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