Nothing appears odd to which we are accustomed. We look abroad and wonder, but we look at home and are content. The Esquimaux believe that men dying in windy weather are unfortunate, because their souls, as they escape, risk being blown away. Some Negroes do not bury in the rainy season, for they believe that then the gods, being all busy up above, can not attend to any ceremonies. Dr. Hooker writes home from the Himalaya mountains, that about Lake Yarou the Lamas' bodies are exposed, and kites are summoned to devour them by the sound of a gong and of a trumpet made out of a human thigh-bone. Such notions from abroad arrest our notice, but we see nothing when we look at home. We might see how we fill our sick-rooms with a fatal gloom, and keep our dead five or six days within our houses, to bury them, side by side and one over another, thousands together, in the middle of our cities. However, when we do succeed in getting at a view of our own life ab extra, it is a pleasant thing to find that sanitary heresies at any rate have not struck deep root in the British soil. In an old book of emblems there is a picture of Cupid whipping a tortoise, to the motto that [pg 613] Love hates delay. If lovers of reform in sanitary matters hate delay, it is a pity; for our good old tortoise has a famous shell, and is not stimulated easily.
IX. The Fire And The Dressing-Room.
Against the weather all men are Protectionists—all men account it matter of offense. What say the people of the north? A Highland preacher, one December Sunday, in the fourth hour of his sermon—For be it known to Englishmen who nod at church, that in the Highlands, after four good hours of prayer and psalm, there follow four good hours of sermon. And, nota bene, may it not be that the shade of our King Henry I. does penance among Highland chapels now, for having, in his lifetime, made one Roger a bishop because he was expert in scrambling through the services?—A Highland pastor saw his congregation shivering. “Ah!” he shouted, “maybe ye think this a cauld place; but, let me tell ye, hell's far caulder!” An English hearer afterward reproached this minister for his perversion of the current faith. “Hout, man,” said he, “ye dinna ken the Hielanders. If I were to tell them hell was a hot place, they'd all be laboring to go there.” And that was true philosophy. Mythologies invented in the north, imagined their own climate into future torture. Above, in the northern lights, they saw a chase of miserable souls, half starved, and hunted to and fro by ravens; below, they imagined Nastrond with its frosts and serpents. Warmth is delightful, certainly. No doubt but sunburnt nations picture future punishment as fire. Yes, naturally, for it is in the middle region only that we are not wearied with extremes. What region shall we take? Our own? When is it not too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, or too uncertain? Italy? There the sun breeds idle maggots. As for the poet's paradise, Cashmere, botanists tell us that, although, no doubt, fruits grow luxuriantly there, they are extremely flavourless. Then it is obvious that to abuse, antagonise, defy the weather, is one of the established rights of man. Upon our method of defying it, our health, in some measure, depends. How is our right to be maintained unhealthily?
Not by blind obedience to nature. We are correcting her, and must not let her guide us. Nature considers all men savages—and savages they would be, if they followed her. What is barbarism? Man in a state of nature. Nature, I say, treats us almost as if we were unable to light fires, or stich for ourselves breeches. Nature places near the hand of man in each climate a certain food, and tyrannizes over his stomach with a certain craving. Whales and seals delight the Esquimaux; he eats his blubber and defies the frost. So fed, the Esquimaux woman can stand out of doors, suckling her infant at an open breast, with the thermometer 40° below zero. As we go south, we pass the lands of bread and beef, to reach the sultry region wherein nature provides dates, and so forth. Even in our own range of the seasons, nature seeks to bind us to her own routine; in winter gives an appetite for flesh and fat, in summer takes a part of it away. We are not puppets, and we will not be dictated to; so we stimulate the stomach, and allow no brute instinct to tamper with our social dietary. We do here, on a small scale, what is done, on a large scale, by our friends in India, who pepper themselves into appetite, that they may eat, and drink, and die. We drink exciting beverage in summer, because we are hot; we drink it in winter, because we are cold. The fact is, we are driven to such practices; for if we did not interfere to take the guidance of our diet out of nature's hands, she would make food do a large portion of the service which civilization asks of fire and clothing. We should walk about warm in the winter, cool in the summer, having the warmth and coolness in ourselves. Now, it is obvious that this would never do. We must be civilized, or we must not. Is Mr. Sangster to sell tomahawks instead of canes? Clearly, he is not. We must so manage our homes as to create unhealthy bodies. If we do not, society is ruined; if we do—and in proportion as we do so—we become more and more unfit to meet vicissitudes of weather. Then we acquire a social craving after fires, and coats, and cloaks, and wrappers, and umbrellas, and cork soles, and muffetees, and patent hareskins, and all the blessings of this life, upon which our preservation must depend. These prove that we have stepped beyond the brute. You never saw a lion with cork soles and muffetees. The tiger never comes out, of nights, in a great coat. The eagle never soars up from his nest with an umbrella. Man alone comprehends these luxuries; and it is when he is least healthy that he loves them best.
In winter, then, it is not diet, and it is not exercise, that shall excite in us a vital warmth. We will depend on artificial means; we will be warmed, not from within, but from without. We will set ourselves about a fire, like pies, and bake; heating the outside first. Where the fire fails, we will depend upon the dressing-room.
If we have healthy chests, we will encase ourselves in flannel; but if we happen to have chest complaint, we will use nothing of the sort. When we go out, we will empanoply our persons, so that we may warm ourselves by shutting in all exhalation from our bodies, and by husbanding what little heat we permit nature to provide for us.
In summer we will eat rich dinners and drink wine, will cast off three-fourths of the thickness of our winter clothing, and still be oppressed by heat. Iced drinks shall take the place of fire.
Civilized people can not endure being much wetted. Contact of water, during exercise, will do no harm to healthy bodies, but will spoil good clothes. We will get damp only when we walk out in bad weather; then, when [pg 614] we come home, we need no change. Evaporation from damp clothes—the act of drying—while the body cools down, resting, and perhaps fatigued, that is what damages the health; against that we have no objection.
Hem! No doubt it is taking a great liberty with a Briton to look over his wardrobe. I will not trespass so far, but, my dear sir, your Hat! If we are to have a column on our heads, let it be one in which we can feel pride; a miniature monument; and we might put a statue on the top. Hats, as they are now worn, would not fitly support more than a bust. Is not this mean? On ægritudinary grounds we will uphold a hat. To keep the edifice from taking flight before a puff of wind, it must be fitted pretty tightly round the head, must press over the forehead and the occiput. How much it presses, a red ring upon our flesh will often testify. Heads are not made of putty; pressure implies impediment to certain processes within; one of these processes is called the circulation of the blood. The brain lies underneath our hats. Well, that is as it should be. Ladies do not wear hats, and never will, the bonnet is so artful a contrivance for encompassing the face with ornament; roses and lilies and daffidowndillies, which would have sent Flora into fits, and killed her long ago, had such a goddess ever been.
I said that there was brain under the hat; this is not always obvious, but there is generally hair. Once upon a time, not very long ago, hair was constructed with great labor into a huge tower upon every lady's head, pomatum being used by way of mortar, and this tower was repaired every three weeks. The British matron then looked like a “mop-headed Papuan.” The two were much alike, except in this, that while our countrywoman triumphed in her art, the Papuan was discontented with his nature. The ladies here, whose hair was naturally made to fall around the shoulders, reared it up on end; but in New Guinea, fashionables born with hair that grew of its own will into an upright bush, preferred to cut it off, and re-arrange it in a wig directed downwards. Sometimes they do no more than crop it close; and then, since it is characteristic of the hair in this race to grow, not in an expanse, but in tufts, the head is said by sailors to remind them of a worn-out shoe-brush. So, at the Antipodes as well as here, Art is an enemy to Nature. Hair upon the head was meant originally to preserve in all seasons an equable temperature above the brain. Emptying grease-pots into it, and matting it together, we convert it into an unwholesome skull-cap.