CHAP. IX. TRUE RESPECTABILITY. 239 forms the greatest amount of useful work and of human duty. Money is power after its sort, it is true; but intelligence, public spirit, and moral virtue, are powers too, and far nobler ones. The making of a fortune may no doubt enable some people to "enter society," as it is called; but to be esteemed there, they must possess qualities of mind, manners, or heart, else they are merely rich people, nothing more. There are men "in society" now, as rich as Croesus, who have no consideration extended towards them, and elicit no respect. For why? They are but as money-bags: their only power is in their till. The men of mark in society-the guides and rulers of opinion -the really successful and useful men--are not necessarily rich men; but men of sterling character, of disciplined experience, and of moral excellence. Even the poor man like Thomas Wright, though he possesses but little of this world's goods, may, in the self-consciousness of a wellcultivated nature, of opportunities used and not abused, of a life spent to the best of his means and ability, look down, without the slightest feeling of envy, upon the person of mere worldly success, the man of money-bags and acres. 240 PHYSICAL CULTURE. СНАР. Х. CHAPTER X. SELF-CULTURE. "Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself."-Gibbon. "These two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together -manly dependence and manly independence, manly reliance and manly self-reliance.". -Wordsworth. SELF-CULTURE includes the education or training of all parts of a man's nature; the physical and moral, as well as the intellectual. Each must be developed, and yet each must yield something to satisfy the claims of the others. Cultivate the physical powers exclusively, and you have an athlete or a savage; the moral only, and you have an enthusiast or a maniac; the intellectual only, and you have a diseased oddity, it may be a monster. It is only by wisely training all three together that the complete man can be formed. The ancients laid great stress on physical training, and a sound mind in a sound body was the end which they professed to aim at in their highest schools of culture. The Greek teachers were peripatetic, holding that young men should only learn what they could learn standing. The old English entertained a similar idea, embodied in the maxim, "The field in summer, the study in winter." Milton described himself as up and stirring early in the morning-" in winter, often ere the sound of any bell wakes man to labour or devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or to cause them to be read till the attention be СНАР. Х. 6 NEGLECT OF BODILY EXERCISE. 241 ready, or memory have its full fraught; then, with clear and generous labour, preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty." In his Tractate on Education' he recommends the physical exercise of fencing to young men, as calculated to " keep them healthy, nimble, strong, and well in breath, and also as the likeliest means to make them grow large and tall, and inspire them with a gallant and fearless courage," and he further urges that they should "be practised in all the locks and grips of wrestling, wherein Englishmen were wont to excel." In our day, such exercises have somewhat fallen into disrepute, and education has become more exclusively mental; very much to the detriment of the bodily health. The brain is cultivated at the expense of the members, and the physical is usually found in an inverse ratio to the intellectual appetite. Hence, in this age of progress, we find so many stomachs weak as blotting-paper,-hearts indicating "fatty degeneration,”—unused, pithless hands, calveless legs and limp bodies, without any elastic spring in them. But it is not merely health that suffers by neglect and disuse of the bodily organs. The mind itself grows sickly and distempered, the pursuit of knowledge itself is impeded, and manhood becomes withered, twisted, and stunted. It is, perhaps, to this neglect of physical exercise that we find amongst students so frequent a tendency towards discontent, unhappiness, inaction, and reverie,displaying itself in a premature contempt for real life, and disgust at the beaten tracks of men, a tendency which in England has been called Byronism, and in Germany Wertherism. Dr. Channing noted the same growth in America, which led him to make the remark, that "too many of our young men grow up in a school of despair." The only remedy for this green-sickness of youth is abundant physical exercise,-action, work, and bodily occupation of any sort. R 242 BOATING AND CRICKETING, CHAP. X. Daniel Malthus urged his son when at college to be most diligent in the cultivation of knowledge, but he also enjoined him to pursue manly sports as the best means of keeping up the full working power of his mind, as well as of enjoying the pleasures of intellect. "Every kind of knowledge," said he, "every acquaintance with nature and art, will amuse and strengthen your mind, and I am perfectly pleased that cricket should do the same by your arms and legs; I love to see you excel in exercises of the body, and I think myself that the better half, and much the most agreeable part, of the pleasures of the mind, is best enjoyed while one is upon one's legs." But a still more important use of active employment is that enforced by the great divine, Jeremy Taylor. "Avoid idleness," he says, "and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul is unemployed, and the body is at ease; for no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments, bodily labour is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving away the devil." Practical success in life depends much more upon physical health than is generally imagined. Hodson, of Hodson's Horse, writing home to a friend in England, said, “I believe, if I get on well in India, it will be owing, physically speaking, to a sound digestion." The capacity for continuous working in any calling must necessarily mainly depend upon this; and hence the necessity for attending to health, even as a means of intellectual labour itself. It is in no slight degree to the boating and cricketing sports still cultivated at our best public schools and universities, that they produce so many specimens of healthy, manly, and vigorous men, of the true Hodson stamp. It is said that the Duke of Wellington, when once looking on at the boys engaged in their sports in the play-ground at Eton, where he had spent his own juvenile days, made the pregnant remark, "It was there that the battle of Waterloo was won!" CHAP. X. USES OF MECHANICAL WORK. 243 The cultivation of muscularity may doubtless be overestimated; yet it is unquestionably important that every young man should be early trained to the free use of his body and limbs. This, however, is one of the "common things" in modern education which is apt to be neglected. There are many youths who leave school and college full of the learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who, as regards the use of their own hands, are almost helpless. In gerunds and participles the "double first-class" man may be profound, but in the use of his eyes—in the faculty of common observation-he may be inferior to a ploughman. Though he may have taken the highest honours, he will sometimes, in common matters, be found beneath the level of the smith, the carpenter, or the navvy. 66 •At sea he is a land-lubber, in the country a cockney, in town a greenhorn, in science an ignoramus, in business a simpleton, in pleasure a milksop-everywhere out of his element, everywhere at sea, in the clouds, adrift, or by whatever words utter ignorance and incapacity are to be described."* Perhaps, as educators grow wiser, they may become more practical, and recognise as among the chief objects of education, to fit men for actual life, and enable them to understand and take part in the daily business of common men. Nor would the education of youths in common things be found incompatible with the very highest intellectual culture, but the reverse. Even some training in the use of tools in a workshop, for instance, would be found a good adjunct to education,—for it would teach young men the use of their hands and arms, familiarize them with healthy work, exercise their faculties upon things tangible and actual, give them some practical acquaintance with mechanics, impart to them the ability of being useful, and implant in them the habit of persevering physical effort. This is an advantage which the working classes, strictly so called, certainly possess over the leisure classes,-that they are in early life under the necessity of applying themselves * Article in the 'Times.' |