A hundred years ago
There is every probability of a positive decrease in the joy, or gladness, or capacity of mirth within the Western woF1d. The desire to be 'out of it all' increases fast till old age is no longer looked forward to with pleasure. The English cultivated do not die like the Australians, but they grow sad and weary. The brain is inconsciously fatigued till spirits disappear, and the capacity of pleasure is diminished as it is by over-training. Men are jaded, in fact, and in the trainer's dialect made 'stale', rather than oppressed with true melancholia. If that is true, and it must in part be true, the disease may be temporary, and pass with the generation, the next one acquiring with the effort at selfdefence either some new strength, or what is more probable, a habit of indifference to the calls on their minds which will act as a protection. They will in colloquial phrase instinctively 'take things easier,' yield more readily and in more india-rubber fashion to the incessant impact from without. We think we perceive that tendency in the young, and though exasperating, it may yet be healthy. We can conceive no worse prospect than a gradual increase from generation to generation of the weariness of life, till cultivated Englishmen, like cultivated Russians, arrived at the conclusion that everything existing was unendurable, and nothing better was to be expected or desired.
Spectator, May 3 1879
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