Books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and
afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the
taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel or
the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught
for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really
heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a
science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he
was about. In a great grief like this you cannot tickle and divert the
mind; you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb--bury it in an abyss,
hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable sorrows of
middle life and old age, I recommended a strict chronic course of
science and hard reasoning--counter-irritation. Bring the brain to act
upon the heart! If science is too much against the grain (for we have
not all got mathematical heads), something in the reach of the humblest
understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest--new
language--Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welsh! For the loss
of fortune the dose should be applied less directly to the
understanding--I would administer something elegant and cordial. For as
the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it is
rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we
find the higher class of poets a very valuable remedy. For observe that
poets of the grander and more comprehensive kind of genius have in them
two separate men quite distinct from each other--the imaginative man,
and the practical, circumstantial man; and it is the happy mixture of
these that suits diseases of the mind, half imaginative and half
practical.... For hypochondria and satiety what is better than a brisk
alterative course of travels--especially early, out-of-the-way,
marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they
take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in.... Then, for that
vice of the mind which I call sectarianism--not in the religious sense
of the word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your
next-door neighbour, because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours
boiled; and gossiping and prying into people's affairs, and backbiting,
and thinking heaven and earth are coming together, if some broom touch a
cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains--what
like a large and generous, mildly aperient course of history! How it
clears away all the fumes of the head!--better than the hellebore with
which the old leeches of the Middle Ages purged the cerebellum. There,
amidst all that great whirl and _sturmbad_ (storm-bath), as the Germans
say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and ages, how your mind enlarges
beyond that little feverish animosity to John Styles: or that
unfortunate prepossession of yours, that all the world is interested in
your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife!
I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent
pharmacy--its resources are boundless, but require the nicest
discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who
obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of
geology.... I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at
Cambridge, who was meant for the Church, when he suddenly caught a cold
fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading out of his depth
in Spinoza.... His theological constitution, since then, has become so
robust that he has eaten up two livings and a deanery! In fact, I have a
plan for a library that, instead of heading its compartments,
'Philology, Natural Science, Poetry,' &c., one shall head them according
to the diseases for which they are severally good, bodily and mental--up
from a dire calamity, or the pangs of the gout, down to a fit of the
spleen or a slight catarrh; for which last your light reading comes in
with a whey-posset and barley-water. But when some one sorrow, that is
yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania--when you think,
because heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your
heart, that all your life must be a blank--oh! then diet yourself well
on biography--the biography of good and great men.... I have said
nothing of the Book of Books, for that is the _lignum vitae_, the
cardinal medicine for all. These are but the subsidiaries.--E. G. E. L.
BULWER-LYTTON, LORD LYTTON. _The Caxtons._