THE HEAT.
THE heat is beginning to have a moral interest. Apart from the interesting stories we hear of farmers who have usually supplied two hundredweight of butter per week being only able to scrape together twenty pounds' weight from the depressed and enervated cows, of the india-rubber depots which have kindled into flames under the burning sun, of the sun-strokes which have over- taken adventurous riflemen or cricketers, and all the ordinary stories of a hot season, the heat is really beginning to affect the charac- ters of one's friends and acquaintance. The Old Indians, for in- stance, are very objectionable, with their didactic and triumphant moralities in their own favour,—" Now you have a faint—a very faint—idea of the conditions under which your Anglo-Indian brethren are expected to toil from year to year,"—which is not, in point of fact, a bit true, for the Anglo-Indians are far better off than we are at present,—all their life being so arranged as to suit a tropical climate, and all our life being so arranged as not to suit it. In fact, nothing is more melancholy to notice than the helpless attempts of Englishmen to introduce, on the spur of the moment, the requisite changes, and the abject failure of these attempts for want both of the material prerequisites and of general organization. In the first place, only the shopkeepers and a few great hotels have got sunblinds, and even they have not got windows which fold back so that you can get all the air without the sun. Scarcely anybody likes to go to the expense of Venetian blinds for a single month or two, and those who do won't alter their window sashes so as to get that horrible hot glass out of the aperture altogether. Happy the very few who have both French windows and Venetian blinds or shutters, for the amount of savage despair which has been elicited by the discovery (quite new to some people) that an ordinary sash, even when the upper and lower part are made to coincide, still fills up half the aperture, has frequently transformed the most benignant countenances during these last few weeks with an expression of impotent rage terrible to behold. Then at the very best the size of the windows in English houses has been adapted only with a view to admit light, not with a view to admit unlimited air. And consequently, when a rumour has gone forth in any household and been crediblyconfirmed that a breath of air may be distinctly felt by sitting at a particular window, the glances of feverish impatience which are cast at any one who has preoccupied the favoured spot
tend to lower one's faith in human nature. But the most fatal of the failures caused by the attempt to adapt a society that has been edu- cated to admire and love the little heat we experience, to tropical fer- yours like those of the last month, is due to the want of simultaneous consent on the part of society in general. In the first place, it is not a change easy to make even for an individual. If a man determines that he will get up at four, as they do in the tropics,—and gets up at four,—in the first place, he is seedy and miserable all day, and so exhausted at night that he sleeps till nine instead of four on the day after. Or if he is a methodical person, and reasons that if he is to get up at four he must first go to bed at nine, then he tosses in the sultry heat of an English bedroom for about four hours before he closes his eyes, mentally imprecating the worst of fates on the noisy passers-by, on the man who will rap his double rap as late as ten next door on one side, and on the other neighbour on the other side who will rouse him even as late as eleven by a furious ring; on the washerwoman who brings home the clothes with a patient single knock more infuriating still, half an hour later, and on the policemen who will converse in their beat just below his window till past midnight. And if at last, after sponging himself, or even taking a frantic pull at the string of the shower bath, and gasping half an hour at the window, he finds sleep possible, he does not waken at four at all, or if he does, wakens with a sense of having been severely beaten all night, which compels him in justice to himself to go off to sleep again, and get up much later than usual, when the breakfast room is like an oven in full baking force. Or take the case of the few happily constituted men who can coax themselves to sleep when they will, heat or no heat. Such a one may really go to bed at nine, and sleep and waken at four with a triumphant sense of superiority to all mankind, and feel as fresh and proud as a hero of romance when,he issues from his bath and sees the sun only just touching the attic windows opposite, and contemplates a long morning before him. But then he finds his room all dusty and littered, his stomach very empty, dry food very revolting, and tea unattainable. When at last the housemaid comes in looking surprised and annoyed at the personal inter- ference with her vocation which her master's presence causes, and he asks for tea, he is told, " The milkman hain't come, sir, and won't be 'ere this hour ;" and so, long before breakfast-time, the wretched being laments more than anybody that he was rash enough to contemplate an insulated interference with the mighty organization of English society. The truth is, that no one who lives in a society adapted to the needs of the tropics has the least idea of the discomforts of tropical heat in a society modelled on quite other ideas. Fancy telling your servants that for the next two months they must be up at half-past three or four o'clock at latest, and may go to bed again at nine, and insisting on the baker and the milkman adapting themselves to these new regula- tions! Why, you might just as well request them all to leave off their clothes as leave off their habits ! Their only idea of adapting themselves to the heat is unlimited beer, which adds more to the internal heat than any other cause. It is a great wonder, and a sign perhaps of slightly increased pliancy in the English nature, that so many men carry about umbrellas to screen them from the sun,—a sight which tea years ago was never seen in England even in the most scorching summers. But as to altering vitally the whole context of society in the way needful to utilize the cool morning hours, and for a month or two only, we are as yet very remote indeed from any such social elasticity as that.
But besides the curiously spasmodic failures which are made in the attempt to adapt ourselves by temporary expedients to a climate which we only experience about twice in twenty or thirty years, there are other curious moral interests belonging to the present dispensation,—the most curious being, perhaps, the moral straws at which feverish people catch in their desire for coolness, and the indignation with which a man who catches at one straw himself, treats the favourite straw of another. If one man ventures (very wildly) to hope for a change from the approaching total eclipse of the sun, for instance (which is not visible, by the way, in England, though that has no more to do with the matter than the eclipse itself, and nevertheless, if known, might have had something to do with the imagination of the conjecturer), his hearers will look ferociously at him as if he were raising false hopes gratuitously, and one of them, perhaps, after remarking viciously that that is above three weeks off yet, will proceed to inquire how the accident of the moon's passing so exactly between the sun and the earth as to extinguish its light from a small part of the earth for an hour or so, is to have more effect than any ordinary night, when the body of the earth itself extinguishes the sun's light on half its surface for many hours. And yet all the while there will be a
faint notion that something is to be hoped from the 17th of August, if only the heat can be endured till that day. If any one mentions,—what we believe is true,—that it has been very wet over the Atlantic, while the land has been so dried up with heat ; that the Shetlands have been deluged, while even North Britain has been parched,--that it has rained hard in Italy, while it has been so sultry in England, listeners will ask angrily what hope there is in that, and yet privately take comfort. But all this catching at straws really aggravates the mischief, and makes us infinitely more feverish and hotter. There in almost as much anxiety in the eyes of the dogs and other dumb animals—cats excepted, which don't object to any heat,—as there is in men. But the dumb creatures do not aggravate the evil, like rash men, by attempting insulated revolutions in habits of life which it is obvious they have not the power to carry out, or by catching at vain sources of hope.
On the whole, the remedies practicable in England against the heat seem to reduce themselves to a few ;—first of all, submission, and not conflict;—then abstinence from heat-producing -food, butter, fat, sugar, malt, and the like,—abstinence from the temporary delights of cold shower baths, which are apt to produce tremendous reaction, and to fever the skin in the end more than they have cooled it, except, of course, the regular morning shower bath, which is invaluable to strengthen you for the fatigue of the day ;—a .slightlyreduced diet, plenty of tea as hot as you can drink it, as much air as can be got,—air even with sun, rather than shadow without it; —and for those who can afford luxuries, frequent change of clothes in the day-time, and, beat of all, a reserve bed at night, with cool linen sheets, in which refuge may be taken when the first bed has become hot and crumpled with tossing ; and he who cannot afford this, might at least change his night shirt fora cool, fresh one, air well his bed, without too much energy of mind or body, and then lie down again ;—but, above all, no voluntaryrestlessness, no roam- ing about the house in the midnight hours in moody despair ; no pleading your miserable destiny to the shining and careless -stars, or to the airless, sultry night. If bathe you must, warm water, not cold, is the most likely to soothe and produce rest, warm water to the feet especially being a great alleviation of fever and sleeplessness. But the most fatal thing of all in the present weather is the revolutionary temper,—the attempt (which must fail) to wrestle with the arrangements -of society, and effect a revolution in favour of Oriental modes of
life. Quietism is the mood of mind most favourable to a mode- rate temperature of body. Acquiesce in everything,—even, if it be possible, in clothes. Surrender your will, forget your temper, -avoid every sort of friction, material and moral ; murmur not at any mischance ; and slide through your duties, if you can, till the autumnal evenings and mornings strike cool again. The elections are not till November. There is a time for energy and a time for patience ;—this is the time for patience, which is the coolest of the virtues,—the raspberry vinegar of the mind. Change any unen- durable situation silently and peaceably, without chafing,—as you would get from your hot bed into your cool bed at night, if you -could. So only, and not by moral fevers of revolution, may we live it out, till the time of tyranny be overpast.
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