Part 7

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 people who 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, the _less_ we 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 gentleman who naïvely expressed his feelings by saying impressively to a friend, “I take _great_ interest in my own concerns, I _assure_ you 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 when we 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 this _desideratum_, 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 the gentle 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 the _menu_ of 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 the arid 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 take flight 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 even _Habitans in Sicco_ may sometimes meet such cases), the mind seems to “shy” suddenly, like a restive horse, from the 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 conditions of 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, the _menu_ of 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 carried on 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 to _earn_ rather than to _save_; 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, “_if_ such a thing had not happened” which did happen, or “_if_ So-and-so had gone hither” instead of thither, or “_if_ I 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 done _if_ they 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 building _châteaux 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, medical man, 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 chemical _desideratum_, 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 topics have 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 more rarely 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 modern world 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 and skill 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, _that_ we 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?

ESSAY V. TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW.

The father of Grecian philosophy held that “Man was created to know and to contemplate.” The father of Hebrew philosophy—whose “Song,” if not his “Wisdom,” is canonical, and whose judgment, if not his life, is supposed to have been divinely guided—taught the somewhat different lesson: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

We have been more or less steadily trying the validity of Solomon’s dictum for about three thousand years. Would it be premature to take stock of the results, and weigh whether it be really for human well-being or the reverse that Knowledge is “increasing,” not only at the inevitable rate of the accumulating experience of generations, but also at the highly accelerated pace attained by our educational machinery? It is at least slightly paradoxical that the same State should call on its clergy to teach as an infallible truth that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and at the same time decree for all its subjects, as if it were a highly benevolent measure, universal compulsory education.

I fear that the prejudice in favor of Knowledge is so potent that no reader will give me credit for entering on this inquiry in any other spirit than one of banter. Nevertheless, I propose in the present paper to examine, to the best of my ability, the general bearings of book-knowledge upon human happiness and virtue, and so attain to some conclusion on the matter, and decide whether Solomon did or did not give proof of profound sagacity in originating the axiom that “Ignorance is bliss” in the usual negative form of Hebrew verities; and also in foretelling (nearly thirty centuries before the present London publishing season) that “of the making of books there is no end.” Knowledge, like other evils, it seems, is infinitely reproductive.

The larger and simpler objections to book-lore lie on the surface of the case. First. Health, bodily activity, and muscular strength are almost inevitably exchanged in a certain measure for learning. Ardent students are rarely vigorous or agile; and, in the humbler ranks, the loss of ruddy cheeks and stalwart limbs among the children of the peasantry, after schools have been established in a village, has been constantly observed. The close and heated class-rooms in which the poor urchins sit (often in winter with clothes and shoes drenched through with rain or snow) form a bad exchange, in a physical point of view, for the scamper across the common, and the herding of sheep on the mountain. Let us put the case at its lowest. Suppose that, out of three persons who receive an ordinary book-education, one always loses a certain share of health; that he is never so vigorous as he would have been, and is more liable to consumption, dyspepsia, and other woes incident to sedentary humanity, of which again he bequeaths a tendency to his offspring. Here is surely some deduction from the supposed sum of happiness derivable from knowledge. Can all the flowers of rhetoric of all the poets make atonement for the loss of the bounding pulse, the light, free step, the cool brain of perfect health?