ON HAVING THE BLUES
The letters of Charles Eliot Norton have lately been published, and the time is opportune for a lesson from that good man’s life. Though always physically frail, he lived to be over eighty, and got more out of his life, and gave more from it, than do most robust men, even when they have his rare degree of intellect. Some who knew him well, say that one great secret of his long life of helpfulness and happiness was that he never had the blues.
While men like Norton make cheerfulness a religion, many other people of very good intentions do not even recognize it as a duty, but grope, and drag others, through clouded lives, while the clouds are generally of their own permitting, and not seldom of their own making. They are often thoughtful people, but not thoughtful enough to realize how much happiness and usefulness are wasted by the habit of the blues, or how easily that habit can be overcome. They sometimes even indulge it from a notion that depression of spirit is synonymous with depth of spirit, not realizing how often black waters set up a very abysmal appearance in a chasm so shallow that if a man clinging to the edge would only let go, he could touch bottom without submerging his chin. But if he delights in what he assumes to be the gloomy depths of his soul, he does not want to let go: he wants to believe his own puddle deep, and hates nothing worse than the possibility that it may be shallow, just as nothing so enrages the insane as the suggestion that they are insane.
Really superior persons (without capitals or quotation marks) are sometimes superior because of superior sensibility, though oftener, I suspect, in spite of it; and sometimes because of superior morality. Upon such people the shortcomings of life—especially of human nature, weigh harder than upon common folks. It was by no means Carlyle’s dyspepsia alone that kept him grumbling all the while, and that, but for his sense of humor, would have killed him long before his time. Then, too, superior people often have superior imaginations, and often abuse them by imagining horrible things, and suffering more from them than the clod suffers from realities.
Moreover, people with sensibilities and imaginations are apt to be queer in their morals: they may have too few, because sensitiveness and imagination breed passions, and are inimical to the philosophy, as well as the plain common-sense, that regulate passions; or they may have too many morals, because sensitiveness makes them hate the ugly consequences of immorality worse than the rest of us can, and also because, where Hell is in fashion, if it still is anywhere, they imagine it so much more vividly, and shrink from it so much more vigorously than the rest of us can, that they get New England consciences. Worse still, that kind of superior person with too few morals to do business with, or too many, is subject to insufficient food and clothing, and to poor quarters and inefficient medical care—to being sick, in short; and deprivation and sickness very naturally bring on the blues; and last of all, sensitiveness and imagination and too many morals and too few comforts, and sickness do not develop a sense of humor. The poet or the tragedian in the black frock-coat buttoned up to hide the absence of the shirt, is not half so funny to himself as to us.
In giving so many of the reasons why people who make great and beautiful things are apt to have the blues, I have run along the edge of platitude, and occasionally, I fear, slipped over, because I want to emphasize the fact that there is no warrant for the fallacy nursed by so many would-be troubled souls, that having the blues will enable them to make great and beautiful things, and that because Carlyle and Poe had the blues, your or my having them is evidence that ours have the same causes as theirs or will be accompanied by the same results.
And there are several other things tending the same way which we had better put an end to. Depression of spirits is not as often the result of vanity, or over-sensibility or any other form of weak wits, as it is of weak nerves or weak liver. And yet all these weaknesses are generally inextricably mixed as cause and effect. If without any real cause of worry, you wake up two or three consecutive mornings feeling that the world is an unsatisfactory place, probably you had better go to the doctor. He won’t be apt to give you anything worse than rhubarb and soda. You might even try them before going; and if it is a sunny day, try to glory in it, out of doors if possible; and if it is a rainy day, try to think how cozy it will be by the fire, or if you have to go to an office, how good it will be to have a day for steady work, when clients and customers are not apt to come in.
I wish I felt sure that the doctor would make you realize that we need healthy emotional pickers and stealers just as much as we need healthy physical ones. Overstrain and undersleep will make the world appear an empty place, simply because the nerves won’t pick up the good things in it. Hence the listlessness apt to follow happiness, when happiness is great enough to fatigue. Hence people on honeymoons sometimes having entirely baseless suspicions that they don’t love as much as they supposed they did. Hence, too, no end of texts for temperance.
The bacteria of the blues of course always seize on a favorable culture medium. Probably the best of such media is a settled and exaggerated consciousness of the possibility of disaster, which soon becomes magnified into a probability. Some people feel as if they were always treading on a thin crust over a volcano. Your doctor can do a good deal for one cause of that. The other cause is what Bacon called defective enumeration—generalizing from the remarkable, instead of the usual—the most frequent of all fallacies. Hundreds of people can be killed in automobiling without your considering it more dangerous than other sports, but as soon as somebody very near to you is killed, you think the sport dangerous. Now as to danger in general, think of the facts. At any moment, perhaps one person in five hundred actually is in danger of disease or other misfortune. But the remaining four hundred and ninety-nine are not, except in the distorted imagination of far too large a proportion of them. There’s a big chance—perhaps one in three or four, that you who read these lines, being a person who lives not merely on the surface of things, are in the habit of letting your imagination play too much with what is under the surface. Now stop it! You may of course be actually the victim of ill fortune; but even if you are, there’s a chance that, in compensation, you have been made a saint by it, and that you really get more out of life than do most people more happily situated: for that’s the way of saints, as you can tell by looking at their serene expression.