The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions

by Frances Power Cobbe

Nor iron bars a cage.”

Nevertheless, the singular phenomenon of evident, unmistakable Happiness enjoyed, in despite of circumstances, never seems to teach us how entirely secondary all objective circumstances needs must be to the subjective side of the question, and how much more rational it would be on our part to look first to securing for ourselves the longest and completest tenure of the internal elements of enjoyment before we turn our attention to the attainment of those which are external.

The bearing of this remark on the present subject is, of course, obvious. Is it Life in Town or Life in the Country wherein the springs of happiness flow with perennial freshness, and wherein the Spirit of Delight will burn brightest and longest? To solve this problem, we must turn over in our minds the various conditions of such a state of mind and spirits, the most generally recognized of which is bodily Health.

There is not the smallest danger in these days that any inquirer, however careless, should overlook the vast importance of physical soundness to every desirable mental result. Indeed, on the contrary, we may rather expect shortly to find our teachers treating Disease as the only real delinquency in the world, and all crimes and vices as mere symptoms of disordered nerves or overloaded stomach,—kleptomania, dipsomania, homicidal mania, or something equally pardonable on the part of automata like ourselves. Seriously speaking, a high state of health, such as the “Original” described himself as having attained, or even something a few degrees less perfect, is, undoubtedly, a potent factor in the sum of happiness, causing every separate sensation—sleeping, waking, eating, drinking, exercise, and rest—to be delightful; and the folly of people who seek for Happiness, and yet barter away Health for Wealth or Fame, or any other element thereof, is like that of a man who should sell gold for dross. Admitting this, it would seem to follow that Life in the Country, generally understood to be the most wholesome, must be the most conducive to the state of enjoyment. But there are two points not quite cleared up on the way to this conclusion. First, bodily health seems to be, to some people, anything but the blessing it ought to be, rendering them merely coarse and callous, untouched by those finer impulses and sentiments which pain has taught their feebler companions, and so shutting them out from many of the purest and most spiritual joys of humanity. Paley questioned whether the sum of happiness would not be increased to most of us by one hour of moderate pain in every twenty-four; and, though few would directly ask for the increment of enjoyment so attained, there are perhaps still fewer who would desire to unlearn all the lessons taught in the school of suffering, or find themselves with the gross, oxlike nature of many a farmer or publican, whose rubicund visage bears testimony to his vigorous appetite and to the small amount of pain, sorrow, or anxiety which his own or anybody else’s troubles have ever caused him. Taking it all in all, it seems doubtful, then, whether the most invariably robust people are really much higher than those with more fluctuating health who have taken from the bitter cup the sweet drop which is always to be found at the bottom by those who seek it. For those, unhappiest of all, whom disease has only rendered more selfish and self-centred and rebellious, there is, of course, no comparison possible.

And, secondly, Is it thoroughly proved that country life is invariably healthier than the life of towns? The maladies arising from bad air, late hours, and that overwork and overstrain which is the modern Black Death, are of course unknown in the calm-flowing existence of a rural squire and his family. But there are other diseases which come of monotonous repose, unvarying meals, and general tedium vitae, quite as bad as the scourges of the town. Of all sources of ill health, I am inclined to think lack of interest in life, and the constant society of dull and disheartening people, the very worst and most prolific. Undoubtedly, it is so among the upper class of women; and the warnings of certain American physicians against the adoption by girls of any serious or earnest pursuit seems painfully suggestive of a well-founded alarm lest their own lists of hysterical and dyspeptic patients should show a falling off under the new impetus given to women’s work and study. In London, people have very much less leisure to think about their ailments, or allow the doctor’s visit to become a permanent institution, as is so often the case in country houses. The result is that (whether or not statistics prove the existence of more sickness in town than in the country) at least we do not hear of eternally ailing people in London nearly so often as we do in country neighborhoods, where there are always to be found as stock subjects of local interest and sympathy old Mr. A.’s gout, and Lady B.’s liver complaint; and those sad headaches which yet fortunately enable poor Mrs. C. to spend at least one day in the week in her darkened bedroom out of the reach of her lord’s intolerable temper.[^[26]] Be it also that the maladies which townsfolk mostly escape—namely, dyspepsia, hysteria, and neuralgia—are precisely those which exercise the most direct and fatal influence on human powers of enjoyment, whereas the ills to which flesh is heir in great cities, among the upper and well-fed classes, are generally more remotely connected therewith.

But—pace the doctors and all their materialistic followers—I question very much whether bodily health, the mere absence of physical disease, be nearly as indispensable a condition of happiness as certain peculiarities of the mental and moral constitution. The disposition to Anxiety, for instance, which reduces many lives to a purgatory of incessant care,—about money, about the opinion of society, or about the health and well-being of children,—is certainly a worse drawback to peace and happiness than half the diseases in the Registrar-General’s list. This anxious temperament is commonly supposed to be fostered and excited in towns, and laid to sleep in the peaceful life of the country; and, if it were certainly and invariably so, I think the balance of happiness between the two would well-nigh be settled by that fact alone. But again there is something to be said on the side of the town. An African traveller has described to me how, after months exposed to the interminable perils from man and brute and climate, he felt, after his first night on board a homeward-bound English ship, a reaction from the tension of anxiety which revealed to himself the anguish he had been half-unconsciously enduring for many months. In like manner the city man or the statesman feels, when at last he takes his summer holiday, under what tremendous pressure of care he has been living during the past year, or session, in London; and he compares it, naturally enough, with the comparatively careless life of his friend, the country squire. But every one in London does not run a race for political victory or social success, and there are yet some sober old ways of business—both legal and mercantile—which do not involve the alternative of wealth or ruin every hour. For such people I apprehend London life is actually rather a cure for an anxious temperament than a provocative of care. There is no time for dwelling on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres of possible evils ahead. Labors and pleasures, amusements and monetary worries, succeed each other so rapidly that the more serious anxieties receive less and less attention as the plot of London life thickens year by year. One nail drives out another, and we are now and then startled to remember that there has been really for days and months a reasonable fear of disaster hanging over us to which we have somehow scarcely given a thought, while in the country it would have filled our whole horizon, and we should scarcely have forgotten it day or night.

And, again, quite as important as bodily health and freedom from anxiety is the possession of a certain childlike freshness of character; a simplicity which enables men and women, even in old age, to enjoy such innocent pleasures as come in their way without finding them pall, or despising them as not worth their acceptance. Great minds and men of genius seem generally specially gifted with this invaluable attribute of perennial youth; while little souls, full of their own petty importance and vanities, lose it before they are well out of the school-room. The late sculptor, John Gibson (whose works will be, perhaps, appreciated when all the monstrosities of modern English statuary are consigned to the lime-kiln), used to say in his old age that he wished he could live over again every day and hour of his past life precisely as he had spent it. Let the reader measure what this means in the mouth of a man of transparent veracity, and it will appear that the speaker must needs have carried on through his seventy years the freshness of heart of a boy, never wearied by his ardent pursuit of the Beautiful, and supported by the consciousness that this pursuit was not wholly in vain. People who are always “looking for the next thing,” taking each pleasure not as pleasure per se, but merely as a useful stepping-stone to something else which may possibly be pleasure, or as a subject to be talked of; people who are always climbing, like boys at a fair, up the slippery pole of ambition,—cannot possibly know the meaning of such genuine and ever fresh enjoyment.

Is a man likely to grow more or less simple-hearted and single-minded in Town or in the Country? Alas! there can be little or no doubt that London life is a sad trial to all such simplicity; and that nothing is more difficult than to preserve, in its hot, stifling atmosphere, the freshness and coolness of any flower of sentiment, or the glory of any noble, unselfish enthusiasm. Social wear and tear, and the tone of easy-letting-down commonly adopted by men of the world towards any lofty aspiration, compel those who would fain cherish generous and conscientious motives to cloak them under the guise of a hobby or a whim, and, before many years are over, the glow and bloom of almost every enthusiasm is rubbed off and spoiled.

But it is time to pass from the general subjective conditions of happiness common to us all to those individual tastes and idiosyncrasies which are probably more often concerned in the preference of town or country life. We are all of us mingled of pretty nearly the same ingredients of character; but they are mixed in very different proportions in each man’s brewing, and in determining the flavor of the compound everything depends on the element which happens to prevail. By some odd chance, few of us, notwithstanding all our egotism and self-study, really know ourselves well enough to recognize whether we are by nature gregarious or solitary, acted upon most readily by meteorological or by psychological influences, capable of living only on our affections or requiring the exercise of our brains. We are always, for example, talking about the gloom or brightness of the weather, as if we were so many pimpernels, to whom the sun is everything and a cloudy day or a sharp east wind the most pitiable calamity. The real truth is that, to ninety-nine healthy English men and women out of a hundred, atmospheric conditions are insignificant compared to social ones; and the spectacle of a single member of the family in the dumps, or even the suspicion that the servants are quarrelling in the kitchen, detracts more from our faculty of enjoyment than a fall of the barometer from Very Dry to Stormy. In the same way we talk about people “loving the country” or “loving the town,” just as if the character which fitted in and found its natural gratification in the one were qualified to enjoy quite equally the other. Obviously, in some of us the passion for Nature and natural beauty is so prominent that, if it be starved (as it must needs be in a great city) or only tantalized by the sight of pictures reminding us of woods and hills and fresh breezes when we are stifled and jostled in the crowded rooms of Burlington House or the Grosvenor Gallery, we miss so much out of life that nothing can make up for it, and no pleasures of the intellect in the company of clever people, or gratification of taste in the most luxurious home, are sufficient to banish the regret. A young branch swaying in the breeze of spring, and the song of the lark rising out of the thyme and the clover, are better than all the pictures, the concerts, the conversation which the town can offer. And just in the opposite way there are others amongst us in whom the æsthetic element is subordinate to the social, and who long to take a part in the world’s work rather than to stand by and watch the grand panorama of summer and winter move before them while they remain passive. Is it not patently absurd to talk as if persons so differently constituted as these could find happiness,—the one where his ingrained passion for Nature is permanently denied its innocent and easy gratification, the other where his no less deeply rooted interest in the concerns of his kind is narrowed within the petty sphere of rural social life?

But let us now pass on, hoping that we have found the round man for the round hole, and the square man for the square one. What are the more hidden and recondite charms of the two modes of life, of which the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse have rehearsed the superficial characters? What is the meaning in the first place of that taste for “Life at High Pressure,” against which W. R. Greg cautioned us, and Matthew Arnold inveighed? How was it that the sage Dr. Johnson felt undoubtedly a twinge of the same unholy passion when he remarked to the faithful Boswell how delightful it was to drive fast in a post-chaise,—in such a post-chaise, and over such roads as existed in his time? I apprehend that the love for rapid movement comes from the fact that it always conveys to us a sense of vivid volition, and effectually stirs both our pulses and our brains, causing us not only to seem to ourselves, but actually to become, more intelligent. At first the bustle and hurry of London life bewilder the visitor; and, finding it impossible to think, move, and speak as fast as is needful, he feels as a feeble old lady might do arm-in-arm with Jack in his Seven-league boots. But after a little while he learns to step out mentally as rapidly as his neighbors, and thereby acquires the double satisfaction of the intrinsic pleasure of thinking quickly and not dwelling on ideas till they become tedious, and the further sense of gratified vanity in being as clever as other people. This last is again a curious source of metropolitan satisfaction. It is all very well to boast of having “also dwelt in Arcadia.” Such pastoral pride is humility beside the conceit of being a thorough-bred Londoner. There may live many men with souls so dead as never to themselves to have said—anything signifying peculiar appropriation of the soil of Scotland, or of any other “native land.” But who has ever yet met a Cockney who was not from the bottom to the top of his soul proud of being a Londoner, and deeply convinced that he and his fellows can alone be counted as standing “in the foremost files of time”? Of course, whilst he is actually in London, he has no provocation to betray his self-satisfaction among people who can all make the same boast. But watch him the moment he passes into the country. Observe the pains he takes that the natives shall fully understand what manner of man, even a Londoner, they have the privilege of entertaining, and no doubt will remain as to how immensely superior he feels himself to those who habitually dwell “far from the madding crowd.” If he wander into the remoter provinces, say of Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, there is always in his recognition of the hospitality shown to him a tone like that of the shipwrecked apostle in Malta: “The Barbarous people there showed us no small kindness.” He manages to convey by looks, words, and manners his astonishment at any vestiges of civilization which he may meet on those distant shores, and exhibits graceful forbearance in putting up with the delicious fresh fruit, cream, vegetables, and home-fed beef and mutton of his entertainers in lieu of the stale produce of the London shops. One such stranded Cockney I have known to remark that he “observed” that the eggs at N——, and at another country house where he occasionally visited, had in them a “peculiar milky substance,” about whose merits he seemed doubtful; and another I have heard, after landing at Holyhead on his return from Ireland, complacently comparing his watch (which had, like himself, faithfully kept London time during all his tour) with the clock in the station, and observing to his fellow-passengers “that there was not a single clock right in Dublin,—they were all twenty minutes too slow,—and, when he went to Galway, he found them still worse.”