LETTER V.
TO A STUDENT WHO NEGLECTED BODILY EXERCISE.
Difficulty of conciliating the animal and the intellectual lives—Bodily activity sometimes preserved by an effort of the will—Necessity of faith in exercise—Incompatibility between physical and intellectual living disappears in large spaces of time—Franklin’s theory about concentration in exercise—Time an essential factor—Health of a rural postman—Pedestrian habits of Wordsworth—Pedestrian and equestrian habits of Sir Walter Scott—Goethe’s wild delight in physical exercise—Alexander Humboldt combated early delicacy by exercise—Intellectual utilities of physical action.
“We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us.”
How applicable, my dear brother, are these words which the Church, in her wisdom, has seen to be adapted to all sinners—how applicable, I say, are they to students most especially! They have quite a personal applicability to you and me. We have read all day long, and written till three o’clock in the morning; we have taken no exercise for weeks, and there is no health in us. The doctor scrutinizes our wearied eyes, and knows that our brains are weary. Little do we need his warnings, for does not Nature herself remind us of our disobedience, and tell us in language not to be misinterpreted, to amend the error of our ways? Our digestion is sluggish and imperfect; we are as nervous as delicate ladies, and there is no health in us.
How easy it is to follow one of the two lives—the animal or the intellectual! how difficult to conciliate the two! In every one of us there exists an animal which might have been as vigorous as wolves and foxes, if it had been left to develop itself in freedom. But besides the animal, there existed also a mind, and the mental activity restrained the bodily activity, till at last there is a serious danger of putting an end to it altogether.
I know two men, about fifty-five years old both of them, and both of them admirably active. They tell me that their bodily activity has been preserved by an effort of the will; that if they had not resolutely kept up the habit of using legs and arms in daily work or amusement their limbs would have stiffened into uselessness, and their constitutions would have been unable to bear the call of any sudden emergency. One of them has four residences in different parts of the same county, and yet he will not keep a carriage, but is a pedestrian terrible to his friends; the other is at the head of a great business, and gives an example of physical activity to his workpeople. Both have an absolute faith in habitual exercise; and both affirm that if the habit were once broken they could never afterwards resume it.
We need this faith in exercise—this firm conviction of its necessity—the sort of conviction that makes a man go out in all weathers, and leave the most urgent intellectual labor for the mere discipline and hardening of the body. Few students possess this faith in its purity. It is hard to believe that we shall get any good from exercise proportionate to the sacrifice of time.
The incompatibility between the physical and the intellectual lives is often very marked if you look at small spaces of time only; but if you consider broader spaces, such as a lifetime, then the incompatibility is not so marked, and gives place to a manifest conciliation. The brain is clearer in vigorous health than it can be in the gloom and misery of sickness; and although health may last for a while without renewal from exercise, so that if you are working under pressure for a month the time given to exercise is so much deducted from the result, it is not so for the life’s performance. Health sustained for many years is so useful to the realization of all considerable intellectual undertakings, that the sacrifice to the bodily well-being is the best of all possible investments.
Franklin’s theory about concentrating his exercise for the economy of time was founded upon a mistake. Violent exertion for minutes is not equivalent to moderate exercise for hours. The desire to concentrate good of various kinds into the smallest possible space is one of the commonest of human wishes, but it is not encouraged by the broader economy of nature. In the exercise of the mind every teacher is well aware that time is an essential factor. It is necessary to live with a study for hundreds or thousands of hours before the mind can assimilate as much of the subject as it may need; and so it is necessary to live in exercise during a thousand hours of every year to make sure of the physical benefits. Even the fresh air itself requires time to renovate our blood. The fresh air cannot be concentrated; and to breathe the prodigious quantities of it which are needed for perfect energy, we must be out in it frequently and long.
The inhabitants of great cities have recourse to gymnastics as a substitute for the sports of the country. These exercises have one advantage—they can be directed scientifically so as to strengthen the limbs that need development; but no city gymnasium can offer the invigorating breezes of the mountain. We require not only exercise but exposure—daily exposure to the health-giving inclemencies of the weather. The postman who brings my letters walks eight thousand miles a year, and enjoys the most perfect regularity of health. There are operatives in factories who go through quite as much bodily exertion, but they have not his fine condition. He is as merry as a lark, and announces himself every morning like a bearer of joyful tidings. What the postman does from necessity an old gentleman did as regularly, though more moderately, for the preservation of his health and faculties. He went out every day; and as he never consulted the weather, so he never had to consult the physicians.
Nothing in the habits of Wordsworth—that model of excellent habits—can be better as an example to men of letters than his love of pedestrian excursions. Wherever he happened to be, he explored the whole neighborhood on foot, looking into every nook and cranny of it; and not merely the immediate neighborhood, but extended tracts of country; and in this way he met with much of his best material. Scott was both a pedestrian and an equestrian traveller, having often, as he tells us, walked thirty miles or ridden a hundred in those rich and beautiful districts which afterwards proved to him such a mine of literary wealth. Goethe took a wild delight in all sorts of physical exercise—swimming in the Ilm by moonlight, skating with the merry little Weimar court on the Schwansee, riding about the country on horseback, and becoming at times quite outrageous in the rich exuberance of his energy. Alexander Humboldt was delicate in his youth, but the longing for great enterprises made him dread the hindrances of physical insufficiency, so he accustomed his body to exercise and fatigue, and prepared himself for those wonderful explorations which opened his great career. Here are intellectual lives which were forwarded in their special aims by habits of physical exercise; and, in an earlier age, have we not also the example of the greatest intellect of a great epoch, the astonishing Leonardo da Vinci, who took such a delight in horsemanship that although, as Vasari tells us, poverty visited him often, he never could sell his horses or dismiss his grooms?
The physical and intellectual lives are not incompatible. I may go farther, and affirm that the physical activity of men eminent in literature has added abundance to their material and energy to their style; that the activity of scientific men has led them to innumerable discoveries; and that even the more sensitive and contemplative study of the fine arts has been carried to a higher perfection by artists who painted action in which they had had their part, or natural beauty, which they had travelled far to see. Even philosophy itself owes much to mere physical courage and endurance. How much that is noblest in ancient thinking may be due to the hardy health of Socrates!