: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 16 No. 96 October 1865 A Magazine of Literature Science Art and Politics by Various - American periodicals The Atlantic Monthly

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ith 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, Bourdalou?, and F?nelon. 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.

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.

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