Practical Essays. Alexander Bain
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these three experimental proofs we may add the confirmation derived from the grand doctrine named the Correlation, Conservation, Persistence, or Limitation of Force, as applied to the human body and the human mind. We cannot create force anywhere; we merely appropriate existing force. The heat of our fires has been derived from the solar fire. We cannot lift a weight in the hand without the combustion of a certain amount of food; we cannot think a thought without a similar demand; and the force that goes in one way is unavailable in any other way. While we are expending ourselves largely in any single function—in muscular exercise, in digestion, in thought and feeling, the remaining functions must continue for the time in comparative abeyance. Now, the maintenance of a high strain of elated feeling, unquestionably costs a great deal to the forces of the system. All the facts confirm this high estimate. An unusually copious supply of arterial blood to the brain is an indispensable requisite, even although other organs should be partially starved, and consequently be left in a weak condition, or else deteriorate before their time. To support the excessive demand of power for one object, less must be exacted from other functions. Hard bodily labour and severe mental application sap the very foundations of buoyancy; they may not entail much positive suffering, but they are scarcely compatible with exuberant spirits. There may be exceptional individuals whose total of power is a very large figure, who can bear more work, endure more privation, and yet display more buoyancy, without shortened life, than the average human being. Hardly any man can attain commanding greatness without being constituted larger than his fellows in the sum of human vitality. But until this is proved to be the fact in any given instance, we are safe in presuming that extraordinary endowment in one thing implies deficiency in other things. More especially must we conclude, provisionally at least, that a buoyant, hopeful, elated temperament lacks some other virtues, aptitudes, or powers, such as are seen flourishing in the men whose temperament is sombre, inclining to despondency. Most commonly the contradictory demand is reconciled by the proverbial "short life and merry".
Adverting now to the object that Helps had so earnestly at heart—namely, to rouse and rescue the English population from their comparative dulness to a more lively and cheerful flow of existence—let us reflect how, upon the foregoing principles, this is to be done. Not certainly by an eloquent appeal to the nation to get up and be amused. The process will turn out to be a more circuitous one.
The mental conformation of the English people, which we may admit to be less lively and less easily amused than the temperament of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or even the German branch of our own Teutonic race, is what it is from natural causes, whether remote descent, or that coupled with the operation of climate and other local peculiarities. How long would it take, and what would be the way to establish in us a second nature on the point of cheerfulness?
Again, with the national temperament such as it is, there may be great individual differences; and it may be possible by force of circumstances, to improve the hilarity and the buoyancy of any given person. Many of our countrymen are as joyous themselves, and as much the cause of joy in others, as the most light-hearted Irishman, or the gayest Frenchman or Italian. How shall we increase the number of such, so as to make them the rule rather than the exception?
[SOLE MEANS OF ATTAINING CHEERFULLNESS.]
The only answer not at variance with the laws of the human constitution is—Increase the supports and diminish the burdens of life.
For example, if by any means you can raise the standard of health and longevity, you will at once effect a stride in the direction sought. But what an undertaking is this! It is not merely setting up what we call sanitary arrangements, to which, in our crowded populations, there must soon be a limit reached (for how can you secure to the mass of men even the one condition of sufficient breathing-space?), it is that health cannot be attained, in any high general standard, without worldly means far above the average at the disposal of the existing population; while the most abundant resources are often neutralised by ineradicable hereditary taint. To which it is to be added, that mankind can hardly as yet be said to be in earnest in the matter of health.
Farther: it is especially necessary to cheerfulness, that a man should not be overworked, as many of us are, whether from choice or from necessity. Much, I believe, turns upon this circumstance. Severe toil consumes the forces of the constitution, without leaving the remainder requisite for hilarity of tone. The Irishman fed upon three meals of potatoes a day, the lazy Highlander, the Lazaroni of Naples living upon sixpence a week, are very poorly supported; but then their vitality is so little drawn upon by work, that they may exceed in buoyancy of spirits the well-fed but hard-worked labourer. We, the English people, would not change places with them, notwithstanding: our ideal is industry with abundance; but then our industry sobers our temperament, and inclines us to the dulness that Helps regrets. Possibly, we may one day hit a happier mean; but to the human mind extremes have generally been found easiest.
Once more: the light-hearted races trouble themselves little about their political constitution, about despotism or liberty; they enjoy the passing moments of a despot's smiles, and if he turns round and crushes them, they quietly submit. We live in dread of tyranny. Our liberty is a serious object; it weighs upon our minds. Now any weight upon the mind is so much taken from our happiness; hilarity may attend on poverty, but not so well on a serious, forecasting disposition. Our regard to the future makes us both personally industrious and politically anxious; a temper not to be amused with the relaxations of the Parisian in his café on the boulevards, or with the Sunday merry-go-round of the light-hearted Dane. Our very pleasures have still a sadness in them.
Then, again, what are to be our amusements? By what recreative stimulants shall we irradiate the gloom of our idle hours and vacation periods? Doubtless there have been many amusements invented by the benefactors of our species—society, games, music, public entertainments, books; and in a well-chosen round of these, many contrive to pass their time in a tolerable flow of satisfaction. But they all cost something; they all cost money, either directly, to procure them, or indirectly, to be educated for them. There are few very cheap pleasures. Books are not so difficult to obtain, but the enjoying of them in any high degree implies an amount of cultivation that cannot be had cheaply.
Moreover, look at the difficulties that beset the pursuit of amusements. How fatiguing are they very often! How hard to distribute the time and the strength between them and our work or our duties! It needs some art to steer one's way in the midst of variety of pleasures. Hence there will always be, in a cautious-minded people, a disposition to remain satisfied with few and safe delights; to assume a sobriety of aims that Helps might call dulness, but that many of us call the middle path.
[FALLACY OF PRESCRIBING TASTES.]
II. A second error against the limits of the human powers is the prescribing to persons indiscriminately, certain tastes, pursuits, and subjects of interest, on the ground that what is a spring of enjoyment to one or a few may be taken up, as a matter of course, by others with the same relish. It is, indeed, a part of happiness to have some taste, occupation, or pursuit, adequate to charm and engross us—a ruling passion, a favourite study. Accordingly, the victims of dulness and ennui are often advised to betake themselves to something of this potent character. Kingsley, in his little book on the "Wonders of the Shore," endeavoured to convert mankind at large into marine naturalists; and, some time ago, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from Carlyle, regretting that he himself had not been indoctrinated into the zoology of our waysides. I have heard a man out of health, hypochondriac, and idle, recommended to begin botany, geology, or chemistry, as a diversion of his misery. The idea is plausible and superficial. An overpowering taste for any subject—botany, zoology, antiquities, music—is properly affirmed to be born with a man. The forces of the brain must from the first incline largely to that one species of impressions, to which must be added years of engrossing pursuit. We may gaze with envy at the fervour of a botanist over his dried plants, and may wish to take up so fascinating a pursuit: we may just as easily wish to be Archimedes when he leaped out of the bath; a man cannot re-cast his brain nor re-live his life. A taste of a high order, founded on natural endowment, formed by education, and strengthened by active devotion, is also paid for by the atrophy of other tastes, pursuits, and powers. Carlyle might have contracted an interest in frogs, and spiders, and bees, and the other denizens of the wayside,