MY FATHER'S CROTCHET ON THE HYGEIENIC CHEMISTRY OF BOOKS.
"If," said my father--and here his hand was deep in his
waistcoat--"if we accept the authority of Diodorus, as to the
inscription on the great Egyptian library--and I don't see why
Diodorus should not be as near the mark as any one else?" added my
father interrogatively, turning round.
My mother thought herself the person addressed, and nodded her
gracious assent to the authority of Diodorus. His opinion thus
fortified, my father continued,--"If, I say, we accept the authority
of Diodorus, the inscription on the Egyptian library was--'The
Medicine of the Mind.' Now, that phrase has become notoriously trite
and hackneyed, and people repeat vaguely that books are the medicine
of the mind. Yes; but to apply the medicine is the thing!"
"So you have told us at least twice before, brother," quoth the
Captain, bluffly. "And what Diodorus has to do with it, I know no
more than the man of the moon."
"I shall never get on at this rate," said my father, in a tone
between reproach and entreaty.
"Be good children, Roland and Blanche both," said my mother,
stopping from her work, and holding up her needle threateningly--and
indeed inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain's shoulder.
"Rem _acu_ tetigisti, my dear," said my father, borrowing Cicero's
pun on the occasion.[13] "And now we shall go upon velvet. I say,
then, that 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 that, 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 recommend 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--a new language--Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or
Welch! 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. There
is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the homeliest,
the very 'poet of circumstance,' as Gray has finely called him; and
yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest into
forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his
banker's book can cover. There is Virgil, far below him, indeed.
[13] Cicero's joke on a senator who was the son of a tailor--"Thou
hast touched the thing sharply;" (or with a needle--_acu_.)
--'Virgil the wise,
Whose verse walks highest, but not flies.'
as Cowley expresses it. But Virgil still has genius enough to
be two men--to lead you into the fields, not only to listen to
the pastoral reed, and to hear the bees hum, but to note how you
can make the most of the glebe and the vineyard. There is Horace,
charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly
on the loss of your fortune, and by no means undervalue the good
things of this life; but who will yet show you that a man may be
happy with a _vile modicum_, or _parva rura_. There is Shakspeare,
who, above all poets, is the mysterious dual of hard sense and
empyreal fancy--and a great many more, whom I need not name; but
who, if you take to them gently and quietly, will not, like your
mere philosopher, your unreasonable stoic, tell you that you have
lost nothing; but who will insensibly steal you out of this world,
with its losses and crosses, and slip you into another world, before
you know where you are!--a world where you are just as welcome,
though you carry no more earth of your lost acres with you than
covers the sole of your shoe. Then, 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. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into
life; or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world
is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis to
Tartary, meet 'the carts of Zagathai laden with houses, and think
that a great city is travelling towards you.'[14] Gaze on that
vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the descendants of Jenghis
'multiply and disperse over the immense waste desert, which is as
boundless as the ocean.' Sail with the early northern discoverers,
and penetrate to the heart of winter, among sea-serpents and bears,
and tusked morses, with the faces of men. Then, what think you of
Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the kingdom of Mexico,
and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that audacious
brute Pizarro? and the Polynesians, just for all the world like
the ancient Britons? and the American Indians, and the South-Sea
Islanders? how petulant, and young, and adventurous, and frisky your
hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! 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 back-biting, 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 (I beg your pardon, my dear) 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!
[14] RUBRUQUIS, sect. xii.
"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 dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the
first strata, I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon
cooling crystallised masses; and, by the time I had got him into
the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht,
and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife.
Kitty, my dear! it is no laughing matter. 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 over his depth in Spinosa. None of
the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least good in that
state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently upon the
chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker's book, (you should read, it,
Sisty;) then I threw in strong doses of Fichté; after that I put him
on the Scotch metaphysicians, with plunge baths into certain German
transcendentalists; and having convinced him that faith is not an
unphilosophical state of mind, and that he might believe without
compromising his understanding--for he was mightily conceited on
that score--I threw in my divines, which he was now fit to digest;
and 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,"
continued my father more gravely, "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.
See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce
a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own; and how
triumphantly the life sails on, beyond it! You thought the wing was
broken!--Tut-tut--it was but a bruised feather! See what life leaves
behind it, when all is, done!--a summary of positive facts far out
of the region of sorrow and suffering, linking themselves with the
being of the world. Yes, biography is the medicine here! Roland, you
said you would try my prescription--here it is,"--and my father took
up a book, and reached it to the Captain.
My uncle looked over it--_Life of the Reverend Robert Hall_.
"Brother, he was a Dissenter, and, thank heaven, I am a
church-and-state man, back and bone!"
"Robert Hall was a brave man, and a true soldier under the great
commander," said my father artfully.
The Captain mechanically carried his forefinger to his forehead in
military fashion, and saluted the book respectfully.
"I have another copy for you, Pisistratus--that is mine which I have
lent Roland. This, which I bought for you to-day, you will keep."
"Thank you, sir," said I listlessly, not seeing what great good the
_Life of Robert Hall_ could do me, or why the same medicine should
suit the old weatherbeaten uncle, and the nephew yet in his teens.
"I have said nothing," resumed my father, slightly bowing his broad
temples, "of the Book of Books, for that is the _lignum vitæ_, the
cardinal medicine for all. These are but the subsidiaries: for,
as you may remember, my dear Kitty, that I have said before--we
can never keep the system quite right unless we place just in the
centre of the great ganglionic system, whence the nerves carry its
influence gently and smoothly through the whole frame--THE SAFFRON
BAG!"