their heat into damp and cold.
People have said to me, "Oh! it is merely the effect of the unusual
late hour that you have felt!" But, though nite hours, either in
writing or society, have not been my habit, when circumstances of
literary pressure have compelled me occasionally to work late, I have
never felt any such effects. I could rise the next day a little later,
perfectly refreshed and full of spirit for my work.
Another cause to which I attribute my extraordinary degree of health,
has been not merely continued country exercise in walking and
gardening, but, now and then, making a clean breach and change of my
location and mode of life. Travel is one of the great invigorators of
the system, both physically and intellectually. When I have found a
morbid condition stealing over me, I have at once started off on a
pedestrian or other journey. The change of place, scene, atmosphere,
of all the objects occupying the daily attention, has at once put to
flight the enemy. It has vanished as by a spell. There is nothing like
a throwing off the harness and giving mind and body a holiday--a treat
to all sorts of new objects. Once, a wretched, nervous feeling grew
upon me; I flung it off by mounting a stage-coach, and then taking a
walk from the Land's End, in Cornwall, to the north of Devon. It was
gone for ever! Another time the "jolly" late dinners and
blithely-circulating decanter, with literary men, that I found it
almost impossible to avoid altogether without cutting very valuable
connections, gave me a dreadful dyspepsia. I became livingly sensible
of the agonies of Prometheus with the daily vulture gnawing at his
vitals. At once I started with all my family for a year's sojourn in
Germany, which, in fact, proved three years. But the fiend had left me
the very first day. The moment I quitted the British shore, the
tormentor quitted me. I suppose he preferred staying behind, where he
was aware of so many promising subjects of his diabolical art. New
diet, new and early hours, and all the novelties of foreign life, made
his approach to me impossible. I have known him no more, during these
now thirty years.
Eighteen years ago I made the circumnavigation of the globe, going out
to Australia by the Cape of Good Hope, and returning by Cape Horn.
This, including two years of wandering in the woods and wilds of
Australia, evidently gave a new accession of vital stamina to my
frame. It is said that the climate of Australia makes young men old,
and old men young. I do not believe the first part of the proverb, but
I am quite certain that there is a great deal in the second part of
it. During those two years I chiefly lived in a tent, and led a quiet,
free, and pleasant life in the open forests and wild country,
continually shifting our scene as we took the fancy, now encamping in
some valley among the mountains, now by some pleasant lake or river.
In fact, pic-nicing from day to day, and month to month, watching, I
and my two sons, with ever new interest, all the varied life of beast,
bird, and insect, and the equally varied world of trees, shrubs, and
flowers. My mind was lying fallow, as it regarded my usual literary
pursuits, but actually engaged with a thousand things of novel
interest, both among men in the Gold Diggings, and among other
creatures and phenomena around me. In this climate I and my little
party enjoyed, on the whole, excellent health, though we often walked
or worked for days and weeks under a sun frequently, at noon, reaching
from one hundred to one hundred and fifty degrees of Fahrenheit; waded
through rivers breast high, because there were no bridges, and slept
occasionally under the forest trees. There, at nearly sixty years of
age, I dug for gold for weeks together, and my little company
discovered a fine gold field which continues one to this day. These
two years of bush life, with other journeys on the Australian
Continent, and in Tasmania, and the voyages out and back, gave a world
of new vigor that has been serving me ever since. During the last
summer in Switzerland, Mrs. Howitt and myself, at the respective ages
of sixty-eight and seventy-six, climbed mountains of from three to
five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and descended the same
day with more ease than many a young person of the modern school could
do.
As to our daily mode of life, little need be said. We keep early
hours, prefer to dine at noon, are always employed in "books, or work,
or healthful play;" have no particular rules about eating and
drinking, except the general ones of having simple and good food, and
drinking little wine. We have always been temperance people, but never
pledged, being averse to thraldom of any kind, taking, both in food
and drink, what seemed to do us good. At home, we drink, for the most
part, water, with a glass of wine occasionally. On the Continent, we
take the light wines of the country where we happen to be, with water,
because they suit us; if they did not, we should eschew them. In fact,
our great rule is to use what proves salutary, without regard to any
theories, conceits, or speculations of hygienic economy; and, in our
case, this following of common sense has answered extremely well.
At the same time it is true that many eminent men, and especially
eminent lawyers, who in their early days worked immensely hard,
studied through many long nights, and caroused, some of them, deeply
through others, yet attained to a good old age, as Lords Eldon, Scott,
Brougham, Campbell, Lyndhurst, and others. To what are we to attribute
this longevity under the circumstances? No doubt to iron constitutions
derived from their parentage, and then to the recuperative effect of
those half-yearly flights into the Egypt of the country, which make an
essential part of English life. To a thorough change of hours, habits,
and atmosphere in these seasons of villeggiatura. To vigorous athletic
country sports and practices, hunting, shooting, fishing, riding,
boating, yachting, traversing moors and mountains after black-cock,
grouse, salmon, trout and deer. To long walks at sea-side resorts, and
to that love of continental travel so strong in both your countrymen
and women, and ours.
These are the _saving_ causes in the lives of such men. Who knows
how long they would have lived had they not inflicted on themselves,
more or less, the destroying ones. There is an old story among us of
two very old men being brought up on a trial where the evidence of
"the oldest inhabitant" was required. The Judge asked the first who
came up what had been the habits of his life. He replied, "Very
regular, my lord; I have always been sober, and kept good hours." Upon
which the Judge dilated in high terms of praise on the benefit of
regular life. When the second old man appeared, the Judge put the same
question, and received the answer, "Very regular, my lord; I have
never gone to bed sober these forty years." Whereupon his lordship
exclaimed, "Ha! I see how it is. English men, like English oak, wet or
dry, last for ever."
I am not of his lordship's opinion; but seeing the great longevity of
many of our most eminent lawyers, and some of whom in early life
seemed disposed to live fast rather than long, I am more than ever
confirmed in my opinion of the vitalizing influences of temperance,
good air, and daily activity, which, with the benefits of change and
travel, can so far in after life save those whom no original force of
constitution could have saved from the effects of jollity, or of
gigantic efforts of study in early life. For one' of such hard livers,
or hard brain-workers who have escaped by the periodical resort to
healthful usages, how many thousands have been "cut off in the midst
of their days?" A lady once meeting me in Highgate, where I then
lived, asked me if I could recommend her a good doctor. I told her
that I could recommend her three. She observed that one would be
enough; but I assured her that she would find these three more
economical and efficient than any individual Galen that I could think
of. Their names were, "Temperance, Early Hours, and Daily Exercise."
That they were the only ones that I had employed for years, or meant
to employ. Soon after, a gentleman wrote to me respecting these "Three
Doctors," and put them in print. Anon, they were made the subject of
one of the "Ipswich Tracts;" and on a visit, a few years ago, to the
Continent, I found this tract translated into French, and the
title-page enriched with the name of a French physician, as the
author. So much the better. If the name of the French physician can
recommend "The Three Doctors" to the population of France, I am so
much the more obliged.
May 20, 1871.
_Hygiene of the Brain_, New York, 1878.
THE REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY
Found great benefit from the use of tobacco, though several times he
tried to give it up. He smoked the poorest tobacco, however, and Mr.
C. Kegan Paul thus describes the care Charles Kingsley took to
minimise the dangers of the habit:--
"He would work himself into a white heat over his book, till, too
excited to write more, he would calm himself down by a pipe, pacing
his grass-plot in thought, and in long strides. He was a great smoker,
and tobacco was to him a needful sedative. He always used a long and
clean clay pipe, which lurked in all sorts of unexpected places. But
none was ever smoked which was in any degree foul, and when there was
a vast accumulation of old pipes, they were sent back again to be
rebaked, and returned fresh and new. This gave him a striking simile,
which in 'Alton Locke,' he puts into the mouth of James Crossthwaite,
'Katie here believes in Purgatory, where souls are burnt clean again,
like 'bacca pipes.'"
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
I was deeply impressed by something which an excellent clergyman told
me one day, when there was nobody by to bring mischief on the head of
the narrator. This clergyman knew the literary world of his time so
thoroughly that there was probably no author of any mark then living
in England with whom he was not more or less acquainted.
It must be remembered that a new generation has now grown up. He told
me that he had reason to believe that there was no author or authoress
who was free from the habit of taking pernicious stimulants, either
strong green tea or strong coffee at night, or wine, or spirits, or
laudanum.
The amount of opium taken to relieve the wear and tear of authorship
was, he said, greater than most people had any conception of, and all
literary workers took something.
"Why, I do not," said I; "fresh air and cold water are my stimulants."
"I believe you," he replied, "but you work in the morning, and there
is much in that!"
I then remembered, when I had to work a short time at night, a
physician who called on me observed that I must not allow myself to be
exhausted at the end of the day. He would not advise any alcoholic
wines, but any light wines that I liked might do me good. "You have a
cupboard there at your right hand," said he; "keep a bottle of hock
and a wine glass there, and help yourself when you feel you want it."
"No, thank you," said I; "if I took wine it should not be when alone,
nor would I help myself to a glass; I might take a little more and a
little more, till my solitary glass might become a regular tippling
habit; I shall avoid the temptation altogether." Physicians should
consider well before they give such advice to brain-worn workers.
--_Autobiography_.
PROFESSOR MILLER.
"In labour of the head, alcohol stimulates the brain to an increase
of function under the mental power, and so effects a concentrated
cerebral exhaustion, without being able to afford compensating
nutrition or repair. ....There is the same common fallacy here as in
the case of manual labour. The stimulus is felt--to do good. 'I could
not do my work without it.' But at what cost are you doing your work?
Premature and permanent exhaustion of the muscles is bad enough; but
premature and permanent exhaustion of brain is infinitely worse. And
when you come to a point where work must cease or the stimulus be
taken, do not hesitate as to the right alternative. Don't call for
your pate ale, your brandy, or your wine. Shut your book, close your
eyes, and go to sleep: or change your occupation, so as to give a
thorough shift to your brain; and then, after a time, spent, as the
case may be, either in repose or recreation, you will find yourself
fit to resume your former task of thought without loss or
detriment.... Look to the mental workers under alcohol. Take the best
of them. Would not their genius have burned not only with a steadier
and more enduring flame, but also with a less sickly and noxious
vapour to the moral health of all around them, had they been free from
the unnatural and unneeded stimulus? Take Burns, for example. Alcohol
did not make his genius, or even brighten it.... Genius may have its
poetical and imaginative powers stored up into fitful paroxysms by
alcohol, no doubt: the control of will being gone or going, the mind
is left to take ideas as they come, and they may come brilliantly for
a time. But, at best, the man is but a revolving light. At one time a
flash will dazzle you; at another, the darkness is as that of
midnight; the alternating gloom being always longer than the period of
light, and all the more intense by reason of the other's brightness.
While imagination sparkles, reason is depressed. And, therefore, let
the true student eschew the bottle's deceitful aid. He will think all
the harder, all the clearer, and all the longer!"
_Alcohol: its Place and Power_. 866, p. 122.
MR. R. A. PROCTOR, F. R. S.
"I would venture to add an expression of my own firm conviction that
a life of study is aided by the almost entire avoidance of
stimulants, alcoholic as well as nicotian, I do not say that the
moderate use of such stimulants does harm, only that so far as I can
judge from my own experience it affords no help. I recognise a slight
risk in what Abbe Moigno correctly states--the apparent power of
indefinite work which comes with the almost entire avoidance of
stimulants; but the risk is very slight, for the man must have very
little sense who abuses that power to a dangerous degree. Certainly,
if the loss of the power be evidence of mischief, I would say (still
speaking of my own experience, which may be peculiar to my own
temperament) that the use of stimulants, even in a very moderate
degree, is mischievous. For instance, I repeatedly have put this
point to the test:--I work say from breakfast till one o'clock, when,
if I feel at all hungry, I join my family at lunch; if now at lunch I
eat very lightly, and take a glass of ale or whisky-and-water, I feel
disposed, about a quarter of an hour later, to leave my work, which
has, for the time, become irksome to me; and perhaps a couple of
hours will pass before I care for steady work again: on the other
hand, if I eat as lightly, or perhaps take a heartier lunch, but
drink water only, I sit down as disposed for work after as before the
meal. In point of fact, a very weak glass of whisky-and-water has as
bad an influence on the disposition for work as a meal unwisely heavy
would have. It is the same in the evening. If I take a light supper,
with water only, I can work (and this, perhaps, is bad) comfortably
till twelve or one; but a glass of weak whisky-and-water disposes me
to rest or sleep, or to no heavier mental effort than is involved in
reading a book of fiction or travel. These remarks apply only to
quiet home life, with my relatives or intimate friends at the table.
At larger gatherings it seems (as Herbert Spencer has noted) that not
only a heartier meal, but stimulants in a larger quantity, can be
taken without impairment of mental vivacity, and even with advantage,
up to a point falling far short, however, of what in former times
would have been regarded as the safe limit of moderation. Under those
circumstances, "wine maketh glad the heart of man," and many find the
stimulus it gives pleasant,--perhaps dangerously so, unless the
lesson is soon learned that the point is very soon reached beyond
which mental vivacity is not increased but impaired.