CHAPTER I.

ORIGIN OF SEA BATHING.

The Sea, so ill treated by man, in this pitiless warfare, has been to him most generously kind. When Earth, which he loves so much, when that rude Earth wears, weakens, exhausts him, it is that so much feared, so much abused Sea, which takes him to her bosom, and restores him to new life.

And, in fact, is it not from her that life primitively sprang? She contains within her all the elements of life in a quite marvellous plenitude. Why, then, when we feel ourselves sinking, do we not repair for restoration to the abounding source of life?

That source has space and kindness enough for all, but is especially kind to the too civilized children of men, for the sons and daughters who are suffering for the fathers and mothers, victims of mistaken or sinning Love, less culpable than the sinning parents, yet a thousand fold more punished. The Sea, that vast female, delights to restore them; to their weakness she gives her strength; and restores them young, beautiful, healthful, from the boundless stores of her wide expanse and fathomless depths. Venus, who was born of Ocean, is from Ocean reborn every moment, and not a sick, suffering, peevish, pale, and melancholy Venus, but the triumphant, Venus full of passion and certain of fecundity.

How between this great and salutary, but somewhat rude, strength and our weakness, can there be any connection? What union can there be between elements so greatly disproportioned? That was a serious and difficult question; to solve it required an art, an initiation. To understand that question thoroughly, we must make ourselves acquainted with the time and occasion when this art first revealed itself. Between two ages of strength, the strength of the age of the Renaissance and that of the Revolution, there was a period of depression both moral and physical. The old world had died, the new one was not yet born, and the misbegotten children of worn out parents were weak and unhealthy. On the one hand, the excessive indulgence of the rich; on the other hand, the awful privations of the poor, decimated the nations, and most decimated, precisely those nations which most boasted their civilization. France thrice ruined, from base to apex, in a single century succumbed beneath the orgies of the Regency. England triumphed over our ruin, yet had death and destruction within her own bosom. Her Puritan idea had departed, and another had not yet come. Weakened by the fierce lusts of Charles II., she was still farther degraded by the paltry briberies of Walpole; and in the debasement of the Public the worst passions of the Individual came to light. The fine book of _Robinson_ exhibits the horrors of the terrible Lust of Strong Drink;--a terrible book, that, in which Medicine calls to its aid all the denunciations of Religion, and denounces the gloomy suicide of celibatism.

Anxieties, evil habits, effeminate and unwholesome life;--all these betray themselves in the softened tissues, the meagre forms, the horrid scrofula. Lovely complexions cover the most vile diseases. Anne of Austria, renowned for her extreme clearness of complexion, died of loathsome ulcer; the Princess of Soubise, that dazzlingly fair beauty, rotted, so to speak, into her grave. In England, the Duke of Newcastle asked the learned Doctor Russell why it was that the beautiful Lily and Rose concealed so much of scrofula.

It rarely happens that a worn out race recovers itself; but the English did so. For some seventy or eighty years it recovered a wonderful strength of activity. Partly it owed its recovery to its political and social disturbances,--for there is nothing so conducive to health as movement; but it must be confessed that the chief cause of its renovation was its change of habits. It changed in everything,--education, food, medicine; all were changed, for all felt that health and strength were necessary to success in anything and everything.

There needed no great genius for such a Reform; the true theory had been propounded; all that was necessary was to make the Science an Art, to _practise_ what hitherto had only been _preached_. The Moravian, Comenius, writing a century before Rousseau, said: "Return to Nature; educate according to Nature;" the Saxon Hoffman said: "Return to Nature; make her your Physician." Hoffman appeared just in time to combat the evils caused by the orgies of the Regency, evils in which the remedies were as bad as the disease, the Physician as fatal as the Quack. Hoffman truly said to his age--"Leave Doctors alone; live temperately, drink water, and you will need no medicines." That was a true moral reform. And thus among ourselves, Priessnith in 1830, after the Bacchanalia of the Restoration imposed upon the luxurious aristocracy of Europe the coarse food of the peasant, and, in the hard northern climate, the open air bath, in snow water; that Hell of cold which, in its reaction, gives such a glow of heat. And the rich and the delicate submitted to this hard discipline; so great is our human love of life and fear of death.

And, in fact, why should not water be the safety of man? Berzelius assures us that four-fifths of our living frames are water; just as four-fifths of our globe are covered by Oceans, Seas, Lakes, and Rivers. For our arid Earth the Sea is a constant Hydropathist, curing it of its otherwise deadly dryness, and nourishing and beautifying its fruits and flowers. Strange and prodigious magician, that same water! With so little, making so much; with so little, destroying so much--destroying so slowly, but so surely!

_Gutta lapidem cavat, non vi, sed stepe cadendo_; "The plastic globule wears the rugged rock, By frequent falling, not by sudden shock."

Water is at once the most potent and the most elastic of all forces, lending her aid to all the metamorphoses of our globe, covering, penetrating, transforming all around us.

Into what frightful desert, into what gloomy forest, will not man penetrate in search of the healing springs which boil up from the bosom of the earth? What a perfectly superstitious belief we have in those springs which bring to us the hidden and healing virtues! I have seen fanatics who had no Deity but Carlsbad, that wonderful meeting of the most contradictory waters. I have seen the worshippers of Bareges, and I confess that I have myself submitted to the gushing and sulphureous waters of Acqui in their strange and almost animal pulsations. The hot baths of earth have no medium in their action; they are either certain health or certain death. How many sufferers who might have lingered through weeks, months, or even years, have been quickly slain by them! Frequently, those potent waters give a sudden revival, and, together with health, bring back the very passions which caused disease; passions hot as the waters which revived them. The very atmosphere above these sulphureous waters is intoxicating, the _aura_ of the Sybil that maddened her into Prophecy! An outburst which compels us to speak that which we would most conceal. And how terribly self-revealing we are in those Babels to which, under the plea of seeking health, we resort to throw aside the conventionalities, in too many cases the very decencies of Society. There, pale, worn sufferers, of both sexes, sit at the gaming table in eager passion to win gold, and, in reality, winning only an earlier Death.

Very different is the saving breath of the great Sea; in itself it is a purifier. That never ceasing interchange of the ocean of air, and the ocean of water, forbids life ever to languish. Early and late, those oceans of air and sea are at work. At every instant each passes through the crucible of death--and at every instant revives. The whirlwind and the water spout give newer and stronger life to the vexed ocean.

To live on land is to repose; to live on sea is to combat, and to combat savingly;--for those who can bear it, a Spartan training in which many perish, but those who survive are very strong.

In the middle ages there was a perfect horror of the Sea. They libelled the great Sea, they called that fertile mother "the kingdom of the prince of the powers of air"--the very name which was given to Satan. The nobility of the seventeenth century would by no means consent to have its palaces near the huts of the rude seamen. The frowning castle, with its ugly and formal garden, was almost always built, as far as possible from the sea, on some place destitute of sun and air, but marvellously rich in fog and miasmata. In England it was just the same. If the manor house was on a hill, the advantage of the situation was sedulously provided against by a forest of tall trees, and quite as often, instead of being on the hill, it was in the pestilent marsh below. At the present day, England, wiser than of old, builds by the sea side, rejoices in sea baths even in winter, and is rewarded by strong health. The people of the sea coasts better knew, even in earlier times, the life-giving power of the sea. Its purifying power first struck them; they observed its power in curing scrofula of its disgusting sores, and they well knew the power of its bitterness in killing the parasite worms which, otherwise, would kill the child. They ate the Sea weed and the _Halcyonia_, well knowing that the iodine that they contain contracts and makes firm the flesh. Russell, who heard and noted these popular recipes, was thus enabled to answer the question of the Duke of Newcastle, and did so in his excellent book, published in 1750, on the use of Sea water in cases of glandular wasting.

There is a great force in his sentence--"The great want is not how to cure, but how to repair, _to create_."

He proposed a miracle, but a quite possible one; to make new flesh, new tissues. And he proposed to do that chiefly with the child, who, though born of polluted parents, might yet be re-made.

It was at the same time that Bakewell, the Leicestershire farmer, _created_ meat. Up to that time horned cattle were chiefly valued for their milk, from his day forth they are made to yield a more generous food. The poor milk diet, in fact, had to be abandoned by men who are compelled to be so active, so laborious, so untiring. Russell's little book, in 1750, created Sea bathing; it is not too much to say he created it, for it really was he who made it in vogue.

This whole grand theory may be summed up in a very few words:

"It is necessary to drink sea-water, to bathe in sea-water, and to eat sea-weed; clothe your children as lightly as possible, and let them have plenty of air. The Ocean breeze, and the Ocean water; there you have the sure cure."

That last advice seems very bold. To have the half naked child exposed to the open air in a damp and variable climate, is, no doubt, anticipatively, to lose the weak; but the strong will survive, and their posterity will be the better brought up. Let us add that business, and navigation, by earlier relieving the boys from school, from the sedentary life of the young nobles at Oxford or Cambridge, make them a new race.

In his ingenious book, guided only by popular tradition, Russell doubtless was far enough from suspecting how, in a single century, all science would come to the aid of his theory, and that each would aid him in making of the Sea a perfect system of Therapeutics.

The most valuable elements of terrestrial life are abundantly in the sea; and science may well say to us--"Hither! Hither, worn and wearied nation, swinked laborer, failing woman, young child, fading because your parents sinned; hither! to the Sea, and the Sea shall cure you!" The universal base of life, the embryonic mucus, the living animal jelly in which man continually takes and retakes the marrowy substance of his being, is so abounding in the sea that we may call it the sea itself. Of that mucus, both marine animals and marine vegetables are made. Her generosity puts earth to shame. She is liberal to give, be ye therefore, willing to receive.

"But," it maybe said, "we are attacked in the very foundation and support of our being. Our bones bend, bow, and we are weak, and tottering from their insufficient nurture." Well! The lime which they need abounds in the sea; so abounds that her madrepores build islands of it, and are at this moment building whole continents. Her fishes carry it hither and thither in such vast quantity that, washed upon every shore, it serves as a manure.

And you, young female, you who, visibly, are wasting into an early grave, repair to the sea, where every breath you draw shall be a restorative. That restorative iodine, is in every breath that blows, in every wave that heaves, in every fish that swims. The Cod alone have enough to iodise the entire earth.

Is it animal warmth that you lack? The sea affords you the most perfect, the most equable, the most widely diffused warmth; warmth so great, in fact, that were it not diffused, it would melt the earth from Pole to Pole, and make each Pole another Equator.

The rich, warm, red blood, is the triumph of the Sea; by it she has animated and armed with mightiest strength her giants, so much mightier than mightiest giants of the earth. She has made that element, and she can remake you, poor, pale, drooping flower. She abounds, superabounds, in that rich red blood; in her children it so abounds that they give it forth to every wind.

And there is the revelation of the whole mystery. All the principles, pale mortal, that are combined in you, she has in separation. She has your bone, your blood, your sap and your heat--in one or the other of her creatures, she has them all.

And she has, also, what you have not, a superabundant strength. Her breathing gives I know not what of inspiring excitement; of what we may call physical heroism. With all her violence, the great generating element inspires us with the same fiery vivacity, the same wild love, with which she herself palpitates.