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NOT entirely awake, I am
standing on the platform of a large railway terminus in a certain great
city, at 7.20 a.m., on a foggy morning early in January. I am about to set
out on a journey of a hundred miles by the 7.30 train, which is a slow one,
stopping at all the stations. I am alone; for more than human would that
friendship be which would bring out mortal man to see one off at such an
hour in winter. It is a dreamy sort of scene; I can hardly feel that it
substantially exists. Who has not sometimes, on a still autumn afternoon,
suddenly stopped on a path winding through sere, motionless woods, and felt
within himself, Now, I can hardly believe in all this. You talk of the
difficulty of realising the unseen and spiritual; is it not sometimes, in
certain mental moods, and in certain aspects of external nature, quite as
difficult to feel the substantial existence of things which we can see and
touch? Extreme stillness and loneliness, perhaps, are the usual conditions
of this peculiar feeling. Sometimes most men have thought to themselves that
it would be well for them if they could but have the evidence of sense to
assure them of certain great realities which while we live in this world we
never can touch or see ; but I think that many readers will agree with me
when I say, that very often the evidence of sense comes no nearer to
producing the solid conviction of reality than does that widely different
evidence on which we believe the existence of all that is not material You
have climbed, alone, on an autumn day, to the top of a great hill; a river
runs at its base unheard; a champaign country spreads beyond the river;
cornfields swept and bare; hedgerows dusky green against the yellow ground;
a little farmhouse here and there, over which the smoke stagnates in the
breezeless air. It is heather that you are standing on. And as you stand
there alone, and look away over that scene, you have felt as though sense,
and the convictions of! sense, were partially paralysed: you have been aware
that you could not feel that the landscape before you was solid reality. I
am not talking to blockheads, who never thought or felt anything
particularly; of course they could not understand my meaning. But as for
you, thoughtful reader, have you not sometimes, in such a scene, thought to
yourself, not without a certain startled pleasure,—Now, I realise it no more
substantially that there spreads a landscape beyond that river, than that
there spreads a country beyond the grave!
There are many curious moods of mind, of which you will find no mention in
books of metaphysics. The writers of works of mental philosophy keep by the
bread and butter of the world of mind. And every one who knows by personal
experience how great a part of the actual phases of thought and feeling lies
beyond the reach of logical explanation, and can hardly be fixed and
represented by any words, will rejoice when he meets with any account of
intellectual moods which he himself has often known, but which are not to be
classified or explained. And people are shy about talking of such things. I
felt indebted to a friend, a man of high talent and cultivation, whom I met
on the street of a large city on a snowy winter day. The streets were
covered with unmelted snow; so were the housetops ; how black and dirty the
walls looked, contrasting with the snow. Great flakes wrere falling thickly,
and making a curtain which at a few yards’ distance shut out all objects
more effectually than the thickest fog. “It is a day,” said my friend, “I
don’t believe in" and then he went away. And I know he would not believe in
the day, and he would not feel that he w*as in a world of reality, till he
had escaped from the eerie scene out of doors, and sat down by his library
fire. But has not the mood found a more beautiful description in Coleridge’s
tragedy of Remorse? Opium, no doubt, may have increased such phases of mind
in his case; but they are well known by numbers who never tasted opium :—
On a rude rock,
A rock, methought, fast by a grove of firs,
Whose thready leaves to the low-breathing gale,
Made a soft sound most like the distant ocean,
I staid, as though the hour of death were pass’d.
And I were sitting in the world of spirits—
For all things seem’d unreal.
And there can be no doubt that the long vaulted
vistas through a pine wood, the motionless trunks, dark and ghostly, and the
surgy swell of the wind through the spines, are conditions very likely to
bring on, if you are alone, this particular mental state.
But to return to the railway station which suggested all this; it is a
dreamy scene, and I look at it with sleepy eyes. There are not many people
going by the train, though it is a long one. Daylight is an hour or more
distant yet; and the directors, either with the design of producing
picturesque lights and shadows in their shed, or with the design of
economising gas, have resorted to the expedient of lighting only every
second lamp. There are no lamps, too, in the carriages ; and the blank
abysses seen through the open doors remind one of the cells in some feudal
dungeon. A little child would assuredly howl if it were brought to this
place this morning. Away in the gloom, at the end of the train, the sombre
engine that is to take us is hissing furiously, and throwing a lurid glare
upon the ground underneath Q it Nobody’s wits have fully arrived. The clerk
who gave me my ticket was yawning tremendously; the porters on the platform
are yawning; the guard, who is standing two yards off, looking very neat and
trimly dressed through the gloom, is yawning; the stoker who was shovelling
coke into the engine fire was yawning awfully as he did so. We are away
through the fog, through the mist, over the black country, which is slowly
turning gray in the morning twilight. I have with me various newspapers; but
for an hour or more it will be impossible to see to read them. Two fellow-travellers,
whose forms I dimly trace, I hear expressing indignation that the railway
company give no lamps in the carriages. I lean back and try to think.
It is most depressing and miserable work, getting up by candlelight It is
impossible to shave comfortably; it is impossible to have a satisfactory
bath; it is impossible to find anything you want. Sleep, says Sancho Panza,
covers a man all over like a mantle of comfort; but rising before daylight
envelops the entire being in petty misery. An indescribable vacuity makes
itself felt in the epigastric regions, and a leaden heaviness weighs upon
heart and spirits. It must be a considerable item in the hard lot of
domestic servants, to have to get up through all the winter months in the
cold dark house: let us be thankful to them through whose humble labours and
self-denial we find the cheerful fire blazing in the tidy breakfast parlour
when we find our way downstairs. That same apartment looked cheerless enough
when the housemaid entered it two hours ago. It is sad when you are lying in
bed of a morning, lazily conscious of that circling amplitude of comfort^ to
hear the chilly cry of the poor sweep outside; or the tread of the factory
hands shivering by in their thin garments towards the great cotton mill,
glaring spectral out of its many windows, but at least with a cosy
suggestion of warmth and light Think of the baker, too, who rose in the dark
of midnight that those hot rolls might appear on your breakfast table; and
of the printer, intelligent, active, accurate to a degree that you careless
folk who put no points in your letters have little idea of, whose labours
have given you that damp sheet which in a little will feel so crisp and firm
after it has been duly dried, and which wall tell you all that is going on
over all the world, down to the opera which closed at twelve, and the
parliamentary debate which was not over till half-past four. It is good
occasionally to rise at five on a December morning, that you may feel how
much you are indebted to some who do so for your sake all the winter
through. No doubt they get accustomed to it: but so may you by doing it
always. A great many people living easy lives, have no idea of the
discomfort of rising by candlelight. Probably they hardly ever did it: when
they did it, they had a blazing fire and abundant light to dress by; and
even with these advantages, which essentially change the nature of the
enterprise, they have not done it for very long. What an aggregate of misery
is the result of that inveterate usage in the University of Glasgow’, that
the early lectures begin at 7.30 A.M. from November till Mayl How utterly
miserable the dark, dirty streets look, as the unhappy student splashes
through mud and smoke to the black archway that admits to those groves of
Academe! And what a blear-eyed, unwashed, unshaven, blinking, ill-natured,
watched set it is that fills the benches of the lecture-room! The design of
the authorities in maintaining that early hour has been much misunderstood
Philosophers have taught that the professors, in bringing out their unhappy
students at that period, had it in view to turn to use an hour of the day
which otherwise would have been wasted in bed, and thus set free an hour at
a better season of the day. Another school of metaphysicians, among whom may
be reckoned the eminent authors, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, have maintained
with considerable force of argument that the authorities of the University,
eager to advance those under their charge in health, wealth, and wisdom,
have resorted to an observance which has for many ages been regarded as
conducive to that end Others, again, the most eminent among whom is Smith,
have taken up the ground that the professors have fixed on the early hour
for no reason in particular; but that, as the classes must meet at some hour
of each day, they might just as well meet at that hour as at any other. All
these theories are erroneous. There is more in the system than meets the
eye. It originated in Roman Catholic days; and something of the philosophy
of the stoic and of the faith of the anchorite is involved in it Grim
lessons of endurance; dark hints of penance; extensive disgust at matters in
general, and a disposition to punch the head of humanity; are mystically
connected with the lectures at 7.30 a.m. in winter. It is quite different in
summer, when everything is bright and inviting ; if you are up and forth by
five or six o’clock any morning then, you feel ashamed as you look at the
drawn blinds and the closed shutters of the house in the broad daylight.
There is something curious in the contrast between the stillness and shut-up
look of a country-house in the early summer morning, and the blaze of light,
the dew sparkling life-like on the grass, the birds singing, and all nature
plainly awake though man is asleep. You feel that at 7.30 in June, Nature
intends you to be astir; but believe it, ye learned doctors of Glasgow
College, at 7.30 in December her intention is quite the reverse. And if
you*fly in Nature’s face, and persist in getting up at unseasonable hours,
she will take it out of you by making you horribly uncomfortable.
There is, indeed, one fashion in which rising by candlelight, under the most
uncomfortable circumstances, may turn to a source of positive enjoyment.
And the more dreary and wretched you feel, as you wearily drag yourself out
of bed into the searching cold, the greater will that peculiar enjoyment be.
Have you not, my reader, learned by your own experience that the machinery
of the human mind and heart may be worked backwards, just as a steam-engine
is reversed, so that a result may be produced which is exactly the opposite
of the normal one? The fundamental principle on which the working of the
human constitution, as regards pleasure and pain, goes, may be stated in the
following formula, which will not appear a truism except to those who have
not brains to understand it—
The more jolly you are, the jollier you are.
But by reversing the poles, or by working the machine backwards, many human
beings, such as Indian fakirs, mediaeval monks and hermits, Simeon Stylites,
very early risers, very hard students, Childe Harold, men who fall in love
and then go off to Australia without telling the young woman, and the like,
bring themselves to this:—that their fundamental principle, as regards
pleasure and pain, takes the following form—
The more miserable you are, the jollier you are.
Don’t you know that all that is true? A man may bring himself to this point,
that it shall be to him a positive satisfaction to think how much he is
denying himself, and how much he is taking out of himself.
And all this satisfaction may be felt quite irrespective of any worthy end
to be attained by all this pain, toil, endurance, self-denial. I believe
indeed that the taste for suffering as a source of enjoyment is an acquired
taste; it takes some time to bring any human being to it It is not natural,
in the obvious meaning of the word; but assuredly it is natural in the sense
that it founds on something which is of the essence of human nature. You
must penetrate through the upper stratum of the heart, so to speak—that
stratum which finds enjoyment in enjoyment—then you reach to a deeper
sensorium, one whose sensibility is as keen, one whose sensibility is longer
in getting dulled—that sejisorium which finds enjoyment in endurance. Nor
have many years to pass over us before we come to feel that this peculiar
sensibility has been in some measure developed. If you, my friend, are now a
man, it is probable (alas! not certain) that you were once a boy. Perhaps
you were a clever boy; perhaps you were at the head of your class; perhaps
you were a hardworking boy. And now tell me, when on a fine summer evening
you heard the shouts and merriment of your companions in the playground,
while you were toiling away with your lexicon and your Livy, or turning a
passage from Shakspeare into Greek iambics (a hardly-acquired
accomplishment, which has proved so useful in after-life), did you not feel
a certain satisfaction—it was rather a sad one, but still a satisfaction—as
you thought how pleasant it would be to
be out in the beautiful sunshine, and yet felt resolved that out you would
not go! Well for you if your father and mother set themselves stoutly
against this dangerous feeling; well for you if you never overheard them
relating with pride to their acquaintances what a laborious, self-denying,
wonderful boy thou wast! For the sad satisfaction which has been described
is the self-same feeling which makes the poor Hindoo swing himself on a
large hook stuck through his skin, and the fakir pleased when he finds that
his arm, stretched out for twenty years, cannot now be drawn back. It is
precisely the feeling which led the saints of the Middle Ages to starve
themselves till their palate grew insensible to the taste of food, or to
flagellate themselves as badly as Legree did Uncle Tom, or to refrain wholly
from the use of soap and water for forty years. It is a most dangerous thing
to indulge in, this enjoyment arising from the principle of the greatest
jollity from the greatest suffering; for although we ought to feel thankful
that God has so ordered things, that in a world where little that is good
can be done except by painful exertion and resolute self-denial, a certain
satisfaction is linked even with that exertion and self-denial in
themselves, apart from the good results to which they lead; it seems to me
that we have no right to add needless bitterness to life that our morbid
spirit may draw from it a morbid enjoyment No doubt self-denial, and
struggle against our nature for the right, is a noble thing: but I think
that in the present day there is a tendency unduly to exalt both work and
self-denial, as though these things were excellent in themselves apart from
any excellent ends which follow from them. Work merely as work is not a good
thing: it is a good thing because of the excellent things that come with it
and of it. And so with self-denial, whether it appear in swinging on a hook
or in rising at five on a winter morning. It is a noble thing if it is to do
some good; but very many people appear to think it a noble thing in itself,
though it do no good whatever. The man deserves canonisation who swings on a
hook to save his country; but the man is affected with a morbid reversal of
the constitution of human nature who swings on a hook because he finds a
strange satisfaction in doing something which is terribly painful and
abhorrent The true nobility of labour and self-denial is reflected back on
them from a noble end: there is nothing fine in accumulating suffering upon
ourselves merely because we hate it, but feel a certain secondary pleasure
in resolutely submitting to what primarily we hate. There is nothing fine in
going into a monastery merely because you would much rather stay out. There
is nothing fine in going off to America, and never asking a woman to be your
wife, merely because you are very fond of her, and know that all this will
be a fearful trial to go through. You will be in truth ridiculous, though
you may fancy yourself sublime, when you are sitting at the door of your
log-hut away in backwoods lonely as those loved by Daniel Boone, and sadly
priding yourself on the terrible sacrifice you have made. That sacrifice
would have been grand if it had been your solemn duty to make it; it is
silly, and it is selfish, if it be made for mere selfdenial’s sake.
Now a great many people do not remember this. David Copperfield was pleased
in thinking that he was taking so much out of himself. He was pleased in
thinking so, even though no earthly good came of his doing all that His kind
aunt was ruined, and he was determined that he would deny himself in every
way that he might not be a burden upon her; and so when he was walking to
any place he walked at a furious pace, and was glad to find himself growing
fagged and out of breath, because surely it must be a good thing to feel so
jaded and miserable. It was self-sacrifice; it was self-deniaL And if to
walk at five miles and a half an hour had had any tendency to restore his
aunt’s little fortune, it could not have been praised too much; and the less
David liked it, the more praise it would have deserved. And I venture to
think that a good deal of the present talk about Muscular Christianity is
based upon this error. I do not know that exertion of the muscles, as such,
is necessarily a good or an essentially Christian thing. It is good because
it promotes health of body and of mind; but you find many books which appear
to teach that it is a fine thing in itself to leap a horse over a
five-barred gate, or to crumple up a silver jug, or to thrash a
prize-fighter. It is very well to thrash the prize-fighter if it becomes
necessary, but surely it would be better to escape the necessity of
thrashing the prize-fighter.* Certain of the poems of Longfellow, much
admired and quoted by young ladies, are instinct with the mischievous notion
that self-denial for mere self-denial's sake is a grand, heroic, and
religious thing. The Psalm of Life is extremely vague, and somewhat
unintelligible. It is philosophically false to say that
“Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way.”
For, rightly understood, happiness not only is
our aim, but is plainly intended to be such by our Creator. He made us to be
happy: the whole bearing of revealed religion is to make us happy. Of
course, the man who grasps at selfish enjoyment turns his back on happiness.
Self-sacrifice and exertion, where
[To prevent misconception, let me say that I do not allude to the doctrine
of what is (perhaps foolishly, but expressively) called Muscular
Christianity, as taught by Mr Kingsley; but to the absurd caricatures of the
doctrine set forth by several writers who teach the excellence of
Unchristian Muscularity. With the views of Mr Kingsley on this subject I
heartily agree : and I know that there is not a word bearing upon it in the
essay to which he would not say “Amen.” But it must ever be the lot of men
who teach doctrines which, though true and sober, sound at first mention new
and strange, to have them misrepresented by their opponents, and (what is
worse) caricatured by their imitators.]
needful, are the way to happiness; and the main thing which we know of the
Christian heaven is, that it is a state of happiness. But Longfellow,
talking in that fashion (no doubt sitting in a large easy-chair by a warm
fire in a snug study when he did so) wants to convey the utterly false
notion that there is something fine in doing what is disagreeable, merely
for the sake of doing it Now, that notion is Bhuddism, but it is not
Christianity. Christianity says to us, Suffer, labour, endure up to
martyrdom, when duty calls you; but never fancy that there is anything noble
in throwing yourself in martyrdom’s way. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy
God.” And as for Longfellow’s conception of the fellow who went up the Alps,
bellowing out Excelsior; it is nothing better than childish. Any one whose
mind is matured enough to discern that Childe Harold was a humbug, will see
that the lad was a fool What on earth was he to do when he got to the top of
the Alps 1 The poet does not even pretend to answer that question. He never
pretends that the lad whose brow was sad, and his eye like a falchion, &c.,
had anything useful or excellent to accomplish when he reached the
mountain-top at last. Longfellow wishes us to understand that it was a noble
thing to push onward and upward through the snow, merely because it is a
very difficult and dangerous thing. He wishes us to understand that it was a
noble thing to turn away from warm household fires to spectral glaciers, and
to resist the invitations of the maiden, who, if the lad was a stranger in
those parts, as seems to be implied, must have been a remarkably free-and
easy style of young lady—merely because average human nature would have
liked extremely to get out of the storm to the bright fireside, and to have
had a quiet chat with the maiden. I don’t mean to say that about ten years
ago I did not think that Excelsior was a wonderful poem, setting out a true
and noble principle. A young person is captivated with the notion of
self-sacrifice, with or without a reason for it; but self-sacrifice,
uncalled for and useless, is stark folly. It was very good of Curtius to
jump into the large hole in the Forum; no doubt he saved the Senate great
expense in filling it up, though probably it would have been easier to do so
than to carry the Liverpool and Manchester Railway through Chatmoss. And we
cannot think even yet, of Leonidas and his three hundred at Thermopylae,
without some stir of heart; but would not the gallant Lacedaemonians have
been silly and not heroic, had not their self-sacrifice served a great end,
by gaining for their countrymen certain precious days! Even Dickens, though
not much of a philosopher, is more philosophic than Longfellow. He wrote a
little book one Christmas-time, The Battle of Life, whose plot turns
entirely upon an extraordinary act of self-sacrifice; and which contains
many sentences which sound like the cant of the day. Witness the following:—
It is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks upon a thousand
bloodless battles, that are some set-off against the miseries and wickedness
of battle-fields.
There are victories gained every day in struggling hearts, to which these
fields of battle are as nothing.
But although the book contains such sentences, which seem to teach that
struggle and self-conquest are noble in themselves, apart from their aim or
their necessity, the lesson taught by the entire story is the true and just
one, that there is no nobler thing than self-sacrifice and self-conquest,
when they are right, when they are needful, when a noble end is to be gained
by them. As some dramatist or other says—
“That’s truly great! What, think ye, ’twas set
up
The Greek and Roman names in such a lustre,
But doing right, in stem despite of nature!
Shutting their ears ’gainst all her little cries,
When great, august, and godlike virtue call’d!”
The author, you see, very justly remarks that
you are not called to fly in the face of nature, unless when there is good
reason for it And therefore, my friend, don’t get up at seven o’clock on a
winter morning, if you can possibly help it If virtue calls, it will indeed
be noble to rise by candlelight; but not otherwise. If you are the
engine-driver of an early train, if you are a factory-hand, if you are a
Glasgow student of philosophy, get up at an unseasonable period, and accept
the writer’s sympathy and admiration. Poor fellow, you cannot help it 1 But
if you are a Glasgow professor, I have no veneration for that needless act
of self-denial. You need not get up so early unless you like. You do the
thing of your free choice.
And your heroism is only that of the Brahmin who swings on the hook, when
nobody asks him to do so.
Having mused in this fashion, I look out of the carnage window. The morning
is breaking, cold and dismal. There is a thick white mist. We are flying on,
across gray fields, by spectral houses and trees, shewing indistinct through
the uncertain light. It is light enough to read, by making an effort I draw
from my pocket a letter, which came late last night: it is from a friend,
who is an eminent Editor. I do not choose to remember the name of the
periodical which he conducts. I have had time to do no more than glance over
it; and I have not yet arrived at its full meaning. I feel as Tony Lumpkin
felt, who never had the least difficulty in reading the outside of his
letters, but who found it very hard work to decipher the inside. The
circumstance was the more annoying, he justly observed, inasmuch as the
inside of a letter generally contains the cream of the correspondence.
When I receive a letter from my friend the Editor, I am able, by an intense
application of attention for a few minutes, to make out its general drift
and meaning. The difficulty in the way of grasping the entire sense does not
arise from any obscurity of style, but wholly from the remarkable nature of
the penmanship. And after gaining the general bearing of the document, I am
well aware that there are many recesses and nooks of meaning which will not
be reached but after repeated perusals. What appeared at first a flourish of
the pen may gradually assume the form of an important clause of a sentence,
materially modifying its force. What appears at present a blot may turn out
to be anything whatever; what at present looks like No may prove to have
stood for Yes. I think sympathetically of the worthy father of Dr Chalmers.
When he received his weekly or fortnightly letter from his distinguished
son, he carefully locked it up. By the time a little store had accumulated,
his son came to pay him a visit; and then he broke all the seals and got the
writer of the letters to read them. I read my letter over; several shades of
thought break upon me, of whose existence in it I was previously unaware.
That handwriting is like In Memoriam. Read it for the twentieth time, and
you will find something new in it I fold the letter up; and I begin to think
of a matter concerning which I have thought a good deal of late.
Surely, I think to myself, there is a respect in which the more refined and
cultivated portion of the human race in Britain is suffering a rapid
deterioration, and getting into a morbid state. I mean in the matter of
nervous irritability or excitability. Surely people are far more nervous now
than they used to be some generations back. The mental cultivation and the
mental wear which we have to go through, tends to make that strange and
inexplicable portion of our physical constitution a very great deal too
sensitive for the work and trial of daily life. A few days ago I drove a
friend who had been paying us a visit over to our railway station. He is a
man of fifty, a remarkably able and accomplished man. Before the train
started the guard came round to look at the tickets. My friend could not
find his; he searched his pockets everywhere, and although the entire evil
consequence, had the ticket not turned up, could not possibly have been more
than the payment a second time of four or five shillings, he got into a
nervous tremor painful to see. He shook from head to foot; his hand trembled
so that he could not prosecute his search rightly, and finally he found the
missing ticket in a pocket which he had already searched half-a-dozen times.
Now contrast the condition of this highly-civilised man, thrown into a
painful flurry and confusion at the demand of a railway ticket, with the
impassive coolness of a savage who would not move a muscle if you hacked him
in pieces. Is it not a dear price we pay for our superior cultivation, this
morbid sensitiveness which makes us so keenly alive to influences which are
painful and distressing? I have known very highly educated people who were
positively trembling with anxiety and undefined fear every day before the
post came in. Yet they had no reason to anticipate bad news; they could
conjure up indeed a hundred gloomy forebodings of evil, but no one knew
better than themselves how vain and weak were their fears. Surely the
knights of old must have been quite dif ferent They had great stalwart
bodies, and no minds to speak of. They had .no doubt a high sense of honour—not
a very enlightened sense—but their purely intellectual nature was hardly
developed at all They never read anything. There were not many knights or
squires like Fitz Eustace, who “Much had pored Upon a huge romantic tome,
In the hall window of his home,
Imprinted at the antique dome
Of Caxton or De Worde.”
They never speculated upon any abstract subject:
and although in their long rides from place to place they might have had
time for thinking, I suppose their attention was engrossed by the necessity
of having a sharp look-out around them for the appearance of a foe. And we
all know that that kind of sharpness—the hunter’s sharpness, the guerilla’s
sharpness—may coexist with the densest stupidity in all matters beyond the
little range that is familiar. The aboriginal Australian can trace friend or
foe with the keenness almost of brute instinct: so can the Red Indian, so
can the Wild Bushman; yet the intellectual and moral nature in all these
races is not very many degrees above the elephant or the shepherd’s dog. And
stupidity is a great preservative against nervous excitability or anxiety. A
dull man cannot think of the thousand sad possibilities which the quicker
mind sees are brooding over human life. Nor does this friendly stupidity
only dull the understanding; it gives inertia, immobility, to the emotional
nature. Compare a pure thoroughbred horse with a huge heavy carthorse
without a trace of breeding. The thoroughbred is a beautiful creature
indeed: but look at the startled eye, look at the quick ears, look at the
blood coursing through those great veins so close to the surface, look how
tremblingly alive the creature is to any sudden sight or sound. Why, there
you have got the perfection of equine nature, but you have paid for it just
the same price that you pay for the perfection of human nature—what a
nervous creature you have there! Then look at the cart-horse. It is clumsy
in shape, ungraceful in movement, rough in skin, dull of eye; in short, it
is a great ugly brute. But what a placid equanimity there is about it! How
composed, how immovable it looks, standing with its head hanging down, and
its eyes half closed. It is a low type of its race no doubt, but it enjoys
the blessing which is enjoyed by the dull, stupid, unrefined woman or man,
it is not nervous. Let something fall with a whack, it does not start as if
it had been shot Throw a little pebble at its flank, it turns round
tranquilly to see what is the matter. Why, the thoroughbred would have been
over that hedge at much less provocation. -The morbid nervousness of the
present day appears in several ways. It brings a man sometimes to that
startled state that the sudden opening of a door, the clash of the falling
fire-irons, or any little accident, puts him in a flutter. How nervous the
late Sir Robert Peel must have been when, a few weeks before his death, he
went to the Zoological Gardens, and when a monkey suddenly sprang upon his
arm, the great and worthy man fainted 1 Another phase of nervousness is when
a man is brought to that state that the least noise or cross-occurrence
seems to jar through the entire nervous system—to upset him, as we say; when
he cannot command his mental powers except in perfect stillness, or in the
chamber and at the writing-table to which he is accustomed; when, in short,
he gets fidgety, easily worried, full of whims and fancies which must be
indulged and considered, or he is quite out ot sorts. Another phase of the
same morbid condition is, when a human being is always oppressed with vague
undefined fears that things are going wrong; that his income will not meet
the demands upon it, that his child’s lungs are affected, that his mental
powers are leaving him—a state of feeling which shades rapidly off into
positive insanity. Indeed, when matters remain long in any of the fashions
which have been described, I suppose the natural termination must be disease
of the heart, or a shock of paralysis, or insanity in' the form cither of
mania or idiocy. Numbers of commonplace people who could feel very acutely,
but who could not tell what they felt, have been worried into fatal
heart-disease by prolonged anxiety and misery. Every one knows how paralysis
laid its hand upon Sir Walter Scott, always great, lastly heroic. Protracted
anxiety how to make the ends meet, with a large family and an uncertain
income, drove Southey’s first wife into the lunatic asylum: and there is
hardly a more touching story than that of her fears and forebodings through
nervous year after year. Not less sad was the end of her overwrought
husband, in blank vacuity; nor the like end of Thomas Moore. And perhaps the
saddest instance of the result of an overdriven nervous system, in recent
days, was the end of that rugged, honest, wonderful genius, Hugh Miller.
Is it a reaction, a desperate rally against something that is felt to be a
powerful invader, that makes it so much a point of honour with Englishmen at
this day to retain, or appear to retain, a perfect immobility under all
circumstances? It is pretty and interesting for a lady, at all events for a
young lady, to exhibit hei nervous tremors; a man sternly represses the
exhibition of these. Stoic philosophy centuries since, and modem refinement
in its last polish of manner, alike recognise the Red Indian’s principle,
that there is something manly, something fine, in the repression of human
feeling. Here is a respect in which the extreme of civilisation and the
extreme of barbarism closely approach one another. The Red Indian really did
not care for anything; the modem fine gentleman, the youthful exquisite,
though really pretty nervous, wishes to convey by his entire deportment the
impression, that he does not care for anything. A man is to exhibit 110
strong emotion. It is unmanly.
If he is glad, he must not look it If he loses a great deal more money than
he can afford on the Derby, he must take it coolly. Everything is to be
taken coolly: and some indurated folk no doubt are truly as cool as they
look. Let me have nothing to do with such. Nil admirari is not a good maxim
for a man. The coolest individual who occurs to me at this moment is
Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. He was not a pleasant character. That
coolness is not human. It is essentially Satanic. But in many people in
modem days the apparent coolness covers a most painful nervousness. Indeed,
as a general rule, whenever any one does anything which is (socially
speaking) outrageously daring, it is because he is nervous; and struggling
with the feeling, and striving to conceal the fact A speaker who is too
forward, who is jauntily free and easy, is certainly very nervous. And
though I have said that perfect coolness in all circumstances is not amiable
or desirable, still one cannot look but with interest, if not with sympathy,
at Campbell’s fine description of the Red Indian :—
He said,—and strain’d unto his heart the boy-
Far differently, the mute Oneyda took
His calumet of peace and cup of joy:
As monumental bronze unchanged his look;
A soul that pity touch’d, but never shook;
Train’d from his tree-rock’d cradle to his bier
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
Impassive,—fearing but the shame of fear,—
A Stoic of the woods,—a man without a tear I The
writings of Mr Dickens furnish me with a companion picture adapted to modem
times. I confess that, upon reflection, I doubt whether a considerable
portion of the interest of Outalissi’s peculiar manner may not be derived
from distance in time and space. Indian immobility and stoical philosophy
are not sublime in the servants’ hall of modem society:—
"I don’t know anything,” said Britain, with a leaden eye and an immovable
visage. “I don’t care for anything. I don’t make out anything. I don’t
believe anything. And I don’t want anything.”
Nervous people should live in large towns. The houses are so big, and afford
such impervious shadow, that the nervous man, very little when compared with
them, does not feel himself pushed into painful prominence. It is a comfort,
too, to see many other people going about. It carries the nervous man out of
himself. It reminds him that multitudes more have their cares as well as he.
It dispels the uncomfortable feeling which grows on such people in the
country, that everybody is thinking and talking of them,—to see numbers of
men and women, all quite occupied with their own concerns, and evidently
never thinking of them at all.
I have known one of these shrinking and evil-foreboding persons say, that he
could not have lived in the country (as he did) had not the district where
his home was been very thickly wooded with large trees. It was a comfort to
a man who wished to shrink out of sight and get quietly by when the road
along which he was walking wound into a thick wood. The trees were so big
and so old, and they seemed to make a shelter from the outer world. In
walking over a vast bare level down, a man is the most conspicuous figure in
the landscape. There is nothing taller than himself, and he can be seen from
miles away. Now, to be pushed into notice—to be made a conspicuous figure
—is intensely painful to the nervous man. You and I, my reader, no doubt
think such a state of feeling morbid, but it is probably a state to which
circumstances might bring most people. And we can quite well understand,
that when pressed by care, sorrow, or fear, there is something friendly in
the shade of trees —in anything that dims the light, and hides from public
view. You remember the poor fellow (a very silly fellow indeed, but very
silly fellows can suffer) who asked Little Dorrit to marry him, and met a
decided though a kind refusal. He lived somewhere over in Southwark, in a
street of poor houses, which had little back-greens, but of course no trees
in them. But the poor fellow felt the instinctive longing of the stricken
heart for shadow; and so, when his mother hung out the clothes from the wash
on ropes crossing and recrossing the little green, he used to go out and sit
amid the flapping sheets, and say that “he felt it like groves!” Was not
that a testimony to the friendly congeniality of trees to the sad or
timorous human being? And when Cowper wearied to get away from a turbulent
world to some quiet retreat, he did not wish that that retreat should be in
an open country. No, he says—
Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more!
To the same effect did the same shrinking poet
express himself in lines equally familiar:—
I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since: with many an arrow deep
infix’d My panting side was charged, when I withdrew To seek a tranquil
death in distant shades.
I suppose that if some heavy blow had fallen upon any of us, we should not
choose the open field or the bare hillside as the place to which we should
go to think about it. We should rather choose some low-lying, sheltered,
shaded spot Great sorrow does not parade itself. It wishes to get out of
sight.
As to the question how this nervousness may be got rid of, it is difficult
to know what to think. It is in great measure a physical condition, and not
under the control of the will Some people would treat it physically—send the
nervous man to the water-cure,—put him in training like a prize-fighter or a
pedestrian, and the like. These are excellent things; still I have greater
confidence in mental remedies. Give the evil-foreboding man plenty to% do;
push him out of his quiet course of life into the turmoil which he shrinks
away from, and the turmoil will lose its fears. Work is the healthy
atmosphere for a human being. The soul of man is a machine with this great
peculiarity about it,—that we cannot stop it from motion when we will.
Perhaps that is a defect Many a man, through a weary sleepless night, has
longed for the power to push some lever or catch into the swift-running
engine that was whirring away within him, and bring it to a stand. However,
it cannot be. And as the machine will go on, we must provide it with grist
to grind, wre must give it w’ork to do, or it will knock itself in pieces;
or if not that% then get all w^arped and twisted, so that it never shall go
without creaking, and straining, and trembling. And so, if you find a man or
woman, young or old, vexed with ceaseless fears, worried with all kinds of
odd ideas, doubts upon religious matters, and the like, don’t argue with
them; that is not the treatment that is necessary in the meantime. There is
something else to be done first It would do no good to blister a horse’s
legs till the previous inflammation has gone dowm. It will do no good to
present the soundest views to a nervous, idle man. Set him to hard work.
Give him lots to do. And then that invisible machine, which has been turning
off misery and delusion, will begin to turn off content and sound views of
all things. After two or three weeks of this healthful treatment you may
proceed to argue with your friend. In all likelihood you will find that
argument will not be necessary. He has arrived at truth and sense already.
There is a wonderfully close connexion between work and sound views; between
doing and knowing. It is in life as it is in religion: “If any man will do
His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.”
Looking out now, I see it has grown quite light, though the day is gloomy,
and will be so to its close. The train is speeding round the base of a great
hill. Far below us a narrow little river is dashing on, all in foam. Its
sound is faintly heard at this height. I said to myself, by way of winding
up my musing upon nervousness: After all, is not this painful fact just an
over-degree of that which makes us living beings? Is it not just life too
sensitively present in every atom of even the dull flesh? There is that gray
rock which we are passing; how still and immovable it is ! All the stoicism
of Greece, all the impassiveness of the mute Oneyda, all the indifference of
the pococurante Englishman, how far they fall short of that sublime
stillness ! But it is still because it is senseless. It looks as if it felt
nothing, because it really feels nothing. I compare it with Lord Derby
before he gets up to make a great speech; fidgeting on his seat; watching
every movement and word of the man he' is going to smash; his wonderfully
ready mind working with a whirr like wheel-work revolving unseen through its
speed; living intensely, in fact, in every fibre of his frame. Well, that is
the finer thing, after all. The big cart-horse, already thought ofJ is
something midway between the Premier and the granite. The stupid blockhead
is cooler than the Premier, indeed ; but he is not so cool as the granite.
If coolness be so fine a thing, of course the perfection of coolness must be
the finest thing; and that we find in the lifeless rock. What is life but
that which makes us more sensitive than the rock: what is the highest type
of life but that which makes us most sensitive! It is better to be the warm,
trembling, foreboding, human being, than to be Ben Nevis, knowing nothing,
feeling nothing, fearing nothing, cold and lifeless.
It is natural enough to pass from thinking of one human weakness to thinking
of another; and certain remarks of a fellow-traveller, not addressed to me,
suggest the inveterate tendency to vapouring and big talking which dwells in
many men and women. Who is there who desires to appear to his
fellow-creatures precisely what he is! I have known such people and admired
them, for they are comparatively few. Why does Mr Smith, when some hundreds
of miles from home, talk of his place in the country? In the etymological
sense of the words it certainly is a place in the country, for it is a seedy
one-storied cottage without a tree near it, standing bleakly on a hillside,
But a place in the country suggests to the mind long avenues, great
shrubberies, extensive greenhouses, fine conservatories, lots of horses,
abundance of servants; and that is the picture which Mr Smith desires to
call up before the mind’s eye of those whom he addresses. When Mr Robinson
talks with dignity about the political discussions which take place in his
servants’ hall, the impression conveyed is that Robinson has a vast
establishment of domestics. A vision rises of ancient retainers, of a
dignified housekeeper, of a bishop-like butler, of Jeamses without number,
of unstinted October. A man of strong imagination may even think of
huntsmen, falconers, couriers—of a grand baronial monagey in fact. You would
not think that Robinson’s establishment consists of a cook, a housemaid, and
a stable-boy. Very well for the fellow too ; but why will he vapour? When Mr
Jones told me the other day that something or other happened to him when he
wras going out “to the stables to look at the horses,” I naturally thought,
as one fond of horseflesh, that it would be a fine sight to see Jones’s
stables, as he called them. I thought of three handsome carriage-horses
sixteen hands high, a pair of pretty ponies for his wife to drive, some
hunters, beauties to look at and tremendous fellows to go. The words used
might even have justified the supposition of two or three racehorses, and
several lads with remarkably long jackets walking about the yard. I was
filled with fury when I learned that Jones’s horses consisted of a large
brougham-horse, broken-winded, and a spavined pony. I have known a man who
had a couple of moorland farms habitually talk of his estate. One of the
commonest and weakest ways of vapouring is by introducing into your
conversation, very familiarly, the names ot people of rank whom you know
nothing earthty about “How sad it is,” said Mrs Jenkins to me the other day,
“about the duchess being so ill! Poor dear thing! We are all in stick great
distress about her! “We all” meant, of course, the landed aristocracy of the
district, of which Mrs Jenkins had lately become a member, Jenkins having
retired from the hardware line and bought a small tract of quagmire. Some
time ago a man told me that he had been down to Oatmealshire to see his
tenantry. Of course he was not aware that I knew that he was the owner of
just one farm. “This is my parish we have entered,” said a youth of clerical
appearance to me in a railway carriage. In one sense it was; but he would
not have said so had he been aware that I knew he was the curate, not the
rector. “How can Brown and his wife get on,” a certain person observed to
me; “they cannot possibly live: they will starve. Think of people getting
married with not more than eight or nine hundred a yearl” How dignified the
man thought he looked as he made the remark! It was a fine thing to
represent that he could not understand how human beings could do what he
w-as well aw^are w'as done by multitudes of wiser people than himself.
“It is a cheap horse that of Wiggins’s,” remarked Mr Figgins; “it did not
cost more than seventy or eighty pounds.” Poor silly Figgins fancies that
all who hear him will conclude that his own broken-kneed hack (bought for
£25) cost at least £150. Oh, silly folk who talk big, and then think you are
adding to your importance, don't you know that you are merely making fools
of yourselves? In nine cases out of ten the person to whom you are relating
your exaggerated story knows what the precise fact is. He is too polite to
contradict you and to tell you the truth, but rely on it he knows it No one
believes the vapouring story told by another man; no, not even the man who
fancies that his own vapouring story is believed. Every one who knows
anything of the world knows how, by an accompanying process of mental
arithmetic, to make the deductions from the big story told, which will bring
it down to something near the truth. Frequently has my friend Mr Snooks told
me of the crushing retort by which he shut up Jeffrey upon a memorable
occasion. I can honestly declare that I never gave credence to a syllable of
what he said. Repeatedly has my friend Mr Longbow told me of his remarkable
adventure in the Bay of Biscay, when a whale very nearly swallowed him.
Never once did I fail to listen with every mark of implicit belief to my
friend’s narrative, but do you think I believed it? And more than once has
Mrs O’Callaghan assured me that the hothouses on her fawther’s esteet were
three miles in length, and that each cluster of grapes grown on that
favoured spot weighed above a hundredweight. With profound respect I gave
ear to all she said; but, gentle daughter of Erin, did you think I was as
soft as I seemed? You may just as well tell the truth at once, ye big
talkers, for everybody will know it, at any rate.
It is a sad pity when parents, by a long course of big talking, and silly
pretension, bring up their children with ideas of their own importance which
make them appear ridiculous, and which are rudely dissipated on their
entering into life. The mother of poor Lollipop, when he went to Cambridge,
told me that his genius was such that he was sure to be Senior Wrangler. And
possibly he might have been if he had not been plucked.
It is peculiarly irritating to be obliged to listen to a vapouring person
pouring out a string of silly exaggerated stories, all tending to shew how
great the vapouring person is. Politeness forbids your stating that you
don’t believe them. I have sometimes derived comfort under such an
infliction from making a memorandum, mentally, and then, like Captain Cuttle,
“making a note” on the earliest opportunity. My taking this course, instead
of being irritated by each successive stretch, you are rather gratified by
the number and the enormity of them. I hereby give notice to all ladies and
gentlemen whose conscience tells them that they arc accustomed to vapour,
that it is not improbable that I have in my possession a written list of
remarkable statements made by them. It is possible that they would look
rather blue if they were permitted to see it.
Let me add, that it is not always vapouring to talk of one’s self, even in
terms which imply a compliment. It was not vapouring when Lord Tenterden,
being Lord Chief-Justice of England, standing by Canterbury Cathedral with
his son by his side, pointed to a little barber’s shop, and said to the boy,
“I never feel proud except when I remember that in that shop your
grandfather shaved for a penny!” It was not vapouring when Burke wrote, “I
was not rocked, and swaddled, and dandled into a legislator: Nitor in
adversnm is the motto for a man like me!” It was not vapouring when Milton
wrote that he had in himself a conviction that “by labour and intent study,
which he took to be his portion in this life, he might leave to after ages
something so written as that men should not willingly let it die.” Nor was
it vapouring, but a pleasing touch of nature, when the King of Siam begged
our ambassador to assure Queen Victoria that a letter which he sent to her,
in the English language, was composed and written entirely by himself. It is
not vapouring, kindly reader, when upon your return home after two or three
days’ absence, your little son, aged four years, climbs upon your knee, and
begs you to ask his mother if he has not been a very good boy when you were
away; nor when he shews you, with great pride, the medal which he has won a
few years later. It is not vapouring when the gallant man who heroically
jeoparded life and limb for the women’s and children’s sake at Lucknow,
wears the Victoria Cross over his brave heart Nor is it a piece of national
vapouring, though it is, sure enough, an appeal to proud remembrances, when
England preserves religiously the stout old Victory, and points strangers to
the spot where Nelson fell and died.
But a shrieking whistle yells in my ear: my musings are suddenly pulled up.
The hundred miles are traversed: the train is slackening its speed. It was
half-past seven when we started: it is now about half past eleven. We draw
alongside the platform: there are faces I know. I see a black head over the
palisade: that is my horse. It would be vapouring to say that my carriage
awaits me : for though it has four wheels, it is drawn by no more than four
legs. Drag out a portmanteau from under the seat, exchange a cap for a hat,
open the door, jump out, bundle away home. And then, perhaps, I may tell
some unknown friends who have the patience to read my essays, how I mused,
in the railway train. |
