The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865

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* * * * *

To the array of evidence which may be brought from all the registries of
all the states and universities under heaven, some may triumphantly
exclaim, "Statistics are unworthy of trust." "To lie like statistics,"
"false as a fact," these are the stalest of witticisms. But the
objection to which they give point is practically frivolous. Grant that
statistics are to a certain degree doubtful, are they not the most
trustworthy evidence we have? And in the question at issue, are they not
the only evidence which has real force? And allowing their general
defectiveness, how shall we explain, that, though gathered from all
sides and by all kinds of people, they so uniformly favor education?
Why, if they must err, do they err so pertinaciously in one direction?
How does it happen, that, summon as many witnesses as you please, and
cross-question them as severely as you can, they never falter in this
testimony, that, where intelligence abounds, there physical vigor does
much more abound? that, where education is broad and generous, there the
years are many and happy?

If, therefore, facts can prove anything, it is that just such a
condition of life as that which is growing more and more general among
us, and which our common-school system directly fosters, where every man
is becoming an educated man,--where the farmer upon his acres, the
merchant at his desk, and the mechanic in his shop, no less than the
scholar poring over his books shall be in the truest sense
educated,--that such a condition is the one of all others which promotes
habits of thought and action, an elasticity of temper and a breadth of
vision and interest most conducive to health and vigor. It is the
fashion to talk of the appearance of superior robustness so
characteristic of our English brethren. But we suspect that in this
case, too, appearances are deceitful. That climate may produce in us a
restless energy inconsistent with rounded forms and rosy cheeks we
freely allow. But in strength and real endurance the New England
constitution will yield to none. And the stern logic of facts shows
beyond a peradventure, that here there are no influences, climatic or
intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the
future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education,
we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of
ever-increasing knowledge.

* * * * *

We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special
classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war
between the mind and the body,--for we consider that point to be already
demonstrated,--but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of
inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the
substantial truth of our position.

We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the
English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all.
Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose
names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits
would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when
human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long
did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured
their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of
fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only
the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the
dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and
marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton,
struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with
blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights
of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if
you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which
shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of
the century,--Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay,
Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,--all these, with scarcely an
exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it
with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living
the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted
to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry,
broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have
destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw
off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than
sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length
of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.

You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of
purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers.
You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of
excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid
notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of
erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just
the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the
thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we
could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at
the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must
figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the
Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That
resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose
names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy Taylor,
and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last
century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The
Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and
Fenelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley
and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded
to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just
sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion
that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and
paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year
1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own
vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his
profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will
produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a
life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old
Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men
who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.

If now any one has a lurking doubt of the physical value of an active
and well-stored mind, let him pass from the preachers to the statesmen,
from the men who teach the wisdom of the world to come to the men who
administer the things of this world. Let him begin with the grand names
of the Long Parliament,--Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell,--and then gather
up all the great administrators of the next two centuries, down to the
octogenarians who are now foremost in the conduct of British affairs;
and if he wishes to widen his observation, let him pass over the Channel
to the Continent, and in France recall such names as Sully and
Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, Talleyrand and Guizot; in Austria,
Kaunitz and Metternich. And when he has made his list as broad, as
inclusive of all really great statesmanship everywhere as he can, find
his average; and if he can bring it much beneath seventy, he will be
more fortunate than we were when we tried the experiment.

Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,--these are the
royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
which for so many years they searched with telescopic eye. And yet
neither of them lived less than seventy-eight years. As for the men of
natural science, it looks as though they were spared by some
Providential provision, in order that they might observe and report for
long epochs the changes of this old earth of ours. Cuvier dying at
seventy-five, Sir Joseph Banks at seventy-seven, Buffon at eighty-one,
Blumenbach at eighty-eight, and Humboldt at fourscore and ten, are some
of the cases which make such a supposition altogether reasonable.

Cross the ocean, and you will find the same testimony, that mental
culture is absolutely favorable to physical endurance. The greatest men
in our nation's history, whether in walks of statesmanship, science, or
literature, almost without exception, have lived long. Franklin,
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the elder Adams, and Patrick Henry, in
earlier periods,--the younger Adams, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Choate, and
Everett, Irving, Prescott, Cooper, and Hawthorne, in later times,--are
cases in point. These men did not die prematurely. They grew strong by
the toil of the brain. And to-day the quartette of our truest
poets--Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes--are with us in the hale
years of a green age, never singing sweeter songs, never harping more
inspiring strains. Long may our ears hear their melodies!

* * * * *

If now we could enter the walks of private life, and study widely the
experience of individual men, we should have an interesting record
indeed, and a manifold and wellnigh irresistible testimony. Consider a
few remarkable, yet widely differing cases.

Who can read attentively the life of John Wesley, and not exclaim, if
varied and exhausting labor, if perpetual excitement and constant drafts
upon the brain, would ever wear a man out, he would have worn out? It
was his creative energy that called into existence a denomination, his
ardent piety that inspired it, his clear mind that legislated for it,
his heroic industry that did no mean part of the incessant daily toil
needful for its establishment. Yet this man of many labors, who through
a long life never knew practically the meaning of the word _leisure_,
says, at seventy-two, "How is it that I find the same strength that I
did thirty years ago, that my nerves are firmer, that I have none of the
infirmities of old age, and have lost several that I had in youth." And
ten years later, he devoutly records, "Is anything too hard for God? It
is now eleven years since I have felt such a thing as weariness." And he
continued till eighty-eight in full possession of his faculties,
laboring with body and mind alike to within a week of his death.

Joseph Priestley was certainly a very different man, but scarcely less
remarkable. No mean student in all branches of literature, a
metaphysician, a theologian, a man of science, he began life with a
feeble frame, and ended a hearty old age at seventy-one. He himself
declares at fifty-four, that, "so far from suffering from application to
study, I have found my health steadily improve from the age of eighteen
to the present time."

You would scarcely find a life more widely divided from these than that
of Washington Irving. Nevertheless, it is like them in one respect, that
it bears emphatic testimony to the real healthiness of mental exertion.
He was the feeblest of striplings at eighteen. At nineteen, Judge Kent
said, "He is not long for this world." His friends sent him abroad at
twenty-one, to see if a sea voyage would not husband his strength. So
pale, so broken, was he, that, when he stepped on board the ship, the
captain whispered, "There is a chap who will be overboard before we are
across!" Irving had, too, his share of misfortunes,--failure in
business, loss of investments, in earlier life some anxiety as to the
ways and means of support. Even his habits of study were hardly what the
highest wisdom would direct. While he was always genial and social, and
at times easy almost to indolence, when the mood seized him, he would
write incessantly for weeks and even for months, sometimes fourteen,
fifteen, or sixteen hours in a day. But he grew robust for half a
century, and writes, at seventy-five, that he has now "a streak of old
age."

* * * * *

The example of some of those who are said to have been worn out by
intense mental application furnishes perhaps the most convincing proof
of all that no reasonable activity of the mind ever warred with the best
health of the body. Walter Scott, we are told, wore out. And very
likely, to a certain extent, the statement is true. But what had he not
accomplished before he wore out? He had astonished the world with that
wonderful series of romances which place him scarcely second to any name
in English literature. He had sung those border legends which delighted
the ears of his generation. He had produced histories which show, that,
had he chosen, he might have been as much a master in the region of
historic fact as in the realm of imagination. He had edited other men's
works; he had written essays; he had lent himself with a royal
generosity to every one who asked his time or influence; and when,
almost an old man, commercial bankruptcy overtook him, and he sought to
lift the mountain of his debt by pure intellectual toil, he wore out.
But declining years, disappointed hopes, desperate exertions, may wear
anybody out. He wore out, but it was at more than threescore years, when
nine tenths of his generation had long slept in quiet graves,--when the
crowd of the thoughtless and indolent, who began life with him, had
rusted out in inglorious repose. Yes, Walter Scott wore out, if you call
that wearing out.

John Calvin, all his biographers say, wore out. Perhaps so;--but not
without a prolonged resistance. Commencing life with the frailest
constitution, he was, as early as twenty-five, a model of erudition, and
had already written his immortal work. For thirty years he was in the
heat and ferment of a great religious revolution. For thirty years he
was one of the controlling minds of his age. For thirty years he was the
sternest soldier in the Church Militant, bearing down stubborn
resistance by a yet more stubborn will. For thirty years neither his
brain nor his pen knew rest. And so at fifty-six this man of broken body
and many labors laid down the weapons of his warfare; but it was at
Geneva, where the public registers tell us that the average of human
life in that century was only nine years.

One writes words like these:--"John Kitto died, and his death was the
judgment for overwork, and overwork of a single organ,--the brain." And
who was John Kitto? A poor boy, the son a drunken father, subject from
infancy to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled
industry, and with an equally unparalleled neglect of the laws of
health; of whom it is scarcely too much to say literally, that he knew
no change, but from his desk to his bed, and from his bed to his desk
again. A voluminous writer, who, if he produced no work of positive
genius, has done more than any other man to illustrate the Scriptures,
and to make familiar and vivid the scenery, the life, the geography, and
the natural history of the Holy Land. And he died in the harness,--but
not so very early,--at fifty. And we say that he would have lived much
longer, had he given his constitution a fair chance. But when we
remember his passionate fondness for books, how they compensated him for
the want of wealth, comforts, and the pleasant voices of wife and
children that he could not hear, we grow doubtful. And we hear him
exclaim almost in rhapsody,--"If I were blind as well as deaf, in what a
wretched situation should I be! If I could not read, how deplorable
would be my condition! What earthly pleasure equal to the reading of a
good book? O dearest tomes! O princely and august folios! to obtain you,
I would work night and day, and forbid myself every sensual joy!" When
we behold the forlorn man, shut out by his misfortune from so many
resources, and finding more than recompense for this privation within
the four walls of his library, we are tempted to say, No, he would not
have lived as long; had he studied less, he would have remembered his
griefs more.

Of course it is easy to take exception to all evidence drawn from the
life and experience of individual men,--natural to say that one must
needs be somewhat old before he can acquire a great name at all, and
that our estimate considers those alone to whom mere prolongation of day
has given reputation, and forgets "the village Hampdens, the mute,
inglorious Miltons," the unrecorded Newtons, the voiceless orators,
sages, or saints who have died and made no sign. To this the simple
reply is, that individual cases, however numerous and striking, are not
relied upon to prove any position, but only to illustrate and confirm
one which general data have already demonstrated. Grant the full force
of every criticism, and then it remains true that the widest record of
literary life exhibits no tendency of mental culture to shorten human
life or to create habits which would shorten it. Indeed, we do not know
where to look for any broad range of facts which would indicate that
education here or anywhere else has decreased or is likely to decrease
health. And were it not for the respect which we cherish towards those
who hold it, we should say that such a position was as nearly pure
theory or prejudice or opinion founded on fragmentary data as any view
well could be.

* * * * *

But do you mean to assert that there is no such thing as intellectual
excess? that intellectual activity never injures? that unremitting
attention to mental pursuits, with an entire abstinence from proper
exercise and recreation, is positively invigorating? that robbing the
body of sleep, and bending it sixteen or eighteen hours over the desk,
is the best way to build it up in grace and strength? Of course no one
would say any such absurd things. There is a right and wrong use of
everything. Any part of the system will wear out with excessive use.
Overwork kills, but certainly not any quicker when it is overwork of the
mind than when it is overwork of the body. Overwork in the study is just
as healthful as overwork on the farm or at the ledger or in the smoky
shop, toiling and moiling, with no rest and no quickening thoughts.
Especially is it true that education does not peculiarly tempt a man to
excess.

But are you ready to maintain that there is no element of excess infused
into our common-school system? Certainly. Most emphatically there is
not. What, then, is there to put over against these terrible statements
of excessive labor of six or seven hours a day, under which young brains
are reeling and young spines are bending until there are no rosy-checked
urchins and blooming maids left among us? The inexorable logic of facts.
The public schools of Massachusetts were taught in the years 1863-4 on
an average just thirty-two weeks, just five days in a week, and, making
proper allowance for recesses and opening exercises, just five and a
quarter hours in a day. Granting now that all the boys and girls studied
during these hours faithfully, you have an average for the three hundred
and thirteen working days of the year of two hours and forty-one minutes
a day,--an amount of study that never injured any healthy child. But,
going back a little to youthful recollections, and considering the
amazing proclivity of the young mind to idleness, whispering, and fun
and frolic in general, it seems doubtful whether our children ever yet
attained to so high an average of actual study as two hours a day. As a
modification of this statement, it may be granted that in the cities and
larger towns the school term reaches forty weeks in a year. If you add
one hour as the average amount of study at home, given by pupils of over
twelve years, (and the allowance is certainly ample,) you have four
hours as the utmost period ever given by any considerable class of
children. That there is excess we freely admit. That there are easy
committee-men who permit too high a pressure, and infatuated teachers
who insist upon it, that there are ambitious children whom nobody can
stop, and silly parents who fondly wish to see their children
monstrosities of brightness, lisping Latin and Greek in their cradles,
respiring mathematics as they would the atmosphere, and bristling all
over with facts of natural science like porcupines, till every bit of
childhood is worked out of them,--that such things are, we are not
inclined to deny. But they are rare exceptions,--no more a part of the
system than white crows are proper representatives of the dusky and
cawing brotherhood.

Or yet again, do we mean to assert that no attention need be given to
the formation of right physical habits? or that bodily exercise ought
not to be joined to mental toils? or that the walk in the woods, the row
upon the quiet river, the stroll with rod in hand by the babbling brook,
or with gun on shoulder over the green prairies, or the skating in the
crisp December air on the glistening lake, ought to be discouraged? Do
we speak disrespectfully of dumb-bells and clubs and parallel bars, and
all the paraphernalia of the gymnasium? Are we aggrieved at the mention
of boxing-gloves or single-stick or foils? Would it shock our nervous
sensibilities, if our next-door neighbor the philosopher, or some
near-by grave and reverend doctor of divinity, or even the learned judge
himself, should give unmistakable evidence that he had in his body the
two hundred and odd bones and the five hundred and more muscles, with
all their fit accompaniments of joints and sinews, of which the
anatomists tell us? Not at all. Far from it. We exercise, no doubt, too
little. We know of God's fair world too much by description, too little
by the sight of our own eyes. Welcome anything which leads us out into
this goodly and glorious universe! Welcome all that tends to give the
human frame higher grace and symmetry! Welcome the gymnastics, too,
heavy or light either, if they will guide us to a more harmonious
physical development.

We ourselves own a set of heavy Indian-clubs, of middling Indian-clubs,
and of light Indian-clubs. We have iron dumb-bells and wooden
dumb-bells. We recollect with considerable satisfaction a veritable
bean-bag which did good service in the household until it unfortunately
sprung a-leak. In an amateur way we have tried both systems, and felt
the better for them. We have a dim remembrance of rowing sundry leagues,
and even of dabbling with the rod and line. We always look with friendly
eye upon the Harvard Gymnasium, whenever it looms up in actual or mental
vision. Never yet could we get by an honest game of cricket or base-ball
without losing some ten minutes in admiring contemplation. We bow with
deep respect to Dr. Windship and his heavy weights. We bow, if anything,
with a trifle more of cordiality to Dr. Lewis and his light weights.
They both have our good word. We think that they would have our example,
were it not for the fatal proclivity of solitary gymnastics to dulness.
If we have not risen to the high degrees in this noble order of muscular
Christians, we claim at least to be a humble craftsman and faithful
brother.

Speaking with all seriousness, we have no faith in mental activity
purchased at the expense of physical sloth. It is well to introduce into
the school, into the family, and into the neighborhood any movement
system which will exercise all the muscles of the body. But the educated
man is not any more likely to need this general physical development
than anybody else. Establish your gymnasium in any village, and the
farmer fresh from the plough, the mechanic from swinging the hammer or
driving the plane, will be just as sure to find new muscles that he
never dreamed of as the palest scholar of them all. And the diffusion of
knowledge and refinement, so far from promoting inactivity and banishing
recreations from life, directly feeds that craving for variety out of
which healthful changes come, and awakens that noble curiosity which at
fit seasons sends a man out to see how the wild-flower grows in the
woods, how the green buds open in the spring, how the foliage takes on
its painted autumn glory, which leads him to struggle through tangled
thickets or through pathless woods that he may behold the brook laughing
in cascade from rock to rock, or to breast the steep mountain that he
may behold from a higher outlook the wonders of the visible creation.
Other things being equal, the educated man in any vocation is quite as
likely as another to be active, quick in every motion and free in every
limb.

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