THE EFFECT OF CULTURE ON VITALITY.
WE rather wonder why the Daily Telegraph thinks it necessary to justify the recent assertion of M. Jules Simon that intellectual occupation tends to longevity. All around us are proofs of the truth of the assertion. So far from intellectual work diminishing vitality, the chiefs of all the intellectual professions are, and in recent times have been, men who have passed the ordinary term of years with un- diminished powers. In politics, the principal leaders whom. this generation have known have been Earl Russell, Lord Palmerston, Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr. Gladstone, and every one of the three was at seventy in full vigour, while the last, at eighty-three, is coercing a reluctant party to endorse a policy which the people of England determinately reject. The great statesman of the Continent, Prince Bismarck, remains at seventy-eight a force with which his Government has to reckon ; while the will of Leo XIII., an exceptionally intel-, lectual Pope, at eighty-three, is felt in every corner of the world. The most intellectual and successful soldier of our time, the man who had really thought-out victories, Marshal von Moltke, was an unbroken man at ninety and more years. No men dare compare themselves in literary power with Tennyson . or Carlyle, Victor Hugo or Von Ranke, and they all reached the age which the author of Ecclesiastes declared to be marked only by labour and sorrow; as also did Professor Owen, whose life was one long labour in scientific inquiry ; and so has Sir William Grove, one of the most strenuous thinkers whom even this age of thinkers has produced. We might lengthen the list indefinitely; but to what use, when we all know that the most intellectual among lawyers, historians, novelists, theologians, physicists, politicians, and naturalists survive their contemporaries, usually with undiminished powers P In all statistical accounts, the clergy, whose occupation is wholly intellectual, rank first among the long-lived. A little lower down in the scale, the most hale men among us are those who have been doing intellectual work, often extremely hard work, through all their lives, and who are still so strong that all the professions are affected by their resolution not to retire, and the inability of younger men to invent a reason for making
their retirement compulsory. To say that they are picked lives is false, for they are so numerous that the intense vitality of the old and intellectual actually affects the organisation of society; and to say that the unintellectual flourish equally well, as the Daily Telegraph is half-inclined to do, is not provably true. The stupid among the cultivated do not survive in anything like the same proportion; and though it is true that every workhouse contains one or two specimens of longevity, it will constantly be found that they were, for their class, exceptionally bright and thoughtful, capable of saying sayings and relating narratives which the majority were in- terested to hear. Among the ladies of the century, the oldest have been the brightest—take Lady Smith or Mrs. Procter for examples—and it would be easy, in London alone, to assemble a "grey party" of women all over seventy whose talk would put that of the girls and younger matrons to shame for its vivacity and verve. It is true, no doubt, that there are men without intellectual occupations who live long in right of constitutions without weak places in them, and true, also, that freedom from anxiety of itself is favourable to longevity; but, to judge from the scene around us, no anti- septic, no preservative against decay, is quite equal to an occu- pation which requires a steady tax upon the brain. Numbers of these "ancient men," too, can still walk, ride, tricycle, bowl in a way their sons can only just surpass, and exhibit a degree of physical health which makes one wonder why insurance- offices should accept them for annuities, or why experienced surgeons should whisper that after eighty-five the scientific " expectation of life" may be calculated by days. We do not hesitate to say that if brain-power were hereditary—which, pace Mr. Galton, it is not, or at least is not without intervals —a race of men living for ages by intellectual occupation alone would radically modify all theories as to the expectation of life, would add to it, that is, by at least ten solid years.
Nor is it impossible to guess with at least some approach to conviction at the physical cause of the longevity often dis- played by the intellectual, if physically they are fairly sound. No proposition is more fully established than this,—that use, within certain limits of moderation, strengthens instead of weakening the faculty used. The gamekeeper who walks all day, can walk at seventy better than any sedentary man ; hunting-men, though they lose their nerve, never lose the muscles which control a horse ; and a gardener of seventy will dig without fatigue, while his employer of fifty- five gives in. It is said, on good evidence, that a Japanese dentist can train his fingers to pluck out teeth without in- struments; and even the eyes can be made by habit abnormally strong. Dr. Brudenell Carter, in an admirable paper on this subject, proved that the popular notion about "use "destroying the eyes was a pure fallacy, journeymen watchmakers using their magnifying glasses—fixed, remember, not in both eyes, but in one of them—for forty years consecutively without appreciable injury or decay of visual power. "Training," it is true, often exhausts force; but that is because we train in athletics in order not to improve the normal strength for normal exertion, but to obtain abnormal power for a short abnormal effort, sometimes too great for the springs of life to bear. Use is the great preservative, not de- stroyer, of strength ; and the use of the brain protects and develops the nerve-power of which it is the reservoir, and on which, in part, longevity depends. You may kill a man with anxiety very quickly; but it is difficult to kill him with work, especially if he retains the power, which most men of intel- lectual occupations more or lees possess, of sleeping nearly at will, and without torpor. You may see some Judges do it every day, and with the most singular suddenness, not only the intellect but also the sense of hearing seeming to be sus- pended by an act of pure volition. The man who has used his brain all his life, say for six hours a day, has, in fact, trained his nerve-power, and placed it beyond the reach of early decay, or that kind of feebleness which makes so many apparently healthy men succumb so readily to attacks of disease. Doctors know the differences among men in this respect quite well, and many of them acknowledge that the "habit of sur- viving" which they find in their best patients arises from two causes,—one, which used to be always pleaded, being that Soundness of physical constitution whieh some men enjoy by hereditary right ; and the other, some recondite form of brain- power, seldom exhibited, except under strong excitement, by any but those who throughout life have been compelled to think and, so to speak, use their thoughts as other men use their ligaments and muscles. If such a man is tired of life, medicine will not save him ; but, as a rule, his will, consciously or unconsciously, compels the trained nerve-power to struggle on. Whether the brain can actually give power to the muscles is not certain, though the enormous strength sometimes deve- loped in a last rally looks very like it ; but that it can materially affect vitality is quite certain, and has been acknow- ledged by the experienced in all ages.
Why, then, has the popular instinct, which is so seldom entirely wrong, rather condemned brain-work as, on the whole, enfeebling P We conceive for three reasons ; one, which is now growing feeble, being the tradition of an earlier time of war- fare, when it was almost necessary to neglect the cultivation of the brain for that of the body, and the man of thews and sinews rose almost without effort to the top. The men whose trade is physical effort rarely cultivate the brain, and as they do not, despise it; and this contempt, or rather distrust, having once been the governing idea of whole races, and successful races, has left a tradition operative even now. Another reason is that precocity is really a source of danger to life ; and the people, seeing that the precociously learned or clever are frail, set the frailty down not to the precocity, but to the cleverness or the learning. They might as well despise ankles because a child set to walk too early usually grows bandy-legged, or, at least, loses the perfect litheness it should when standing up- right display. But the third cause has operated far more than the other two ; and that is a form of natural selection, —the proclivity of the feeble towards purely intellectual work. They simply cannot do the other, and their failures in health are set down, not to natural feebleness, but to the intellectual work to which they have flown as to a refuge, or by natural recoil. That work has probably strengthened instead of further enfeebling them ; but the commonalty look only to the total result, which, no doubt, is frequently disastrous in the extreme. The lad had no right to read as he did ; but it was not the reading killed him. The man had no right to spend ten hours a day in his profession ; but it was not the thinking essential to it which wore out his frame. That would have worn out in any ease, whether he read or worked or not. We do not mean to say, of course, that there is no such thing as over-study, or over-devotion to an intellectual profession, for we all know instances which prove clearly the injury that may be so inflicted on a man's vitality. We have known men who never recovered from the strain of an examination, which upon others as successful as themselves had no vital effect at all. But we do mean to say that intellectual work unaccom- panied by anxiety, and especially by pecuniary anxiety in men, or by the anxiety of intense competition in women, very rarely impairs the frames of the fit, and very frequently increases that store of vitality of which men like M. Jules Simon are really boasting when they speak of their unusual length of years. It was not while he was working that Shakespeare died ; and it is after they retire that hard- thinking professionals, lawyers, doctors, authors, and con- structive engineers most frequently collapse. The intellectual work has sustained, not weakened them ; and it is when they give it up that the weak places of the constitution, previously kept in health by mental activity and its effect upon nerve- power, succumb to disease or to that feebleness for which physicians have no name, although they recognise its signs so well and know when they are fatal. The men who task their brains "flicker out" in idleness, not while they are at work.
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