There is a deal of truth underlying that sentence. To put it in my own homely way: if a young man, or a middle-aged one either, while spending a day in the country, with the fresh breezes of heaven blowing on his brow, with the larks a-quiver with song in the bright sunshine, and all nature rejoicing,—I tell you that if such an individual, not being a cripple, can pass a five-barred gate without an inclination to vault over it, he cannot be in good health.
Will that scale suit you to measure your health against?
Nay, but to be more serious, let me quote the words of that prince of medical writers, the late lamented Sir Thomas Watson, Bart:—
“Health is represented in the natural or standard condition of the living body. It is not easy to express that condition in a few words, nor is it necessary. My wish is to be intelligible rather than scholastic, and I should puzzle myself as well as you, were I to attempt to lay down a strict and scientific definition of what is meant by the term ‘health.’ It is sufficient for our purpose to say that it implies freedom from pain and sickness; freedom also from all those changes in the natural fabric of the body, that endanger life or impede the easy and effectual exercise of the vital functions. It is plain that health does not signify any fixed and immutable condition of the body. The standard of health varies in different persons, according to age, sex, and original constitution; and in the same person even, from week to week or from day to day, within certain limits it may shift and librate. Neither does health necessarily imply the integrity of all the bodily organs. It is not incompatible with great and permanent alterations, nor even with the loss of parts that are not vital—as of an arm, a leg, or an eye. If we can form and fix in our minds a clear conception of the state of health, we shall have little difficulty in comprehending what is meant by disease, which consists in some deviation from that state—some uneasy or unnatural sensation of which the patient is aware; some embarrassment of function, perceptible by himself or by others; or some unsafe though hidden condition of which he may be unconscious; some mode, in short, of being, or of action, or of feeling different from those which are proper to health.”
Can medicine restore the health of those who are threatened with a break-up, whose nerves are shaken, whose strength has been failing for some time past, when it seems to the sufferer—to quote the beautiful words of the Preacher—the days have already come when you find no pleasure in them; when you feel as if the light of the sun and the moon and the stars are darkened, that the silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher broken at the fountain?
No, no, no! a thousand times no. Medicine, tonic or otherwise, never, alone, did, or could, cure the deadly ailment called ennui. You want newness of life, you want perfect obedience for a time to the rules of hygiene, and exercise above all.
Now I do not for a moment mean to say that caravanning is the very best form of exercise one can have. Take your own sort, the kind that best pleases you. But, for all that, experience leads me to maintain that no life separates a man more from his former self, or gives him a better chance of regeneration of the most complete kind, than that of the gentleman gipsy.
Take my own case as an example. I am what is called a spare man, though weighing eleven stone odd to a height of five feet nine. I am spare, but when well as wiry and hard as an Arab.
I had an unusually stiff winter’s work last season. On my 1,300-mile caravan tour I had assuredly laid up a store of health that stood me in good stead till nearly April, and I did more literary work than usual. But I began to get weary at last, and lost flesh. I slaved on manfully, that I might get away on my second grand tour, from which I have just returned, after covering ground to the extent of a thousand and odd miles. Well, I started, and as I took a more hilly route, the journey was more fatiguing for us all. We all weighed before starting; six weeks afterwards we weighed again; my coachman had increased one and a half pounds, my valet three pounds, while I, who underwent the greatest fatigue of the three, had put on five pounds. Nor was this all; my heart felt lighter than it had done for years, and I was singing all day long. Though not a young man, I am certainly not an old one, but before starting, while still toiling at the drudgery of the desk’s dull wood, I was ninety-five years of age—in feeling; before I had been six weeks on the road I did not feel forty, or anything like it.
The first fortnight of life in a great caravan like the Wanderer is just a little upsetting; even my coachman felt this. The constant hum of the waggon-wheels, and the jolting—for with the best of springs a two-ton waggon will jolt—shakes the system. It is like living in a mill; but after this you harden up to it, and would not change your modus vivendi for life in a royal palace.