Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 by Various

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It is to be reluctantly recorded, in fact, that the Protestant saints
have not ordinarily had much to boast of, in physical stamina, as
compared with the Roman Catholic. They have not got far beyond Plotinus.
We do not think it worth while to quote Calvin on this point, for he, as
everybody knows, was an invalid for his whole lifetime. But we do take
it hard, that the jovial Luther, in the midst of his ale and skittles,
should have deliberately censured Juvenal's _mens sana in corpore sano_,
as a pagan maxim!

If Saint Luther fails us, where are the advocates of the body to look
for comfort? Nothing this side of ancient Greece, we fear, will afford
adequate examples of the union of saintly souls and strong bodies.
Pythagoras the sage we doubt not to have been identical with Pythagoras
the inventor of pugilism, and he was, at any rate, (in the loving words
of Bentley,) "a lusty proper man, and built as it were to make a good
boxer." Cleanthes, whose sublime "Prayer" is, to our thinking, the
highest strain left of early piety, was a boxer likewise. Plato was a
famous wrestler, and Socrates was unequalled for his military
endurance. Nor was one of these, like their puny follower Plotinus, too
weak-sighted to revise his own manuscripts.

It would be tedious to analyze the causes of this modern deterioration
of the saints. The fact is clear. There is in the community an
impression that physical vigor and spiritual sanctity are incompatible.
We knew a young Orthodox divine who lost his parish by swimming the
Merrimac River, and another who was compelled to ask a dismissal in
consequence of vanquishing his most influential parishioner in a game
of ten-pins; it seemed to the beaten party very unclerical. We further
remember a match, in a certain sea-side bowling-alley, in which two
brothers, young divines, took part. The sides being made up, with the
exception of these two players, it was necessary to find places for
them also. The head of one side accordingly picked his man, on the
presumption (as he afterwards confessed) that the best preacher would
naturally be the worst bowler. The athletic capacity, he thought, would
be in inverse ratio to the sanctity. We are happy to add, that in this
case his hopes were signally disappointed. But it shows which way the
popular impression lies.

The poets have probably assisted In maintaining the delusion. How many
cases of consumption Wordsworth must have accelerated by his assertion,
that "the good die first"! Happily, he lived to disprove his own maxim.
We, too, repudiate it utterly. Professor Peirce has proved by statistics
that the best scholars in our colleges survive the rest; and we hold
that virtue, like intellect, tends to longevity. The experience of the
literary class shows that all excess is destructive, and that we need
the harmonious action of all the faculties. Of the brilliant roll of the
"young men of 1830," in Paris,--Balzac, Soulie, De Musset, De Bernard,
Sue, and their compeers,--it is said that nearly every one has already
perished, in the prime of life. What is the explanation? A stern one:
opium, tobacco, wine, and licentiousness. "All died of softening of the
brain or spinal marrow, or swelling of the heart." No doubt, many of
the noble and the pure were dying prematurely at the same time; but it
proceeded from the same essential cause: physical laws disobeyed and
bodies exhausted. The evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned,
as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The _delirium
tremens_ of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than
the second childishness of the pure and abstemious Southey.

But, happily, times change, and saints with them. Our moral conceptions
are expanding to take in that "athletic virtue" of the Greeks, [Greek:
apetae gimnastikae] which Dr. Arnold, by precept and practice, defended.
The modern English "Broad Church" aims at breadth of shoulders, as well
as of doctrines. Kingsley paints his stalwart Philammons and Amyas
Leighs, and his critics charge him with laying down a new definition of
the saint, as a man who fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a
thousand hours. Our American saintship, also, is beginning to have
a body to it, a "Body of Divinity," indeed. Look at our three great
popular preachers. The vigor of the paternal blacksmith still swings the
sinewy arm of Beecher; Parker performed the labors, mental and physical,
of four able-bodied men, until even his great strength temporarily
yielded;--and if ever dyspepsia attack the burly frame of Chapin, we
fancy that dyspepsia will get the worst of it.

This is as it should be. One of the most potent causes of the
ill-concealed alienation between the clergy and the people, in our
community, is the supposed deficiency, on the part of the former, of
a vigorous, manly life. It must be confessed that our saints suffer
greatly from this moral and physical _anhaemia_, this bloodlessness,
which separates them, more effectually than a cloister, from the strong
life of the age. What satirists upon religion are those parents who say
of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring,
"He is born for a minister," while the ruddy, the brave, and the
strong are as promptly assigned to a secular career! Never yet did an
ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching
sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls,
without living to repent it in maturity. These precocious little
sentimentalists wither away like blanched potato-plants in a cellar;
and then comes some vigorous youth from his out-door work or play, and
grasps the rudder of the age, as he grasped the oar, the bat, or the
plough-handle. We distrust the achievements of every saint without a
body; and really have hopes of the Cambridge Divinity School, since
hearing that it has organized a boat-club.

We speak especially of men, but the same principles apply to women.
The triumphs of Rosa Bonheur and Harriet Hosmer grew out of a free and
vigorous training, and they learned to delineate muscle by using it.

Everybody admires the physical training of military and naval schools.
But these same persons never seem to imagine that the body is worth
cultivating for any purpose, except to annihilate the bodies of others.
Yet it needs more training to preserve life than to destroy it. The
vocation of a literary man is far more perilous than that of a frontier
dragoon. The latter dies at most but once, by an Indian bullet; the
former dies daily, unless he be warned in time and take occasional
refuge in the saddle and the prairie with the dragoon. What battle-piece
is so pathetic as Browning's "Grammarian's Funeral"? Do not waste your
gymnastics on the West Point or Annapolis student, whose whole life will
be one of active exercise, but bring them into the professional schools
and the counting-rooms. Whatever may be the exceptional cases, the stern
truth remains, that the great deeds of the world can be more easily done
by illiterate men than by sickly ones. Wisely said Horace Mann, "All
through the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is
lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble
enterprises perished, for lack of physical vigor to embody them in
deeds." And yet more eloquently it has been said by a younger American
thinker, (D.A. Wasson,) "Intellect in a weak body is like gold in
a spent swimmer's pocket,--the richer he would be, under other
circumstances, by so much the greater his danger now."

Of course, the mind has immense control over physical endurance, and
every one knows that among soldiers, sailors, emigrants, and woodsmen,
the leaders, though more delicately nurtured, will often endure hardship
better than the followers,--"because," says Sir Philip Sidney, "they are
supported by the great appetites of honor." But for all these triumphs
of nervous power a reaction lies in store, as in the case of the
superhuman efforts often made by delicate women. And besides, there is
a point beyond which no mental heroism can ignore the body,--as, for
instance, in seasickness and toothache. Can virtue arrest consumption,
or self-devotion set free the agonized breath of asthma, or heroic
energy defy paralysis? More formidable still are those subtle results
of disease, which cannot be resisted, because their source is unseen.
Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the
good or bad digestion of a prime-minister; and Motley holds that the
gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world.

But so blinded, on these matters, is our accustomed mode of thought,
that Mr. Beecher's recent lecture on the Laws of Nature has been met
with strong objections from a portion of the religious press. These
newspapers agree in asserting that admiration of physical strength
belonged to the barbarous ages of the world. So it certainly did, and so
much the better for those ages. They had that one merit, at least; and
so surely as an exclusively intellectual civilization ignored it, the
arm of some robust barbarian prostrated that civilization at last. What
Sismondi says of courage is preeminently true of that bodily vigor which
it usually presupposes: that, although it is by no means the first
of virtues, its loss is more fatal than that of all others. "Were it
possible to unite the advantages of a perfect government with the
cowardice of a whole people, those advantages would be utterly
valueless, since they would be utterly without security."

Physical health is a necessary condition of all permanent success. To
the American people it has a stupendous importance because it is the
only attribute of power in which they are losing ground. Guaranty
us against physical degeneracy, and we can risk all other
perils,--financial crises, Slavery, Romanism, Mormonism, Border
Ruffians, and New York assassins; "domestic malice, foreign levy,
nothing" can daunt us. Guaranty us health, and Mrs. Stowe cannot
frighten us with all the prophecies of Dred; but when her sister
Catherine informs us that in all the vast female acquaintance of the
Beecher family there are not a dozen healthy women, we confess ourselves
a little tempted to despair of the republic.

The one drawback to satisfaction in our Public-School System is the
physical weakness which it reveals and helps to perpetuate. One seldom
notices a ruddy face in the school-room, without tracing it back to a
Transatlantic origin. The teacher of a large school in Canada went so
far as to declare to us, that she could recognize the children born this
side the line by their invariable appearance of ill-health joined with
intellectual precocity,--stamina wanting, and the place supplied by
equations. Look at a class of boys or girls in our Grammar Schools; a
glance along the line of their backs affords a study of geometrical
curves. You almost long to reverse the position of their heads, as Dante
has those of the false prophets, and thus improve their figures; the
rounded shoulders affording a vigorous chest, and the hollow chest an
excellent back.

There are statistics to show that the average length of human life is
increasing; but it is probable that this results from the diminution
of epidemic diseases, rather than from any general improvement in
_physique_. There are facts also to indicate an increase of size and
strength with advancing civilization. It is known that two men of middle
size were unable to find a suit of armor large enough among the sixty
sets owned by Sir Samuel Meyrick. It is also known that the strongest
American Indians cannot equal the average strength of wrist of
Europeans, or rival them in ordinary athletic feats. Indeed, it is
generally supposed that any physical deterioration is local, being
peculiar to the United States. Recently, however, we have read, with
great regret, in the "Englishwoman's Review," that "it is allowed by
all, that the appearance of the English peasant, in the present day,
is very different to [from] what it was fifty years ago; the robust,
healthy, hard-looking countrywoman or girl is as rare now as the pale,
delicate, nervous female of our times would have been a century ago."
And the writer proceeds to give alarming illustrations, based upon the
appearance of children in English schools, both in city and country.

We cannot speak for England, but certainly no one can visit Canada
without being struck with the spectacle of a more athletic race of
people than our own. On every side one sees rosy female faces and noble
manly figures. In the shop-windows, in winter weather, hang snow-shoes,
"gentlemen's and ladies' sizes." The street-corners inform you that the
members of the "Curling Club" are to meet to-day at "Dolly's," and the
"Montreal Fox-hounds" at St. Lawrence Hall to-morrow. And next day
comes off the annual steeple-chase, at the "Mile-End Course," ridden by
gentlemen of the city with their own horses; a scene, by the way, whose
exciting interest can scarcely be conceived by those accustomed only
to "trials of speed" at agricultural exhibitions. Everything indicates
out-door habits and athletic constitutions.

We are aware that we may be met with the distinction between a good idle
constitution and a good working constitution,--the latter of which often
belongs to persons who make no show of physical powers. But this only
means that there are different temperaments and types of physical
organization, while, within the limits of each, the distinction between
a healthy and a diseased condition still holds; and we insist on that
alone.

Still more specious is the claim of the Fourth-of-July orators, that,
health or no health, it is the sallow Americans, and not the robust
English, who are really leading the world. But this, again, is a
question of temperaments. The Englishman concedes the greater intensity,
but prefers a more solid and permanent power. It is the noble masonry
and vast canals of Montreal, against the Aladdin's palaces of Chicago.
"I observe," admits the Englishman, "that an American can accomplish
more, at a single effort, than any other man on earth; but I also
observe that he exhausts himself in the achievement. Kane, a delicate
invalid, astounds the world by his two Arctic winters,--and then dies in
tropical Cuba." The solution is simple; nervous energy is grand, and so
is muscular power; combine the two, and you move the world.

We shall assume, as admitted, therefore, the deficiency of physical
health in America, and the need of a great amendment. But into the
general question of cause and cure we do not propose to enter. In view
of the vast variety of special theories, and the inadequacy of any one,
(or any dozen,) we shall forbear. To our thinking, the best diagnosis
of the universal American disease is to be found in Andral's
famous description of the cholera: "Anatomical characteristics,
insufficient;--cause, mysterious;--nature, hypothetical;--symptoms,
characteristic;--diagnosis, easy;--_treatment, very doubtful_."

Every man must have his hobby, however, and it is a great deal to ride
only one hobby at a time. For the present we disavow all minor ones.
We forbear giving our pet arguments in defence of animal food, and in
opposition to tobacco, coffee, and india-rubbers. We will not criticize
the old-school physician whom we once knew, who boasted of not having
performed a thorough ablution for twenty-five years; nor will we
question the physiological orthodoxy of Miss Sedgwick's New England
artist, who represented the Goddess of Health with a pair of flannel
drawers on. Still less should we think of debating (or of tasting)
Kennedy's Medical Discovery, or R.R.R., or the Cow Pepsin. We know our
aim, and will pursue it with a single eye.

"The wise for cure on _exercise_ depend,"

saith Dryden,--and that is our hobby.

A great physician has said, "I know not which is most indispensable
for the support of the frame,--food or exercise." But who, in this
community, really takes exercise? Even the mechanic commonly confines
himself to one set of muscles; the blacksmith acquires strength in his
right arm, and the dancing-master in his left leg. But the professional
or business man, what muscles has he at all? The tradition, that
Phidippides ran from Athens to Sparta, one hundred and twenty miles, in
two days, seems to us Americans as mythical as the Golden Fleece. Even
to ride sixty miles in a day, to walk thirty, to run five, or to swim
one, would cost most men among us a fit of illness, and many their
lives. Let any man test his physical condition, we will not say by
sawing his own cord of wood, but by an hour in the gymnasium or at
cricket, and his enfeebled muscular apparatus will groan with rheumatism
for a week. Or let him test the strength of his arms and chest by
raising and lowering himself a few times upon a horizontal bar, or
hanging by the arms to a rope, and he will probably agree with Galen
in pronouncing it _robustum validumque laborem_. Yet so manifestly are
these things within the reach of common constitutions, that a few weeks
or months of judicious practice will renovate his whole system, and the
most vigorous exercise will refresh him like a cold bath.

To a well-regulated frame, mere physical exertion, even for an
uninteresting object, is a great enjoyment, which is, of course,
enhanced by the excitement of games and sports. To almost every man
there is joy in the memory of these things; they are the happiest
associations of his boyhood. It does not occur to him, that he also
might be as happy as a boy, if he lived more like one. What do most men
know of the "wild joys of living," the daily zest and luxury of out-door
existence, in which every healthy boy beside them revels?--skating,
while the orange sky of sunset dies away over the delicate tracery of
gray branches, and the throbbing feet pause in their tingling motion,
and the frosty air is filled with the shrill sound of distant steel,
the resounding of the ice, and the echoes up the hillsides?--sailing,
beating up against a stiff breeze, with the waves thumping under the
bow, as if a dozen sea-gods had laid their heads together to resist
it?--climbing tall trees, where the higher foliage, closing around,
cures the dizziness which began below, and one feels as if he had left a
coward beneath and found a hero above?--the joyous hour of crowded life
in football or cricket?--the gallant glories of riding, and the jubilee
of swimming?

The charm which all have found in Tom Brown's "School Days at Rugby"
lies simply in this healthy boy's-life which it exhibits, and in the
recognition of physical culture, which is so novel to Americans. At
present, boys are annually sent across the Atlantic simply for bodily
training. But efforts after the same thing begin to creep in among
ourselves. A few Normal Schools have gymnasiums (rather neglected,
however); the "Mystic Hall Female Seminary" advertises riding-horses;
and we believe the new "Concord School" recognizes boating as an
incidental;--but these are all exceptional cases, and far between.
Faint and shadowy in our memory are certain ruined structures lingering
Stonehenge-like on the Cambridge "Delta,"--and mysterious pits
adjoining, into which Freshmen were decoyed to stumble, and of which
we find that vestiges still remain. Tradition spoke of Dr. Follen
and German gymnastics; but the beneficent exotic was transplanted
prematurely, and died. The only direct encouragement of athletic
exercises which stands out in our memory of academic life was a certain
inestimable shed on the "College Wharf," which was for a brief season
the paradise of swimmers, and which, after having been deliberately
arranged for their accommodation, was suddenly removed, the next season,
to make room for coal-bins. Manly sports were not positively discouraged
in our day,--but that was all.

Yet earlier reminiscences of the same beloved Cambridge suggest deeper
gratitude. Thanks to thee, W.W.,--first pioneer, in New England, of true
classical learning,--last wielder of the old English birch,--for the
manly British sympathy which encouraged to activity the bodies, as well
as the brains, of the numerous band of boys who played beneath the
stately elms of that pleasant play-ground! Who among modern pedagogues
can show such an example of vigorous pedestrianism in his youth as thou
in thine age? and who now grants half-holidays, unasked, for no other
reason than that the skating is good and the boys must use it while it
lasts?

We cling still to the belief, that the Persian _curriculum_ of
studies--to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth--is the better part
of a boy's education. As the urchin is undoubtedly physically safer for
having learned to turn a somerset and fire a gun, perilous though these
feats appear to mothers,--so his soul is made healthier, larger, freer,
stronger, by hours and days of manly exercise and copious draughts of
open air, at whatever risk of idle habits and bad companions. Even
if the balance is sometimes lost, and play prevails, what matter? We
rejoice to have been a schoolmate of him who wrote

"The hours the idle schoolboy squandered
The man would die ere he'd forget."

Only keep in a boy a pure and generous heart, and, whether he work or
play, his time can scarcely be wasted. Which really has done most for
the education of Boston,--Dixwell and Sherwin, or Sheridan and Braman?

Should it prove, however, that the cultivation of active exercises
diminishes the proportion of time given by children to study, we can
only view it as an added advantage. Every year confirms us in the
conviction, that our schools, public and private, systematically
overtask the brains of the rising generation. We all complain that Young
America grows to mental maturity too soon, and yet we all contribute
our share to continue the evil. It is but a few weeks since we saw the
warmest praises, in the New York newspapers, of a girl's school, in that
city, where the appointed hours of study amounted to nine and a quarter
daily, and the hours of exercise to a bare unit. Almost all the
Students' Manuals assume that American students need stimulus instead
of restraint, and urge them to multiply the hours of study and diminish
those of out-door amusements and of sleep, as if the great danger did
not lie that way already. When will parents and teachers learn to regard
mental precocity as a disaster to be shunned, instead of a glory to
be coveted? We could count up a dozen young men who have graduated at
Harvard College, during the last twenty years, with high honors, before
the age of eighteen; and we suppose that nearly every one of them has
lived to regret it. "Nature," says Tissot, in his Essay on the Health of
Men of Letters, "is unable successfully to carry on two rapid processes
at the same time. We attempt a prodigy, and the result is a fool." There
was a child in Languedoc who at six years was of the size of a large
man; of course, his mind was a vacuum. On the other hand, Jean Philippe
Baratier was a learned man in his eighth year, and died of apparent old
age at twenty. Both were monstrosities, and a healthy childhood would be
equidistant from either.

One invaluable merit of out-door sports is to be found in this, that
they afford the best cement for childish friendship. Their associations
outlive all others. There is many a man, now perchance hard and worldly,
whom we love to pass in the street simply because in meeting him we
meet spring flowers and autumn chestnuts, skates and cricket-balls,
cherry-birds and pickerel. There is an indescribable fascination in
the gradual transference of these childish companionships into maturer
relations. We love to encounter in the contests of manhood those whom we
first met at football, and to follow the profound thoughts of those who
always dived deeper, even in the river, than our efforts could attain.
There is a certain governor, of whom we personally can remember only,
that he found the Fresh Pond heronry, which we sought in vain; and
in memory the august sheriff of a neighboring county still skates in
victorious pursuit of us, (fit emblem of swift-footed justice!) on the
black ice of the same lovely lake. Our imagination crowns the Cambridge
poet, and the Cambridge sculptor, not with their later laurels, but with
the willows out of which they taught us to carve whistles, shriller than
any trump of fame, in the happy days when Mount Auburn was Sweet Auburn
still.

Luckily, boy-nature is too strong for theory. And we admit, for the sake
of truth, that physical education is not so entirely neglected among us
as the absence of popular games would indicate. We suppose, that, if the
truth were told, this last fact proceeds partly from the greater freedom
of field-sports in this country. There are few New England boys who do
not become familiar with the rod or gun in childhood. We take it, that,
in the mother country, the monopoly of land interferes with this, and
that game laws, by a sort of spontaneous pun, tend to introduce games.

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