We are all more inclined to extend our patronage to a tradesman who serves with a beaming smile than to one who looks as if he would be thankful to see the last of us.
And in any avocation good health goes a long way by contributing that quiet contentment of mind which is a sine qua non to the attainment of excellence.
It is a dictum in the medical profession that you can always tell the state of a surgeon’s digestion by the amount of confidence with which he makes his incisions.
The parson who enters the pulpit with an air of robust vigour is vastly better calculated to secure the attention of his hearers than one who crawls in looking as if he wished it were all over.
A man who is at the head of a large business awoke one morning feeling out of sorts. His breakfast disagreed with him, and he arrived at his destination in a state of irritability. Then he rapped out at his subordinates until he had flurried them to such an extent that they could not do their work properly. And of course after that everything else went wrong. When he was called on to come to a decision in regard to an important contract, he got the worst of the bargain simply through lack of a little tact. Yet ordinarily he was noted for powers of dealing, and for a judgment that was rarely at fault. That day he was the victim of his own stomach.
Want of stamina has deprived the world of some who might have done much to ease its woes and help its advancement. For it effectually limits the sphere of a man’s operations. There are some of conspicuous ability who have had to waste their talents in some quiet backwater, when had they but had the requisite amount of strength they might have occupied a prominent place in public affairs. Young men who have possessed every other fitting quality have been rejected for the missionary cause because their health was not good enough to stand the hardships of such a life.
Some may ask as to whether good work has not been done by those crippled by ill-health. Undoubtedly it has been done, yet as a rule it has been by those endowed with talents which enabled them to carry out their work in seclusion—writers, poets, composers and so forth—not by those compelled to take their place among the rank and file in the busy world of men and things. Too often in the latter case they have fallen behind and been submerged. Even if success has been their lot, it has been at such a cost to mind and body alike as to make it scarcely worth the while.
Yet even those who have been in the fortunate position of being able to exercise their talents in solitude, far from the madding crowd, have betrayed the influence of their infirmities in the nature of their works. Schubert and Chopin both wrote exquisite music, yet their weak state of health still reveals itself in the melancholy strain which pervades their compositions. The same is characteristic of some of the writers and poets. Robert Louis Stevenson is the great exception. But the disease which attacked him in his young days, and dogged his steps mercilessly to the end of his life, was one that is oftentimes, strangely enough, characterised by buoyancy and enthusiasm, in marked contrast to the prevailing depression of the confirmed dyspeptic, of which Carlyle was such a marked example. Yet what chiefly enabled Stevenson to keep up the vigour and inimitable style of his writing to the day of his death was the unremitting care which he took in order to regulate his life in such a way as to preserve his energies and keep his mental powers intact to the very end. That last broken sentence, the most pathetic ever written, in Weir of Hermiston, is more than an expression of his great genius; it is a lasting tribute to the vigilance with which he safeguarded such strength as he possessed. It is a lasting reproach to those who have been gifted with robust health, and by their own heedlessness have lost what is man’s most priceless possession. People may disregard the laws of health and appear for a time to go unscathed. But the day of retribution will come, and outraged Nature assert itself. Sooner or later the inevitable penalty must be paid.