Название: Practical Essays
Автор: Alexander Bain
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664569370
isbn:
Dugald Stewart inculcates Good-humour as a means of happiness and virtue; his language implying that the quality is one within our power to appropriate.
In Mr. Smiles's work entitled "Self-Help," we find an analogous strain of remarks:—
"To wait patiently, however, man must work cheerfully. Cheerfulness is an excellent working quality, imparting great elasticity to the character. As a Bishop has said, 'Temper is nine-tenths of Christianity,' so are cheerfulness and diligence [a considerable make-weight] nine-tenths of practical wisdom."
Sir Arthur Helps, in those essays of his, combining profound observation with strong genial sympathies and the highest charms of style, repeatedly adverts to the dulness, the want of sunny light-hearted enjoyment of the English temperament, and, on one occasion, piquantly quotes the remark of Froissart on our Saxon progenitors: "They took their pleasures sadly, as was their fashion; ils se divertirent moult tristement à la mode de leur pays"
There is no dispute as to the value or the desirableness of this accomplishment. Hume, in his "Life," says of himself, "he was ever disposed to see the favourable more than the unfavourable side of things; a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year". This sanguine, happy temper, is merely another form of the cheerfulness recommended to general adoption.
I contend, nevertheless, that to bid a man be habitually cheerful, he not being so already, is like bidding him treble his fortune, or add a cubit to his stature. The quality of a cheerful, buoyant temperament partly belongs to the original cast of the constitution—like the bone, the muscle, the power of memory, the aptitude for science or for music; and is partly the outcome of the whole manner of life. In order to sustain the quality, the physical (as the support of the mental) forces of the system must run largely in one particular channel; and, of course, as the same forces are not available elsewhere, so notable a feature of strength will be accompanied with counterpart weaknesses or deficiencies. Let us briefly review the facts bearing upon the point.
The first presumption in favour of the position is grounded in the concomitance of the cheerful temperament with youth, health, abundant nourishment. It appears conspicuously along with whatever promotes physical vigour. The state is partially attained during holidays, in salubrious climates, and health-bringing avocations; it is lost, in the midst of toils, in privation of comforts, and in physical prostration. The seeming exception of elated spirits in bodily decay, in fasting, and in ascetic practices, is no disproof of the general principle, but merely the introduction of another principle, namely, that we can feed one part of the system at the expense of degrading and prematurely wasting others.
[LIGHT-HEARTEDNESS NOT IN OUR OWN POWER.]
A second presumption is furnished also from our familiar experience. The high-pitched, hilarious temperament and disposition commonly appear in company with some well-marked characteristics of corporeal vigour. Such persons are usually of a robust mould; often large and full in person, vigorous in circulation and in digestion; able for fatigue, endurance, and exhausting pleasures. An eminent example of this constitution was seen in Charles James Fox, whose sociability, cheerfulness, gaiety, and power of dissipation were the marvel of his age. Another example might be quoted in the admirable physical frame of Lord Palmerston. It is no more possible for an ordinarily constituted person to emulate the flow and the animation of these men, than it is to digest with another person's stomach, or to perform the twelve labours of Hercules.
A third fact, less on the surface, but no less certain, is, that the men of cheerful and buoyant temperament, as a rule, sit easy to the cares and obligations of life. They are not much given to care and anxiety as regards their own affairs, and it is not to be expected that they should be more anxious about other people's. In point of fact, this is the constitution of somewhat easy virtue: it is not distinguished by a severe, rigid attention to the obligations and the punctualities of life. We should not be justified in calling such persons selfish; still less should we call them cold-hearted: their exuberance overflows upon others in the form of heartiness, geniality, joviality, and even lavish generosity. Still, they can seldom be got to look far before them; they do not often assume the painfully circumspect attitude required in the more arduous enterprises. They are not conscientious in trifles. They cast off readily the burdensome parts of life. All which is in keeping with our principle. To take on burdens and cares is to draw upon the vital forces—to leave so much the less to cheerfulness and buoyant spirits. The same corporeal framework cannot afford a lavish expenditure in several different ways at one time. Fox had no long-sightedness, no tendency to forecast evils, or to burden himself with possible misfortunes. It is very doubtful if Palmerston could have borne the part of Wellington in the Peninsula; his easy-going temperament would not have submitted itself to all the anxieties and precautions of that vast enterprise. But Palmerston was hale and buoyant, and the Prime Minister of England at eighty: Wellington began to be infirm at sixty.
[LIMITATIONS OF THE MENTAL FORCES.]
To these three experimental proofs we may add the confirmation derived from the grand doctrine named the Correlation, Conservation, Persistence, or Limitation of Force, as applied to the human body and the human mind. We cannot create force anywhere; we merely appropriate existing force. The heat of our fires has been derived from the solar fire. We cannot lift a weight in the hand without the combustion of a certain amount of food; we cannot think a thought without a similar demand; and the force that goes in one way is unavailable in any other way. While we are expending ourselves largely in any single function—in muscular exercise, in digestion, in thought and feeling, the remaining functions must continue for the time in comparative abeyance. Now, the maintenance of a high strain of elated feeling, unquestionably costs a great deal to the forces of the system. All the facts confirm this high estimate. An unusually copious supply of arterial blood to the brain is an indispensable requisite, even although other organs should be partially starved, and consequently be left in a weak condition, or else deteriorate before their time. To support the excessive demand of power for one object, less must be exacted from other functions. Hard bodily labour and severe mental application sap the very foundations of buoyancy; they may not entail much positive suffering, but they are scarcely compatible with exuberant spirits. There may be exceptional individuals whose total of power is a very large figure, who can bear more work, endure more privation, and yet display more buoyancy, without shortened life, than the average human being. Hardly any man can attain commanding greatness without being constituted larger than his fellows in the sum of human vitality. But until this is proved to be the fact in any given instance, we are safe in presuming that extraordinary endowment in one thing implies deficiency in other things. More especially must we conclude, provisionally at least, that a buoyant, hopeful, elated temperament lacks some other virtues, aptitudes, or powers, such as are seen flourishing in the men whose temperament is sombre, inclining to despondency. Most commonly the contradictory demand is reconciled by the proverbial "short life and merry".
Adverting now to the object that Helps had so earnestly at heart—namely, to rouse and rescue the English population from their comparative dulness to a more lively and cheerful flow of existence—let us reflect how, upon the foregoing principles, this is to be done. Not certainly by an eloquent appeal to the nation to get up and be amused. The process will turn out to be a more circuitous one.
The mental conformation of the English people, which we may admit to be less lively and less easily amused than the temperament of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or even the German branch of our own Teutonic race, is what it is from natural causes, whether remote descent, or that coupled with the operation of climate and other local peculiarities. How long would it take, and what would be the way to establish in us a second nature on the point of cheerfulness?
Again, with the national temperament such as it is, there may be great individual differences; and it may be possible by force of circumstances, to improve the hilarity СКАЧАТЬ