ESSAY IV.THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING.
Endless books have been written about the Laws of Thought, the Nature of Thought, and the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and metaphysicians have vied with one another to tell us in twenty different ways how we think and why we think and what good our thinking may be supposed to be as affording us any real acquaintance with things in general outside our thinking-machine. One school of philosophers tells us that Thought is a secretion of the brain (i.e., that Thought is a form of Matter), and another that it is purely immaterial, and the only reality in the universe,—i.e., that Matter is a form of Thought. The meekest of men “presume to think” this, that, and the other; and the proudest distinction of the modern sage is to be a “Thinker,” especially a “free” one. But with all this much ado about Thought, it has not occurred to any one, so far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review ofwhat any one of us thinks in the course of the twenty-four hours; what are the number of separable thoughts which, on an average, pass through a human brain in a day; and what may be their nature and proportions in the shape of Recollections, Reflections, Hopes, Contrivances, Fancies, and Reasonings. We are all aware that when we are awake a perpetual stream of thoughts goes on in “what we are pleased to call our minds,” sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in a ditch; sometimes bright, rapid, and sparkling, like a mountain brook; and now and then making some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise, over an obstacle. We are also accustomed to speak as if the sum and substance of all this thinking were very respectable, as might become “beings endowed with the lofty faculty of thought”; and we always tacitly assume that our thoughts have logical beginnings, middles, and endings—commence with problems and terminate in solutions—or that we evolve out of our consciousness ingenious schemes of action or elaborate pictures of Hope or Memory. If our books of mental philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circulating Libraries of another planet, the “general reader” of that distant world will inevitablysuppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thousand millions of men, women, and children, who spend their existence as the interlocutors in Plato’s Dialogues passed their hours under the grip of the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing, sifting, balancing, recollecting, hard at work as if under the ferule of a schoolmaster.
The real truth about the matter seems to be that, instead of taking this kind of mental exercise all day long, and every day, there are very few of us who ever do anything of the kind for more than a few minutes at a time; and that the great bulk of our thoughts proceed in quite a different way, and are occupied by altogether less exalted matters than our vanity has induced us to imagine. The normal mental locomotion of even well-educated men and women, save under the spur of exceptional stimulus, is neither the flight of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a horse upon the road, but may better be compared to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick blackberries, and now turning to right or left to catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick-duck-and-drake on a pond; going nowhere in particular, and only once in a mile or so proceedingsix steps in succession in an orderly and philosophical manner.
It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to supply this large lacune in mental science, and to set forth the truth of the matter about the actual Thoughts which practically, not theoretically, are wont to pass through human brains. Some few observations on the subject, however, may perhaps be found entertaining, and ought certainly to serve to mitigate our self-exaltation on account of our grand mental endowments, by showing how rarely and under what curious variety of pressure we employ them.
The first and familiar remark is that every kind of thought is liable to be colored and modified in all manner of ways by our physical conditions and surroundings. We are not steam thinking-machines, working evenly at all times at the same rate, and turning out the same sort and quantity of work in the same given period, but rather more like windmills, subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails at one time with great impetus and velocity, and at another standing still, becalmed and ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer conditions which affect us, sometimes it is our own inner wheels which are clogged and refuse torotate; but, from whatever cause it arises, the modification of our thoughts is often so great as to make us arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions on the same subject and with the samedataof thought, within an incredibly brief interval of time. Some years ago, the President of the British Association frankly answered objections to the consistency of his inaugural address by referring to the different aspects of the ultimate problems of theology in different “moods” of mind. When men of such eminence confess to “moods,” lesser mortals may avow their own mental oscillations without painful humiliation, and even put forward some claim to consistency if the vibrating needle of their convictions do not swing quite round the whole compass, and point at two o’clock to the existence of a Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a nebula for the origin, and a “streak of morning cloud” for the consummation of things. Possibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim some praise on the score of modesty if it delay for the moment to instruct mankind in either its two o’clock or its six o’clock creed, and wait till it has settled down for some few hours, weeks, or months, to any one definite opinion.
Not to dwell for the present on these serious topics, it is only necessary to carry with us through our future investigations that every man’s thoughts are continually fluctuating and vibrating, from inward as well as outward causes. Let us glance for a moment at some of these. First, there are the well-known conditions of health and high animal spirits, in which every thought is rose-colored; and corresponding conditions of disease and depression, in which everything we think of seems to pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green, blue, and purple to black. A liver complaint causes the universe to be enshrouded in gray; and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and makes us think our best friends little better than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole treatise would be needed to expound how our thoughts are further distempered by food, beverages of various kinds, and narcotics of great variety. When our meals have been too long postponed, it would appear as if that Evil Personage who proverbially finds mischief for idle hands to do were similarly engaged with an idle digestive apparatus, and the result is that, if there be the smallest and most remote cloud to be seen in the whole horizon of our thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just in proportionas we grow hungrier and fainter, till at last it overwhelms us in depression and despair. “Why?” we ask ourselves, “why has not A. written to us for so long? What will B. think of such and such a transaction? How is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled? What is the meaning of that odd little twitch we have felt so often here or there about our persons?” The answer to our thoughts, prompted by the evil genius of famine, is always lugubrious in the extreme. “A. has not written because he is dead. B. will quarrel with us forever because of that transaction. C. will never pay us our money, or we shall never be able to pay C. That twitch which we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is the premonitory symptom of the most horrible of all human maladies, of which we shall die in agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends before the close of the ensuing year.” Such are theidées noireswhich present themselves when we want our dinner; and the best-intentioned people in the world, forsooth! recommend us to summon them round us by fasting, as if they were a company of cherubim instead of imps of quite another character! But the scene undergoes a transformation bordering on the miraculous when we have eaten a slice ofmutton and drunk half a glass of sherry. If we revert now to our recent meditations, we are quite innocently astonished to think what could possibly have made us so anxious without any reasonable ground. Of course, A. has not written to us because he always goes grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never take the trouble to think about our little transaction. C. is certain to pay us, or we can readily raise money to pay him; and our twitch means nothing worse than a touch of rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment.
Beyond the alternations of fasting and feasting, still more amazing are the results of narcotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and coffee. Every species of wine exercises a perceptibly different influence of its own, from the cheery and social “sparkling grape of Eastern France” to the solemn black wine of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentlemen of orthodox sentiments. A cup of strong coffee clears the brain and makes the thoughts transparent, while one of green tea drives them fluttering like dead leaves before the wind. Time and learning would fail to describe the yet more marvellous effects of opium, hemlock, henbane, hashish, bromide, and chloral.Every one of these narcotics produces a different hue of the mental window through which we look out on the world; sometimes distorting all objects in the wildest manner (like opium), sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly by removing the sense of disquiet and restoring our thoughts to the white light of commonsense cheerfulness; and again acting quite differently on the thoughts of different persons, and of the same persons at different times.
Only secondary to the effects of inwardly imbibed stimulants or narcotics are those of the outward atmosphere, which in bracing weather makes our thoughts crisp like the frosted grass, and in heavy November causes them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the moisture from the mossy eaves of the Moated Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a London fog obfuscates them, so that a man might honestly plead that he could no more argue clearly in the fog than the Irishman could spell correctly with a bad pen and muddy ink.
Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any means the only organs through which influences arrive at our brain, modifying the thoughts which proceed from them. Thesense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors of woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even of delicately perfumed rooms, lifts all our thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful, the Tender, and the Sublime may impress us freely; while the same sense, offended by disgusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cookery, open sewers, or close chambers inhabited by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry entereth not, and our very thoughts smell of garlic. Needless to add that in a still more transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts of the musically-minded, and bears them off in its talons over sea and land, and up to Olympus like Ganymede. Two easily distinguishable mental influences seem to belong to music, according as it is heard by those who really appreciate it or by others who are unable to do so. To the former it opens a book of poetry, which they follow word for word after the performer, as if he read it to them, thinking the thoughts of the composer in succession with scarcely greater uncertainty or vagueness than if they were expressed in verbal language of a slightly mystical description. To the latter the book is closed; but though the listener’s own thoughts unrollthemselves uninterrupted by the composer’s ideas, they are very considerably colored thereby. “I delight in music,” said once Sir Charles Lyell to me: “I am always able to think out my work better while it is going on!” As a matter of fact, he resumed at the moment a disquisition concerning the date of the Glacial Period at the precise point at which it had been interrupted by the performance of a symphony of Beethoven, having evidently mastered in the interval an intricate astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with similar deficiency of musical sense, harmonious sound seems to spread a halo like that of light, causing every subject of contemplation to seem glorified, as a landscape appears in a dewy sunrise. Memories rise to the mind and seem infinitely more affecting than at other times, affections still living grow doubly tender, new beauties appear in the picture or the landscape before our eyes, and passages of remembered prose or poetry float through our brains in majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly aroused, and the atmosphere of familiarity and commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted for the hour. As in a camera-obscura ormirror, the very trees and grass which we had looked on a thousand times are seen to possess unexpected loveliness. But all this can only happen to the non-musical soul when the harmony to which it listens is really harmonious, and when it comes at an appropriate time, when the surrounding conditions permit and incline the man to surrender himself to its influences; in a word, when there is nothing else demanding his attention. The most barbarous of the practices of royalty and civic magnificence is that of employing music as an accompaniment to feasts. It involves a confusion of the realm of the real and ideal, and of one sense with another, as childish as that of the little girl who took out a peach to eat while bathing in the sea. Next to music during the dinner-time comes music in the midst of a cheerful evening party, where, when every intellect present is strung up to the note of animated conversation and brilliant repartee, there is a suddendoucheof solemn chords from the region of the pianoforte, and presently some well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all the lazy people, who are lounging in easy-chairs after a good dinner, into the empyrean of emotion “sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy” of Beethoven or Mozart; or some meek damsel,with plaintive note, calls on them, in Schubert’sAddio, to break their hearts at the memory or anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are either behind or before every one of us, and which it is either agony or profanation to think of at such a moment. All this is assuredly intensely barbarous. The same people who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music with incongruous enjoyments of another kind would be guilty of giving a kiss with their mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what we may term extra-mural music, the hideous noises made by the aid of vile machinery in the street, it is hard to find words of condemnation strong enough for it. Probably the organ-grinders of London have done more in the last twenty years to detract from the quality and quantity of the highest kind of mental work done by the nation than any two or three colleges of Oxford or Cambridge have effected to increase it. One mathematician alone, as he informed the writer, estimated the cost of the increased mental labor they have imposed upon him and his clerks at several thousand pounds’ worth of first-class work, for which the State practically paid in the added length of time needed for his calculations. Not much better are those church bells whichnow sound a trumpet before the good people who attend “matins” and other daily services at hours when their profane neighbors are wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their appointed tasks.
Next to our bodily Sensations come in order of influence on our thoughts the Places in which we happen to do our thinking. Meditating like the pious Harvey “Among the Tombs” is one thing; doing the same on a breezy mountain side among the gorse and the heather, quite another. Jostling our way in a crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood, rattling in an English express train or floating by moonlight in a Venetian gondola or an Egyptian dahabieh, though each and all favorable conditions for thinking, create altogether distinct classes of lucubrations. If we endeavor to define what are the surroundings among which Thought is best sustained and most vigorous, we shall probably find good reason to reverse not a few of our accepted and familiar judgments. The common idea, for example, that we ponder very profoundly by the seashore, is, I am persuaded, a baseless delusion. Wethinkindeed that we are thinking, but for the most part our minds merely lie open, like so many oysters, to the incoming waves, andwith scarcely greater intellectual activity. The very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in the fact that it reduces us to a state of mental emptiness and vacuity, while our vanity is soothed by the notion that we are thinking with unwonted emphasis and perseverance. Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us with the monotonous passes of her billowy hands, and lulls us into a slumberous hypnotism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix our eyes and thoughts, like biologized men, on the rising and falling of every wave. If it be tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed till the beautiful white crests topple over and dash in storm and thunder up the beach; and, if it be a summer evening’s calm, we note with placid, never-ending contentment how the wavelets, like little children, run up softly and swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their gifts of shells and seaweed, and then retreat, shy and ashamed of their boldness, to hide themselves once again under the flowing skirts of Mother Ocean.
Again, divines and poets have united to bolster up our convictions that we do a great deal of important thinking at night when we lie awake in bed. Every preacher points to the hours of the “silent midnight,” when hiswarnings will surely come home, and sit like incubi on the breast of sinners who, too often perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they flew, bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit. Shelley, in “Queen Mab,” affords us a terrible night scene of a king who, after his dinner of “silence, grandeur, and excess,” finds sleep abdicate his pillow (probably in favor of indigestion); and Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall,” threatens torments of memory still keener to the “shallow-hearted cousin Amy” whenever she may happen to lie meditating—
“In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
“In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
“In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
“In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
Certainly, if there be any time in the twenty-four hours when we might carry on consecutive chains of thought, it would be when we lie still for hours undisturbed by sight or sound, having nothing to do, and with our bodies so far comfortable and quiescent as to give the minimum of interruption to our mental proceedings. Far be it from me to deny that under such favorable auspices some people may think to good purpose. But, if I do not greatly err, they form the exception rather than the rule among bad sleepers. As the Psalmist of old remarked, it is generally “mischief” which a man—wicked or otherwise—“devises uponhis bed”; and the truth of the observation in our day is proved from the harsh Ukases for domestic government which are commonly promulgated by Paterfamilias at the breakfast table, and by the sullennessde parti priswhich testifies that the sleepless brother, sister, or maiden aunt has made up his or her mind during the night to “have it out” with So-and-so next morning. People are a little faint and feverish when they lie awake, and nothing occurs to divert their minds and restore them to equanimity, and so they go on chewing the bitter cud of any little grudge. Thus it comes to pass that, while Anger causes Sleeplessness, Sleeplessness is a frequent nurse of Anger.[25]
Finally, among popular delusions concerning propitious conditions of Thoughts, must be reckoned the belief (which has driven hermits and philosophers crazy) that thinking is better done in abnormal isolation than in the natural social state of man. Of course there is benefit quite incalculable in the reservation of some portion of our days for solitude. How much excuse is to be made for the shortcomings, the ill-tempers, the irreligion of those poor peoplewho are scarcely alone for half an hour between the cradle and the grave, God alone can tell. But, with such reasonable reservation of our hours and the occasional precious enjoyment of lonely country walks or rides, the benefits of solitude, even on Zimmermann’s showing, come nearly to an end; and there is little doubt that, instead of thinking more, the more hours of loneliness we devote to doing it, thelesswe shall really think at all, or even retain capacity for thinking and not degenerate into cabbages. Our minds need the stimulus of other minds, as our lungs need oxygen to perform their functions. After all, if we analyze the exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant and suggestive conversation, one of its largest elements will be found to be that it has quickened our thoughts from a heavy amble into a gallop. A really fine talk between half a dozen well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people, who discuss an interesting subject with their manifold wealth of allusions, arguments, and illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derbyday, wherein our brains are excited to their utmost speed, and we get over more ground than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation. It is superfluous to add that if our constitutional mental tendency be that of the gentlemanwho naïvely expressed his feelings by saying impressively to a friend, “I takegreatinterest in my own concerns, Iassureyou I do,” it seems doubly desirable that we should overstep our petty ring-fence of personal hopes, fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam with our neighbors over their dominions, and into further outlying regions of public and universal interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions for making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is difficult to imagine a better than the orthodox plan of the “Selig-gemachende Kirche” for making a Saint. Take your man or woman, with a morbidly tender conscience and a pernicious habit of self-introspection. If he or she have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or sorrow overshadowing the whole of life, so much the better. Then shut the individual up in a cell like a toad in a stone, to feed on his or her own thoughts, till death or madness puts an end to the experiment.
But if the seaside and solitude and the midnight couch have been much overrated as propitious conditions of thought, there are,per contra, certain other conditions of it the value of which has been too much ignored. The law of the matter seems to be that real hard Thought, like Happiness, rarely comes whenwe have made elaborate preparation for it; and that the higher part of the mind which is to be exercised works much more freely when a certain lower part (concerned with “unconscious cerebration”) is busy about some little affairs of its own department and its restless activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in fifty does his best thinking quite motionless, but instinctively employs his limbs in some way when his brain is in full swing of argument and reflection. Even a trifling fidget of the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a piece of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our plate at dinner, supplies in a degree thisdesideratum, and the majority of people never carry on an animated conversation involving rapid thought without indulging in some such habit. But the more complete employment of our unconscious cerebration in walking up or down a level terrace or quarter-deck, where there are no passing objects to distract our attention and no need to mark where we plant our feet, seems to provide even better for smooth-flowing thought. The perfection of such conditions is attained when the walk in question is taken of a still, soft November evening, when the light has faded so far as to blur the surrounding withered trees and flowers, but thegentle gray sky yet affords enough vision to prevent embarrassment. There are a few such hours in every year which appear absolutely invaluable for calm reflection, and which are grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet unneeded fire.
There is also another specially favorable opportunity for abstruse meditation, which I trust I may be pardoned for venturing to name. It is the grand occasion afforded by the laudable custom of patiently listening to dull speakers or readers in the lecture-room or the pulpit. A moment’s reflection will surely enable the reader to corroborate the remark that we seldom think out the subject of a new book or article, or elaborate a political or philanthropic scheme, a family compact, or themenuof a large dinner, with so much precision and lucidity as when gazing with vacant respectfulness at a gentleman expatiating with elaborate stupidity on theology or science. The voice of the charmer as it rises and falls is almost as soothing as the sound of the waves on the shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the attention; while the repose of all around gently inclines the languid mind to alight like a butterfly on any little flower it may find in thearid waste, and suck it to the bottom. This beneficent result of sermon and lecture-hearing is, however, sometimes deplorably marred by the stuffiness of the room, the hardness and shallowness of the seats (as in that place of severe mortification of the flesh, the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street), and lastly by the unpardonable habit of many orators of lifting their voices in an animated way, as if they really had something to say, and then solemnly announcing a platitude,—a process which acts on the nerves of a listener as it must act on those of a flounder to be carried up into the air half a dozen times in the bill of a heron and then dropped flat on the mud. Under trials like these, the tormented thoughts of the sufferer, seeking rest and finding none, are apt to assume quite unaccountable and morbid shapes, and indulge in freaks of an irrational kind, as in a dream. The present writer and some sober-minded acquaintances have, for example, all felt themselves impelled at such hours to perform aërial flights of fancy about the church or lecture-room in the character of stray robins or bats. “Here,” they think gravely (quite unconscious for the moment of the absurdity of their reflection), “here, on this edge of a monument, I might stand and takeflight to that cornice an inch wide, whence I might run along to the top of that pillar; and from thence, by merely touching the bald tip of the preacher’s head, I might alight on the back of that plump little angel on the tomb opposite, while a final spring would take me through the open pane of window and perch me on the yew-tree outside.” The whole may perhaps be reckoned a spontaneous mythical self-representation of the Psalmist’s cry: “Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I flee away and be at rest.”
Another kind of meditation under the same aggravated affliction is afforded by making fantastic pictures out of the stains of damp and tracks of snails on the wall, which often (in village churches especially) supply the young with a permanent subject of contemplation in “the doctor with his boots,” the “old lady and her cap,” and the huge face which would be quite perfect if the spectator might only draw an eye where one is missing, as in the fresco of Dante in the Bargello. Occasionally, the sunshine kindly comes in and makes a little lively entertainment on his own account by throwing the shadow of the preacher’s head ten feet long on the wall behind him, causing the action of his jaws to resemble the vast gape of a crocodile.All these, however, ought perhaps to be counted as things of the past; or, at least, as very “Rural Recreations of a Country Parishioner,” as A. K. H. B. might describe them. It is not objects to distract and divert the attention which anybody can complain of wanting in the larger number of modern churches in London.
But, if our thoughts are wont to wander off into fantastic dreams when we are bored, they have likewise a most unfortunate propensity to swerve into byways of triviality no less misplaced when, on the contrary, we are interested to excess, and our attention has been fixed beyond the point wherein the tension can be sustained.
Every one has recognized the truth of Dickens’s description of Fagin, on his trial, thinking of the pattern of the carpet; and few of us can recall hours of anguish and anxiety without carrying along with their tragic memories certain objects on which the eye fastened with inexplicable tenacity. In lesser cases, and when we have been listening to an intensely interesting political speech, or to a profoundly thoughtful sermon (for evenHabitans in Siccomay sometimes meet such cases), the mind seems to “shy” suddenly, like a restive horse, fromthe whole topic under consideration, and we find ourselves, intellectually speaking, landed in a ditch.
Another singular phenomenon under such circumstances is that, on returning, perhaps after the interval of years, to a spot wherein such excessive mental tension has been experienced, some of us are suddenly vividly impressed with the idea that we have been sitting there during all the intervening time, gazing fixedly on the same pillars and cornices, the same trees projected against the evening sky, or whatever other objects happen to be before our eyes. It would appear that the impression of such objects made on the retina, while the mind was wholly and vehemently absorbed in other things, must be somehow photographed on the brain in a different way from the ordinary pictures to which we have given their fair share of notice as they passed before us, and that we are dimly aware they have been taken so long. The sight of them once again bringing out this abnormal consciousness is intensely painful, as if the real self had been chained for years to the spot, and only a phantom “I” had ever gone away and lived a natural human existence elsewhere.
Passing, now, from the external conditionsof our Thinking, if we attempt to classify the Thoughts themselves, we shall arrive, I fear, at the painful discovery that the majority of us think most about the least things, and least about the greatest; and that, in short, the mass of our lucubrations is in the inverse ratio of their value. For example, a share of our thoughts, quite astonishing in quantity, is occupied by petty and trivial Arrangements. Rich or poor, it is an immense amount of thought which all (save the most care-engrossed statesmen or absorbed philosophers) give to these wretched little concerns. The wealthy gentleman thinks of how and where and when he will send his servants and horses here and there, of what company he shall entertain, of the clearing of his woods, the preservation of his game, and twenty matters of similar import; while his wife is pondering equally profoundly on the furniture and ornaments of her rooms, the patterns of her flower-beds or her worsted-work, themenuof her dinner, and the frocks of her little girls. Poor people need to think much more anxiously of the perpetual problem, “How to make both ends meet,” by pinching in this direction and earning something in that, and by all the thousand shifts and devices by which life can be carriedon at the smallest possible expenditure. One of the very worst evils of limited means consists in the amount of thinking about sordid little economies which becomes imperative when every meal, every toilet, and every attempt at locomotion is a battle-field of ingenuity and self-denial against ever-impending debt and difficulty. Among men, the evil is most commonly combated by energetic efforts toearnrather than tosave; but among women, to whom so few fields of honest industry are open, the necessity for a perpetual guard against the smallest freedom of expense falls, with all its cruel and soul-crushing weight, and on the faces of thousands of them may be read the sad story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, perhaps the most foreign of all sentiments to their naturally liberal and generous hearts.
Next to actual arrangements which have some practical use, however small, an inordinate quantity of thought is wasted by most of us on wholly unreal plans and hypotheses which the thinker never even supposes to bear any relation with the living world. Such are the endless moony speculations, “ifsuch a thing had not happened” which did happen, or “ifSo-and-so had gone hither” instead ofthither, or “ifI had only said or done” what I did not say or do, “there would have followed”—heaven knows what. Sometimes we pursue such endless and aimless guessings with a companion, and then we generally stop short pretty soon with the vivid sense of the absurdity of our behavior; unless in such a case as that of the celebrated old childless couple, who, looking back over their fireside on forty years of unbroken union, proceeded to speculate on what they should have doneifthey had had children, and finally quarrelled and separated for ever on a divergence of opinion respecting the best profession for their (imaginary) second son. But, when alone, we go on weaving interminable cobwebs out of such gossamer threads of thought, like poor Perrette with her pot of milk,—a tale the ubiquity of which among all branches of the Aryan race sufficiently proves the universality of the practice of buildingchâteaux en Espagne.
Of course, with every one who has a profession or business of any kind, a vast quantity of thought is expended necessarily upon its details, insomuch that to prevent themselves, when in company from “talking shop” is somewhat difficult. The tradesman, medicalman, lawyer, soldier, landholder, have each plenty to think of in his own way; and in the case of any originality of work—such as belongs to the higher class of literature and art—the necessity for arduous and sustained thought in composition is so great that (on the testimony of a great many wives) I have come to the conclusion that a fine statue, picture, or book is rarely planned without at least a week of domestic irritation and discomfort, and the summary infliction of little deserved chastisement on the junior branches of the distinguished author or artist’s family.
Mechanical contrivances obviously give immense occupation to those singular persons who can love Machines, and do not regard them (as I must confess is my case) with mingled mistrust, suspicion, and abhorrence, as small models of the Universe on the Atheistic Projection. Again, for the discovery of any chemicaldesideratum, ceaseless industry and years of thought are expended; and a Palissy deems a quarter of a lifetime properly given to pondering upon the best glaze for crockery. Only by such sacrifices, indeed, have both the fine and the industrial arts attained success; and happy must the man be counted whose millions of thoughts expended on such topicshave at the end attained any practical conclusion to be added to the store of human knowledge. Not so (albeit the thoughts are much after the same working character) are the endless meditations of the idle on things wholly personal and ephemeral, such as the inordinate care about the details of furniture and equipage now prevalent among the rich in England, and the lavish waste of feminine minds on double acrostics, art, embroidery, and, above all, Dress! A young lady once informed me that, after having for some hours retired to repose, her sister, who slept in the same room, had disturbed her in the middle of the night: “Eugénie, waken up! I have thought of a trimming for our new gowns!” Till larger and nobler interests are opened to women, I fear there must be a good many whose “dream by night and thought by day” is of trimmings.
When we have deducted all these silly and trivial and useless thoughts from the sum of human thinking,—and evil and malicious thoughts, still worse by far,—what small residuum of room is there, alas, for anything like real serious reflection! How seldom do the larger topics presented by history, science, or philosophy engage us! How yet morerarely do we face the great questions of the whence, the why, and the whither of all this hurrying life of ours, pouring out its tiny sands so rapidly! To some, indeed, a noble philanthropic purpose or profound religious faith gives not only consistency and meaning to life, but supplies a background to all thoughts,—an object high above them, to which the mental eye turns at every moment. But this is, alas! the exception far more than the rule; and, where there is no absorbing human affection, it is on trifles light as air and interests transitory as a passing cloud that are usually fixed those minds whose boast it is that their thoughts “travel through eternity.”
Alone among Thoughts of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, stands the grim, soul-chilling thought of Death. It is a strange fact that, face it and attempt to familiarize ourselves with it as we may, this one thought ever presents itself as something fresh, something we had never really thought before,—“I shall die!” There is a shock in the simple words ever repeated each time we speak them in the depths of our souls.
There are few instances of the great change which has passed over the spirit of the modernworld more striking than the revolution which has taken place in our judgment respecting the moral expediency of perpetually thinking about Death. Was it that the whole Classic world was so intensely entrancing and delightful that, to wean themselves from its fascinations and reduce their minds to composure, the Saints found it beneficial to live continually with a skull at their side? For something like sixteen centuries Christian teachers seem all to have taken it for granted that merely to write up “Memento mori” was to give to mankind the most salutary and edifying counsel. Has anybody faith in the same nostrum now, and is there a single Saint Francis or Saint Theresa who keeps his or her pet skull alongside of his Bible and Prayerbook?
A parallel might also be drawn between the medical and spiritual treatment in vogue in former times and in our own. Up to our generation, when a man was ill, the first idea of the physician was to bleed him and reduce him in every way by “dephlogistic” treatment, after which it was supposed the disease was “drawn off”; and, if the patient expired, the survivors were consoled by the reflection that Dr. Sangrado had done all which science andskill could effect to preserve so valuable a life. In the memory of some now living, the presence of a medical man with a lancet in his pocket (instantly used on the emergency of a fall from horseback or a fit of apoplexy, epilepsy, or intoxication), was felt by alarmed relations to be quite providential. Only somewhere about the period of the first visitation of cholera in 1832 this phlebotomizing dropped out of fashion; and, when the doctors had pretty nearly abandoned it, a theory was broached that it was the human constitution, not medical science, which had undergone a change, and that men and women were so much weaker than heretofore that, even in fever, they now needed to be supported by stimulants. Very much in the same way it would appear that in former days our spiritual advisers imagined they could cure moral disease by reducing the vital action of all the faculties and passions, and bringing a man to feel himself a “dying creature” by way of training him to live. Nowadays our divines endeavor to fill us with warmer feelings and more vigorous will, and tell us that
“’Tis life of which our veins are scant;O Life, not Death, for which we pant;More life, and fuller,thatwe want.”
“’Tis life of which our veins are scant;O Life, not Death, for which we pant;More life, and fuller,thatwe want.”
“’Tis life of which our veins are scant;O Life, not Death, for which we pant;More life, and fuller,thatwe want.”
“’Tis life of which our veins are scant;
O Life, not Death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller,thatwe want.”
Is it possible that human nature is really a little less vigorous and passionate than it was when Antony and Cleopatra lived on the earth, or when the genius of Shakspere made them live on the stage?