The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
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, Bourdalouë, and Fénelon. 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