LETTER IV.
TO A MUSCULAR CHRISTIAN.
Muscular and intellectual tendencies in two boys—Difficulty of finding time to satisfy both—Plato on the influences of music and gymnastics—Somnolence and digestion—Neglect of literature—Natural restlessness of the active temperament—Case of a Garibaldian officer—Difficulty of taking a sufficient interest in exercise—A boar hunt.
I know two little boys, sons of a near neighbor, who have from, childhood exhibited opposite tendencies. One of them is incessantly active, always out of doors in any weather, busy about horses, and farming, and game, heedless of his books, and studying only under positive compulsion. The other sits at home with his lessons or a story book, and only goes out because he is incited by the fraternal example. The two lads represent two distinct varieties of human life, the active and the intellectual. The elder is happiest during physical exertion; the younger is happiest when his brain is fully occupied. Left entirely to themselves, without the equalizing influence of the outside world and the ways of living which general custom has established, they would lead the most opposite lives. The elder would inevitably become a farmer, that he might live in the country and take exercise all day long, or else he would seek adventure in wild travel, or in romantic warfare; but the younger would very quickly be taken possession of by some engrossing intellectual pursuit, and lead the life of a sedentary student. The problem which these two young lives have before them is the reconciliation of their tendencies. Since they come of cultivated parents, the intellectual lad has the better chance of following his own bent. Both will have to take their University degrees, and the younger has the advantage there. Still there are powerful influences in favor of the elder. His activity will be encouraged by the admiration of his companions, and by the example of the country gentlemen who are his neighbors. He can ride, and row, and swim; he is beginning to shoot; at twenty he will be a sportsman. When once he has taken his degree, I wonder what will be the advances in his intellectual culture. Fraternal and social influences will preserve the younger from absolute physical inaction; but there are not any influences powerful enough to keep the elder safe from intellectual rust.
If you, who are a distinguished sportsman and athlete, would kindly inform us with perfect frankness of the line which your studies have followed since you quitted Eton, we should be the wiser for your experience. Have gymnastic exercises hardened you, as Plato said they did, when pursued excessively? and do you need the musical studies which he both valued and dreaded as the most powerful of softening influences? If you have energy enough to lead both lives, pray how do you find the time?
As to Plato’s musical influence, you invite it, and yet you treacherously elude its power. After being out all day in the pursuit of sylvan pleasures (if shooting on treeless wastes can be called a sylvan pleasure), you come home at nightfall ravenous. Then you do ample justice to your dinner, and having satisfied your faim de chasseur, you go into the drawing-room, and ask your wife to play and sing to you. If Plato could witness that pretty scene, he would approve your obedience to his counsels. He would behold an athletic Englishman stretching his mighty limbs on a couch of soft repose, and letting his soul grow tender as his ears drank ravishing harmonies. If, however, the ancient sage, delighted with so sweet a picture of strength refined by song, were to dwell upon the sight as I have done, he would perceive too soon that, although your body was present indeed, your soul had become deaf in sleep’s oblivion. So it happens to you night after night, and the music reaches you no more than the songs of choristers reach the dead in the graves below.
And the elevating influences of literature? You have books, of course, in abundance. There is a library, amongst other luxuries of your home. But the literature your intellect feeds upon is in the columns of the Field, your newspaper. Yet this neglect of the means of culture is not due to any natural feebleness of the mind. Your brain, by its nature, is as vigorous as your vigorous body. It is sleep, and weariness, and the great necessary business of digestion, that drown your intellectual energies. The work of repairing so great a destruction of muscle is nature’s chief concern. Since you became the mighty hunter that you are, the wear and tear have been enormous, and the necessary rapidity of reconstruction has absorbed your rich vitality.
I will not question the wisdom of your choice, if there has been any deliberate choice, though perhaps the life of action that you lead may have grown rather out of circumstances determining habit than from any conscious resolution. Health is so much more necessary to happiness than culture, that few who could choose between them would sacrifice it for learning, unless they were impelled by irresistible instincts. And beyond the great delight of health and strength there is a restlessness in men born to be active which must have its outlet in activity. I knew a brave Italian who had followed Garibaldi in all his romantic enterprises, who had suffered from privation and from wounds, who had not only faced death in the wildest adventures, but, what is even more terrible to the active temperament, had risked health from frequent exposure; and when I asked him whether it was affection to his famous chief, or faith in a political creed, or some more personal motive that had led him to this scorn of prudence, he answered that, after honest self-examination, he believed the most powerful motive to be the passion for an active life. The active temperament likes physical action for its own sake, and not as a means of health. Activity renews itself and claims larger and larger satisfaction, till at last the habit of it absorbs the whole energy of the man.
Although such a life as yours would be incompatible with the work I have to do, it would be an unmixed benefit to me to take a greater interest in exercise. If you could but communicate that interest, how willingly would I become your pupil! The fatal law of the studious temperament is, that in exercise itself it must find some intellectual charm, so that we quit our books in the library only to go and read the infinite book of nature. We cannot go out in the country without incessantly thinking about either botany, or geology, or landscape painting, and it is difficult for us to find a refuge from the importunate habit of investigation. Sport is the only refuge, but the difficulty is to care about it sufficiently to avoid ennui. When you have not the natural instinct, how are you to supply its place by any make-believe excitement? There is no position in the world more wearisome than that of a man inwardly indifferent to the amusement in which he is trying to take part. You can watch for game with an invincible patience, for you have the natural instinct, but after the first ten minutes on the skirts of the wood I lay my gun down and begin to botanize. Last week a friendly neighbor invited me to a boar-hunt. The boar was supposed to be in the middle of a great impenetrable plantation, and all I did during the whole morning was to sit in my saddle awaiting the exit of the beast, cantering from one point of the wood’s circumference to another, as the cry of the dogs guided me. Was it pleasure? A true hunter would have found interest enough in expectation, but I felt like a man on a railway-platform who is waiting for a train that is late.