Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Now then, sir, Phyllis has been put to bed; allow me to dance a polka with your daughter. Frail, elegant creature that she is! A glass of wine—a macaroon: good. Sontag, yes; and that dear novel. That was a delightful dance; now let us promenade. The room is close; a glass of wine, an ice, and let us get to the delicious draught in the conservatory, or by that door. Is it not beautiful? The next quadrille—I look slily at my watch, and Auber’s grim chorus rumbles within me, “_Voici minuit! voici minuit_!” Another dance. How fond she seems to be of macaroons! Supper. My dear sir, I will take good care of your daughter. One sandwich. Champagne. Blanc-mange. Tipsey-cake. Brandy cherries. Glass of wine. A macaroon. Trifle. Jelly. Champagne. Custard. Macaroon. The ladies are being taken care of—Yes, now in their absence we will drink their health, and wink at each other: their and our Bad Healths. This is the happiest moment of our lives; at two in the morning, with a dose of indigestion in the stomach, and three hours more to come before we get to bed. You, my dear sir, hope that on many occasions like the present you may see your friends around you, looking as glassy-eyed as you have made them to look now. We will rejoin the ladies.

Nothing but Champagne could have enabled us to keep up the evening so well. We were getting weary before supper—but we have had some wine, have dug the spur into our sides, and on we go again. At length, even the bottle stimulates our worn-out company no more; and then we separate. Good-night, dear sir; we have spent a Very Pleasant Evening under your roof.

To-morrow, when you depart from a late breakfast, having seen your daughter’s face, and her boiled-mackerel eye, knowing that your wife is bilious, and that your son has just gone out for soda-water, you will feel yourself to be a Briton who has done his duty, a man who has paid something on account of his great debt to civilized society.

IV. The Light Nuisance.

Tieck tells us, in his “History of the Schildbürger,” that the town council of that spirited community was very wise. It had been noticed that many worthy aldermen and common-councilors were in the habit of looking out of window when they ought to be attending to their duties. A vote was therefore, on one occasion, passed by a large majority, to this effect, namely—Whereas the windows of the Town-hall are a great impediment to the dispatch of public business, it is ordered that before the next day of meeting they be all bricked up. When the next day of meeting came, the worthy representatives of Schildbürg were surprised to find themselves assembling in the dark. Presently, accepting the unlooked-for fact, they settled down into an edifying discussion of the question, whether darkness was not more convenient for their purposes than daylight. Had you and I been there, my friend, our votes in the division would have been, like the vote in our own House of Commons a few days ago, for keeping out the Light Nuisance as much as possible. Darkness is better than daylight, certainly.

Now this admits of proof. For, let me ask, where do you find the best part of a lettuce?—not in the outside leaves. Which are the choice parts of celery?—of course, the white shoots in the middle. Why, sir? Because light has never come to them. They become white and luxurious by tying up, by earthing up, by any contrivance which has kept the sun at bay. It is the same with man: while we obstruct the light by putting brick and board where glass suggests itself, and mock the light by picturing impracticable windows on our outside walls—so that our houses stare about like blind men with glass eyes—while this is done, we sit at home and blanch, we become in our dim apartments pale and delicate, we grow to look refined, as gentlemen and ladies ought to look. Let the sanitary doctor, at whose head we have thrown lettuces, go to the botanist and ask him, How, is this? Let him come back and tell us, Oh, gentlemen, in these vegetables the natural juices are not formed when you exclude the light. The natural juices in the lettuce or in celery are flavored much more strongly than our tastes would relish, and therefore we induce in these plants an imperfect development, in order to make them eatable. Very well. The natural juices in a man are stronger than good taste can tolerate. Man requires horticulture to be fit to come to table. To rear the finer sorts of human kind, one great operation necessary is to banish light as much as possible.

Ladies know that. To keep their faces pale, they pull the blinds down in their drawing-rooms, they put a vail between their countenances and the sun when they go out, and carry, like good soldiers, a great shield on high, by name a Parasol, to ward his darts off. They know better than to let the old god kiss them into color, as he does the peaches. They choose to remain green fruit: and we all know that to be a delicacy.

Yet there are men among us daring to propose that there shall no longer be protection against light; men who would tax a house by its capaciousness, and let the sun shine into it unhindered. The so-called sanitary people really seem to look upon their fellow-creatures as so many cucumbers. But we have not yet fallen so far back in our development. Disease is a privilege. Those only who know the tender touch of a wife’s hand, the quiet kiss, the soothing whisper, can appreciate its worth. All who are not dead to the tenderest emotions will lament the day when light is turned on without limit in our houses. We have no wish to be blazed upon. Frequently pestilence itself avoids the sunny side of any street, and prefers walking in the shade. Nay, even in one building, as in the case of a great barrack at St. Petersburg, there will be three calls made by disease upon the shady side of the establishment for every one visit that it pays to the side brightened by the sun; and this is known to happen uniformly, for a series of years. Let us be warned, then. There must be no increase of windows in our houses; let us curtain those we have, and keep our blinds well down. Let morning sun or afternoon sun fire no volleys in upon us. Faded curtains, faded carpets, all ye blinds forbid! But faded faces are desirable. It is a cheering spectacle on summer afternoons to see the bright rays beating on a row of windows, all the way down a street, and failing to find entrance any where. Who wants more windows? Is it not obvious that, when daylight really comes, every window we possess is counted one too many? If we could send up a large balloon into the sky, with Mr. Braidwood and a fire-engine, to get the flames of the sun under, just a little bit, that would be something rational. More light, indeed! More water next, no doubt! As if it were not perfectly notorious that in the articles of light, water, and air, Nature outran the constable. We have to keep out light with blinds and vails, and various machinery, as we would keep out cockroaches with wafers; we keep out air with pads and curtains; and still there are impertinent reformers clamoring to increase our difficulty, by giving us more windows to protect against the inroads of those household nuisances.

I call upon consistent Englishmen to make a stand against these innovators. There is need of all our vigor. In 1848, the repeal of the window-tax was scouted from the Commons by a sensible majority of ninety-four. In 1850, the good cause has triumphed only by a precarious majority of three. The exertions of right-thinking men will not be wanting, when the value and importance of a little energetic labor is once clearly perceived.

What is it that the sanitary agitators want? To tan and freckle all their countrywomen, and to make Britons apple-faced? The Persian hero, Rustum, when a baby, exhausted seven nurses, and was weaned upon seven sheep a day, when he was of age for spoon-meat. Are English babies to be Rustums? When Rustum’s mother, Roubadah, from a high tower first saw and admired her future husband Zal, she let her ringlets fall, and they were long, and reached unto the ground; and Zal climbed up by them, and knelt down at her feet, and asked to marry her. Are British ladies to be strengthened into Roubadahs, with hair like a ship’s cable, up which husbands may clamber? In the present state of the mania for public health, it is quite time that every patriotic man should put these questions seriously to his conscience.

One topic more. Let it clearly be understood, that against artificial light we can make no objection. Between sun and candle there are more contrasts than the mere difference in brilliancy. The light which comes down from the sky not only eats no air out of our mouths, but it comes charged with mysterious and subtle principles which have a purifying, vivifying power. It is a powerful ally of health, and we make war against it. But artificial light contains no sanitary marvels. When the gas streams through half a dozen jets into your room, and burns there and gives light; when candles become shorter and shorter, until they are “burnt out” and seen no more; you know what happens. Nothing in Nature ceases to exist. Your camphine has left the lamp, but it has not vanished out of being. Nor has it been converted into light. Light is a visible action; and candles are no more converted into light when they are burning, than breath is converted into speech when you are talking. The breath, having produced speech, mixes with the atmosphere; gas, camphine, candles, having produced light, do the same. If you saw fifty wax-lights shrink to their sockets last week in an unventilated ball-room, yet, though invisible, they had not left you; for their elements were in the room, and you were breathing them. Their light had been a sign that they were combining chemically with the air; in so combining they were changed, but they became a poison. Every artificial light is, of necessity, a little workshop for the conversion of gas, oil, spirit, or candle into respirable poison. Let no sanitary tongue persuade you that the more we have of such a process, the more need we have of ventilation. Ventilation is a catchword for the use of agitators, in which it does not become any person of refinement to exhibit interest.

The following hint will be received thankfully by gentlemen who would be glad to merit spectacles. To make your eyes weak, use a fluctuating light; nothing can be better adapted for your purpose than what are called “mould” candles. The joke of them consists in this, they begin with giving you sufficient light; but, as the wick grows, the radiance lessens, and your eye gradually accommodates itself to the decrease: suddenly they are snuffed, and your eye leaps back to its original adjustment, there begins another slide, and then leaps back again. Much practice of this kind serves very well as a familiar introduction to the use of glasses.

V. Passing The Bottle.

A brass button from the coat of Saint Peter, was at one time shown to visitors among the treasures of a certain church in Nassau; possibly some traveler of more experience may have met with a false collar from the wardrobe of Saint Paul. The intellect displayed of old by holy saints and martyrs, we may reasonably believe to have surpassed the measure of a bishop’s understanding in the present day; for we have the authority of eyesight and tradition in asserting that the meanest of those ancient worthies possessed not less than three skulls, and that a great saint must have had so very many heads, that it would have built the fortune of a man to be his hatter. Perhaps some of these relics are fictitious; nevertheless, they are the boast of their possessors; they are exhibited as genuine, and thoroughly believed to be so. Sir, did your stomach never suggest to you that doctored elder-berry of a recent brew had been uncorked with veneration at some dinner-table as a bottle of old port? Have you experience of any festive friend, who can commit himself to doubt about the age and genuineness of his wine? The cellar is the social relic-chamber; every bin rejoices in a most veracious legend; and, whether it be over wine or over relics that we wonder, equal difficulties start up to obstruct our faith.

Our prejudices, for example, run so much in favor of one-headed men, that we can scarcely entertain the notion of a saint who had six night-caps to put on when he went to bed, and when he got up in the morning had six beards to shave. Knowing that the Russians, by themselves, drink more Champagne than France exports, and that it must rain grapes at Hockheim before that place can yield all the wine we English label Hock, and haunted as we are by the same difficulty when we look to other kinds of foreign wine, we feel a justified suspicion that the same glass of “genuine old port” can not be indulged in simultaneously by ten people. If only one man of the number drinks it, what is that eidolon which delights the other nine?

When George the Fourth was Regent, he possessed a small store of the choicest wine, and never called for it. There were some gentlemen in his establishment acquainted with its merits; these took upon themselves to rescue it from undeserved neglect. Then the prince talked about his treasure—when little remained thereof except the bottles; and it was to be produced at a forthcoming dinner-party. The gentlemen, who knew its flavor, visited the vaults of an extensive wine-merchant, and there they vainly sought to look upon its like again. “In those dim solitudes and awful cells” they, groaning in spirit, made a confessor of the merchant, who, for a fee, engaged to save them from the wrath to come. As an artist in wine, having obtained a sample of the stuff required, this dealer undertook to furnish a successful imitation. So he did; for, having filled those bottles with a wondrous compound, he sent them to the palace just before the fateful dinner-hour, exhorting the conspirators to take heed how they suffered any to be left. The compound would become a tell-tale after twelve hours’ keeping. The prince that evening enjoyed his wine.

The ordinary manufacture of choice wine for people who are not princes, requires the following ingredients: for the original fluid, cider, or Common cape, raisin, grape, parsnip, or elder wine; a wine made of rhubarb (for Champagne); to these may be added water. A fit stock having been chosen, strength, color, and flavor may be grafted on it. Use is made of these materials: for color-burnt sugar, logwood, cochineal, red sanders wood, or elder-berries. Plain spirit or brandy for strength. For nutty flavor, bitter almonds. For fruitiness, Dantzic spruce. For fullness or smoothness, honey. For port-wine flavor, tincture of the seeds of raisins. For bouquet, orris root or ambergris. For roughness or dryness, alum, oak sawdust, rhatany or kino. It is not necessary that an imitation should contain one drop of the wine whose name it bears; but a skillful combination of the true and false is desirable, if price permit. Every pint of the pure wine thus added to a mixture is, of course, so much abstracted from the stock of unadulterated juice.

You will perceive, therefore, that a free use of wine, not highly priced, is likely to assist us very much in our endeavors to establish an unhealthy home. Fill your cellar with bargains; be a genuine John Bull; invite your friends, and pass the bottle.

There is hope for us also in the recollection, that if chance force upon us a small stock of wine that has not been, in England, under the doctor’s hands, we know not what may have been done to it abroad. The botanist, Robert Fortune, was in China when the Americans deluged the Chinese market with their orders for Young Hyson tea. The Chinese very promptly met the whole demand; and Fortune in his “Wanderings” has told us how. He found his way to a Young Hyson manufactory, where coarse old Congou leaves were being chopped, and carefully manipulated by those ingenious merchants the Chinese. But it is in human nature for other folks than the Chinese to be ingenious in such matters. We may, therefore, make up our minds that, since the demand for wine from certain celebrated vineyards, largely exceeds all possibility of genuine supply, since, also, every man who asks is satisfied, it is inevitable that the great majority of wine-drinkers are satisfied with a factitious article. The chances are against our very often meeting with a glass of port that has not taken physic. So, let us never drink dear wine, nor ask a chemist what is in our bottles. Enough that they contain for us delightful poison.

That name for wine, “delightful poison,” is not new. It is as old as the foundation of Persepolis. Jemsheed was fond of grapes, Ferdusi tells, and once, when grapes went out of season, stored up for himself some jars of grape-juice. After a while he went to seek for a refreshing draught; then fermentation was in progress; and he found his juice abominably nasty. A severe stomach-ache induced him to believe that the liquor had acquired, in some way, dangerous qualities, and, therefore, to avoid accidents, he labeled each jar, “Poison.” More time elapsed, and then one of his wives, in trouble of soul, weary of life, resolved to put an end to her existence. Poison was handy: but a draught transformed her trouble into joy; more of it stupefied, but did not kill her. That woman kept a secret: she alone exhausted all the jars. Jemsheed then found them to be empty. Explanations followed. The experiment was tried once more, and wine, being so discovered, was thereafter entitled “the delightful poison.” What Jemsheed would have said to a bottle of port out of our friend Hoggin’s cellar—but I tread on sacred ground.

Of good wine health requires none, though it will tolerate a little. Our prospect, therefore, when the bottle passes briskly, is encouraging. Is the wine good, we may expect some indigestion; is it bad, who can tell what disorders we may not expect? Hoggins, I know, drinks more than a quart without disordering his stomach. He has long been a supporter of the cause we are now advocating, and therein finds one of his rewards. It is not safe to pinch a tiger’s tail; yet, when the animal is sick, perhaps he will not bite although you tread upon it heavily. Healthy men and healthy stomachs tolerate no oppression.

London is full now; elsewhere country folks come out of doors, invited by fine weather. Walk where you will, in country or in town, and look at all the faces that you meet. Traverse the Strand, and Regent-street, and Holborn, and Cheapside; get into a boat at London bridge, steam to Gravesend, and look at your fellow-passengers: examine where you will, the stamp of our civilization, sickliness, is upon nine people in any ten. There are good reasons why this should be so, and so let it continue. We have excluded sanitary calculations from our social life; we have had hitherto unhealthy homes, and we will keep them. Bede tells of a Mercian noble on his death-bed, to whom a ghost exhibited a scrap of paper, upon which were written his good deeds; then the door opened, and an interminable file of ghosts brought in a mile or two of scroll, whereon his misdeeds were all registered, and made him read them. Our wars against brute health are glorious, and we rejoice to feel that of such sins we have no scanty catalogue; we are content with our few items of mere sanitary virtue. As for sanitary reformers, they are a company of Danaids; they may get some of us into their sieve, but we shall soon slip out again. When a traveler proposed, at Ghadames in the Sahara, to put up a lantern here and there of nights among the pitch-dark streets, the people said his notion might be good, but that, as such things never had been tried before, it would be presumptuous to make the trial of them now. The traveler, a Briton, must have felt quite at home when he heard that objection. Amen, then; with the Ghadamese, we say, Let us have no New Lights.

VI. Art Against Appetite.

The object of food is, to support the body in its natural development that it may reach a reasonable age without becoming too robust. Civilization can instruct us so to manage, that a gentle dissolution tread upon the heels of growth, that, as Metastasio hath it,

—“dalle fasce,
Si comincia a morir quando si nasce.”(2)

An infant’s appetite is all for milk; but art suggests a few additions to that lamentably simple diet. A lady not long since complacently informed her medical attendant that, for the use of a baby, then about eight months old she had spent nine pounds in “Infant’s Preservative.” Of this, or of some like preparation, the advertisements tells us that it compels Nature to be orderly, and that all infants take it with greediness. So we have even justice to the child. Pet drinks Preservative; papa drinks Port.

Then there is “farinaceous food.” Here, for a purpose, we must interpolate a bit of science. There is a division of food into two great classes, nourishment and fuel. Nourishment is said to exist chiefly in animal flesh and blood, and in vegetable compounds which exactly correspond thereto, called vegetable fibrine, albumen, and caseine. Fuel exists in whatever contains much carbon: fat and starchy vegetables, potatoes, gum, sugar, alcoholic liquors. If a person take more nourishment than he wants, it is said to be wasted; if he take more fuel than he wants, part of it is wasted, and part of it the body stacks away as fat. These men of science furthermore assert, that the correct diet of a healthy man must contain eight parts of fuel food to one of nourishment. This preserves equilibrium, they say—suits, therefore, an adult; the child which has to become bigger as it lives has use for an excess of nourishment. And so one of the doctors, Dr. R.D. Thomson, gives this table; it has been often copied. The proportion of nourishment to fuel is in

Milk (food for a 1 to 2. growing animal) Beans 1 to 2-1/2. Oatmeal 1 to 5. Barley 1 to 7. Wheat flour (food 1 to 8. for an animal at rest) Potatoes 1 to 9. Rice 1 to 10. Turnips 1 to 11. Arrow-root, tapioca, 1 to 26. sago Starch 1 to 40.

Very well, gentlemen, we take your facts. As ægritudinary men, we know what use to make of them. We will give infants farinaceous food; arrow-root, tapioca, and the like; quite ready to be taught by you that so we give one particle of nourishment in twenty-six. Tell us, this diet is like putting leeches on a child. We are content. Leeches give a delicate whiteness that we are thankful to be able to obtain with out the biting or the bloodshed.

Sanitary people will allow a child, up to its seventh year, nothing beyond bread, milk, water, sugar, light meat broth, without fat, and fresh meat for its dinner—when it is old enough to bite it—with a little well-cooked vegetable. They confine a child, poor creature, to this miserable fare; permitting, in due season, only a pittance of the ripest fruit.

They would give children, while they are growing, oatmeal and milk for breakfast, made into a porridge. They would deny them beer. You know how strengthening that is, and yet these people say that there is not an ounce of meat in a whole bucketful. They would deny them comfits, cakes, wine, pastry, and grudge them nuts; but our boys shall rebel against all this. We will teach them to regard cake as bliss, and wine as glory; we will educate them to a love of tarts. Once let our art secure over the stomach its ascendency, and the civilized organ acquires new desires. Vitiated cravings, let the sanitary doctors call them; let them say that children will eat garbage, as young women will eat chalk and coals, not because it is their nature so to do, but because it is a symptom of disordered function. We know nothing about function. Art against Appetite has won the day, and the pale face of civilization is established.

Plain sugar, it is a good thing to forbid our children; there is something healthy in their love of it. Suppose we tell them that it spoils the teeth. They know no better; we do. We know that the negroes, who in a great measure live upon sugar, are quite famous for their sound white teeth; and Mr. Richardson tells us of tribes among the Arabs of Sahara, whose beautiful teeth he lauds, that they are in the habit of keeping about them a stick of sugar in a leathern case, which they bring out from time to time for a suck, as we bring out the snuff-box for a pinch. But we will tell our children that plain sugar spoils the teeth; sugar mixed with chalk or verdigris, or any other mess—that is to say, civilized sugar—they are welcome to.

And for ourselves, we will eat any thing. The more our cooks, with spice, with druggery and pastry, raise our wonder up, the more we will approve their handicraft. We will excite the stomach with a peppered soup; we will make fish indigestible with melted butter, and correct the butter with cayenne. We will take sauces, we will drink wine, we will drink beer, we will eat pie-crust, we will eat indescribable productions—we will take celery, and cheese, and ale—we will take liqueur—we will take wine and olives and more wine, and oranges and almonds, and any thing else that may present itself, and we will call all that our dinner, and for such the stomach shall accept it. We will eat more than we need, but will compel an appetite. Art against Appetite forever.

Sanitary people bear ill-will to pie-crust; they teach that butter, after being baked therein, becomes a compound hateful to the stomach. We will eat pies, we will eat pastry, we will eat—we would eat M. Soyer himself in a tart, if it were possible.

We will uphold London milk. Mr. Rugg says that it is apt to contain chalk, the brains of sheep, oxen, and cows, flour, starch, treacle, whiting, sugar of lead, arnotto, size, etc. Who cares for Mr. Rugg? London milk is better than country milk, for London cows are town cows. They live in a city, in close sheds, in our own dear alleys—are consumptive—they are delightful cows; only their milk is too strong, it requires watering and doctoring, and then it is delicious milk.

Tea we are not quite sure about. Some people say that because tea took so sudden a hold upon the human appetite, because it spread so widely in so short a time, that therefore it supplies a want: its use is natural. Liebig suggests that it supplies a constituent of bile. I think rather that its use has become general because it causes innocent intoxication. Few men are not glad to be made cheerful harmlessly. For this reason I think it is that the use of tea and coffee has become popular; and since whatever sustains cheerfulness advances health—the body working with good will under a pleasant master—tea does our service little good. In excess, no doubt, it can be rendered hurtful (so can bread and butter); but the best way of pressing it into employment, as an ægritudinary aid, is by the practice of taking it extremely hot. A few observations upon the temperature at which food is refused by all the lower animals, will soon convince you that in man—not as regards tea only, but in a great many respects—Art has established her own rule, and that the Appetite of Nature has been conquered.

We have a great respect for alcoholic liquors. It has been seen that the excess of these makes fat; they, therefore, who have least need of fat, according to our rules, are those who have most need of wine and beer.

Of ordinary meats there is not much to say, We have read of Dr. Beaumont’s servant, who had an open musket-hole leading into his stomach, through which the doctor made experiments. Many experiments were made, and tables drawn of no great value on the digestibility of divers kinds of meat. Climate and habit are, on such points, paramount. Pig is pollution to the children of the Sun, the Jew, and Mussulman; but children of winter, the Scandinavians, could not imagine Paradise complete without it. Schrimner, the sacred hog, cut up daily and eaten by the tenants of Walhalla, collected his fragments in the night, and was in his sty again ready for slaughter the next morning. These things concern us little, for it is not with plain meat that we have here to do, but with the noble art of Cookery. That art, which once obeyed and now commands our appetite, which is become the teacher where it was the taught, we duly reverence. When ægritudinary science shall obtain its college, and when each Unhealthy Course shall have its eminent professor to teach Theory and Practice—then we shall have a Court of Aldermen for Patrons, a Gravedigger for Principal, and a Cook shall be Dean of Faculty.

VII. The Water Party.

Water rains from heaven, and leaps out of the earth; it rolls about the land in rivers, it accumulates in lakes; three-fourths of the whole surface of the globe is water; yet there are men unable to be clean. “God loveth the clean,” said Mahomet. He was a sanitary reformer; he was a notorious impostor; and it is our duty to resist any insidious attempt to introduce his doctrines.

There are in London districts of filth which speak to us—through the nose—in an emphatic manner. Their foul air is an atmosphere of charity; for we pass through it pitying the poor. Burke said of a certain miser to whom an estate was left, “that now, it was to be hoped, he would set up a pocket-handkerchief.” We hope, of the miserable, that when they come into their property they may be able to afford themselves a little lavender and musk. We might be willing to subscribe for the correction now and then, with aromatic cachou, of the town’s bad breath; but water is a vulgar sort of thing, and of vulgarity the less we have the better.

In truth, we have not much of it. We are told that in a great city Water is maid of all work; has to assist our manufactures, to supply daily our saucepans and our tea-kettles; has to cleanse our clothes, our persons, and our houses; to provide baths, to wash our streets, and to flood away the daily refuse of the people, with their slaughter-houses, markets, hospitals, &c. Our dozen reservoirs in London yield a supply daily averaging thirty gallons to each head—which goes partly to make swamps, partly to waste, partly to rot, as it is used in tubs or cisterns. Rome in her pride used once to supply water at the rate of more than three hundred gallons daily to each citizen. That was excess. In London half a million of people get no water at all into their houses; but as those people live in the back settlements, and keep out of our sight, their dirt is no great matter of concern. We, for our own parts, have enough to cook with, have whereof to drink, wherewith to wash our feet sometimes, to wet our fingers and the corner of a towel—we inquire no further. Drainage and all such topics involve details positively nasty, and we blush for any of our fellow-citizens who take delight in chattering about them.

We are told to regard the habits of an infant world. London, the brain of a vast empire, is advised now to forget her civilization, and to go back some thousand years. We are to look at Persian aqueducts, attributed to Noah’s great-grandson—at Carthaginians, Etruscans, Mexicans—at what Rome did. It frets us when we are thus driven to an obvious reply. Man in an unripe and half-civilized condition, has not found out the vulgarity of water; for his brutish instinct is not overcome. All savages believe that water is essential to their life and desire it in unlimited abundance. Cultivation teaches us another life, in which our animal existence neither gets nor merits much attention. As for the Romans, so perpetually quoted, it was a freak of theirs to do things massively. While they were yet almost barbarians, they built that Cloaca through which afterward Agrippa sailed down to the Tiber in a boat. Who wishes to see His Worship the Lord Mayor of London emerging in his state barge from a London sewer?

Now here is inconsistency. Thirty million gallons of corruption are added daily by our London sewers to the Thames: that is one object of complaint, good in itself, because we drink Thames water. But in the next breath it is complained that a good many million gallons more should be poured out; that there are three hundred thousand cesspools more to be washed up; that as much filth as would make a lake six feet in depth, a mile long, and a thousand feet across, lies under London stagnant; and they would wish this also to be swept into the river. I heard lately of a gentleman who is tormented with the constant fancy that he has a scorpion down his back. He asks every neighbor to put in his hand and fetch it out, but no amount of fetching out ever relieves him. That is a national delusion. Our enlightened public is much troubled with such scorpions. Sanitary writers are infested with them.

They also say, That in one-half of London people drink Thames water; and in the other half, get water from the Chadwell spring and River Lea. That the River Lea, for twenty miles, flows through a densely-peopled district. and is, in its passage, drenched with refuse matter from the population on its banks. That there is added to Thames water the waste of two hundred and twenty cities, towns, and villages; and that between Richmond and Waterloo-bridge more than two hundred sewers discharge into it their fetid matter. That the washing to and fro of tide secures the arrival of a large portion of filth from below Westminster, at Hammersmith; effects a perfect mixture, which is still farther facilitated by the splashing of the steamboats. Mr. Hassal has published engravings of the microscopic aspect of water taken from companies which suck the river up at widely-separated stages of its course through town—so tested, one drop differs little from another in the degree of its impurity. They tell us that two companies—the Lambeth and West Middlesex—supply Thames Mixture to subscribers as it comes to them; but that others filter more or less. They say that filtering can expurge nothing but mechanical impurities, while the dissolved pollution which no filter can extract is that part which communicates disease. We know this; well, and what then? There are absurdities so lifted above ridicule, that Momus himself would spoil part of the fun if he attempted to trangress beyond a naked statement of them. What do the members of this Water Party want? I’ll tell you what I verily believe they are insane enough to look for.

They would, if possible, forsake Thames water, calling it dirty, saying it is hard. So hard they say it is, that it requires three spoonfuls of tea instead of two in every man’s pot, two pounds of soap for one in every man’s kitchen. So they would fetch soft water from a Gathering Ground in Surrey, adopting an example set in Lancashire; from rain-fall on the heaths between Bagshot and Farnham, and from tributaries of the River Wey, they would collect water in covered reservoirs, and bring it by A COVERED AQUEDUCT to London. In London, they would totally abolish cisterns, and all intermittence of supply. Water in London they would have to be, as at Nottingham, accessible in all rooms at all times. They would have water, at high pressure, climbing about every house in every court and alley. They would place water, so to speak, at the finger’s end, limiting no household as to quantity. They would enable every man to bathe. They would revolutionize the sewer-system, and have the town washed daily, like a good Mahometan, clean to the finger-nails. They hint that all this might not even be expensive; that the cost of disease and degradation is so much greater than the cost of health and self-respect, as to pay back, possibly, our outlay, and then yield a profit to the nation. They say that, even if it were a money loss, it would be moral gain; and they ask whether we have not spent millions, ere now, upon less harmless commodities than water?

An ingenious fellow had a fiddle—all, he said, made out of his own head; and wood enough was left to make another. He must have been a sanitary man; his fiddle was a crotchet. Still farther to illustrate their own capacity of fiddle-making, these good but misguided people have been rooting up some horrible statistics of the filth and wretchedness which our back-windows overlook, with strange facts anent fever, pestilence, and the communication of disease. All this I purposely suppress; it is peculiarly disagreeable. Delicate health we like, and will learn gladly how to obtain it; but results we are content with, and can spare the details, when those details bring us into contact, even upon paper, with the squalid classes.

If these outcries of the Water Party move the public to a thirst for change, it would be prudent for us ægritudinary men not rashly to swim against the current. Let us adopt a middle course, a patronizing tone. It is in our favor that a large number of the facts which these our foes have to produce, are, by a great deal too startling to get easy credit. A single Pooh! has in it more semblance of reason than a page of facts, when revelations of neglected hygiene are on the carpet. If the case of the Sanitary Reformers had been only half as well made out, it would be twice as well supported.

VIII. Filling The Grave.

M. Boutigny has published an account of some experiments which go to prove that we may dip our fingers into liquid metal with impunity. Professor Plücker, of Bonn, has amply confirmed Boutigny’s results, and in his report hints a conclusion that henceforth “certain minor operations in surgery may be performed with least pain by placing the foot in a bath of red-hot iron.” Would you not like to see Professor Plücker, with his trowsers duly tucked up, washing his feet in a pailful of this very soothing fluid? And would it not be a fit martyrdom for sanitary doctors, if we could compel them also to sacrifice their legs in a cause, kin to their own, of theory and innovation? As Alderman Lawrence shrewdly remarked the other day, from his place in the Guildhall, the sanitary reform cry is “got up.” That is the reason why, in his case, it does not go down. He, for his own part, did not disapprove the flavor of a church-yard, and appeared to see no reason why it should be cheated of its due. The sanitary partisans, he said, were paid for making certain statements. It would be well if we could cut off their supply of halfpence, and so silence them. Liwang, an ancient Emperor of China, fearing insurrection, forbade all conversation, even whispering, in his dominions. It would be well for us if Liwang lived now as our Secretary for the Home Department. There is too much talking—is there not, Mr. Carlyle? We want Liwang among us. However, as matters stand, it is bad enough for the sanitary reformers. “They drop their arms and tremble when they hear,” they are despised by Alderman Lawrence.(3)

Let us uphold our city grave-yards; on that point we have already spoken out. Let us not cheat them of their pasturage; if any man fall sick, when, so to speak, his grave is dug, let us not lift him out of it by misdirected care. That topic now engages our attention.

There is a report among the hear-say stories of Herodotus, touching some tribe of Scythians, that when one of them gets out of health, or passes forty years of age, his friends proceed to slaughter him, lest he become diseased, tough, or unfit for table. These people took their ancestors into their stomachs, we take ours into our lungs—and herein we adopt the better plan, because it is the more unwholesome. We are content, also, now and then to let our friends grow old, although we may repress the tendency to age as much as possible. We do not absolutely kill our neighbors when they sicken; yet by judicious nursing we may frequently keep down a too great buoyancy of health, and check recovery. How to produce this last effect I will now tell you. Gentle mourners, do not chide me as irreverent—

“Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,”

bear with me, then, and let me give my hints concerning ægritudinary sick-room discipline.

Of the professional nurse I will say nothing. You, of course, have put down Mrs. Gamp’s address.

A sick-room should, in the first place, be made dark. Light, I have said before, is, in most cases, curative. It is a direct swindling of the doctor when we allow blinds to be pulled up, and so admit into the patient’s room medicine for which nobody (except the tax-gatherer) is paid.

A sick-room should, in the next place, be made sad, obtrusively sad. A smile upon the landing must become a sigh when it has passed the patient’s door. Our hope is to depress, to dispirit invalids. Cheerful words and gentle laughter, more especially where there is admitted sunshine also, are a moral food much too nutritious for the sick.

The sick-room, in its furniture as well, must have an ominous appearance. The drawers, or a table should be decked with physic bottles. Some have a way of thrusting all the medicine into a cupboard, out of sight, leaving a glass of gayly-colored flowers for the wearied eyes to rest upon: this has arisen obviously from a sanitary crotchet, and is, on no account, to be adopted.

Then we must have the sick-room to be hot, and keep it close. A scentless air, at summer temperature, sanitary people want; a hot, close atmosphere is better suited to our view. Slops and all messes are to be left standing in the room—only put out of sight—and cleared away occasionally; they are not to be removed at once. The chamber also is to be made tidy once a day, and once a week well cleaned: it is not to be kept in order by incessant care, by hourly tidiness, permitting no dirt to collect.

There is an absurd sanitary dictum, which I will but name. It is, that a patient ought to have, if possible, two beds, one for the day, and one for night use; or else two sets of sheets, that, each set being used one day and aired the next, the bed may be kept fresh and wholesome. Suppose our friend were to catch cold in consequence of all this freshness!

No, we do better to avoid fresh air; nor should we vex our patient with much washing. We will not learn to feed the sick, but send their food away when they are unable to understand our clumsiness.

Yet, while we follow our own humor in this code of chamber practice, we will pay tithes of mint and cummin to the men of science. We will ask Monsieur Purgon how many grains of salt go to an egg; and if our patient require twelve turns up and down the room, we will inquire with Argan, whether they are to be measured by its length or breadth.

When we have added to our course some doses of religious horror, we shall have done as much as conscience can demand of us toward filling the grave.

I may append here the remark, that if ever we do resolve to eat our ancestors, there is the plan of a distinguished horticulturist apt for our purpose. Mr. Loudon, I believe it was, who proposed, some years ago, the conversion of the dead into rotation crops—that our grandfathers and grandmothers should be converted into corn and mangel-wurzel. His suggestion was to combine burial with farming operations. A field was to be, during forty years, a place of interment: then the field adjacent was to be taken for that purpose; and so on with others in rotation. A due time having been allowed for the manure in each field to rot, the dead were to be well worked up and gradually disinterred in the form of wheat, or carrots, or potatoes.

Nothing appears odd to which we are accustomed. We look abroad and wonder, but we look at home and are content. The Esquimaux believe that men dying in windy weather are unfortunate, because their souls, as they escape, risk being blown away. Some Negroes do not bury in the rainy season, for they believe that then the gods, being all busy up above, can not attend to any ceremonies. Dr. Hooker writes home from the Himalaya mountains, that about Lake Yarou the Lamas’ bodies are exposed, and kites are summoned to devour them by the sound of a gong and of a trumpet made out of a human thigh-bone. Such notions from abroad arrest our notice, but we see nothing when we look at home. We might see how we fill our sick-rooms with a fatal gloom, and keep our dead five or six days within our houses, to bury them, side by side and one over another, thousands together, in the middle of our cities. However, when we do succeed in getting at a view of our own life _ab extra_, it is a pleasant thing to find that sanitary heresies at any rate have not struck deep root in the British soil. In an old book of emblems there is a picture of Cupid whipping a tortoise, to the motto that Love hates delay. If lovers of reform in sanitary matters hate delay, it is a pity; for our good old tortoise has a famous shell, and is not stimulated easily.

IX. The Fire And The Dressing-Room.

Against the weather all men are Protectionists—all men account it matter of offense. What say the people of the north? A Highland preacher, one December Sunday, in the fourth hour of his sermon—For be it known to Englishmen who nod at church, that in the Highlands, after four good hours of prayer and psalm, there follow four good hours of sermon. And, _nota bene_, may it not be that the shade of our King Henry I. does penance among Highland chapels now, for having, in his lifetime, made one Roger a bishop because he was expert in scrambling through the services?—A Highland pastor saw his congregation shivering. “Ah!” he shouted, “maybe ye think this a cauld place; but, let me tell ye, hell’s far caulder!” An English hearer afterward reproached this minister for his perversion of the current faith. “Hout, man,” said he, “ye dinna ken the Hielanders. If I were to tell them hell was a hot place, they’d all be laboring to go there.” And that was true philosophy. Mythologies invented in the north, imagined their own climate into future torture. Above, in the northern lights, they saw a chase of miserable souls, half starved, and hunted to and fro by ravens; below, they imagined Nastrond with its frosts and serpents. Warmth is delightful, certainly. No doubt but sunburnt nations picture future punishment as fire. Yes, naturally, for it is in the middle region only that we are not wearied with extremes. What region shall we take? Our own? When is it not too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, or too uncertain? Italy? There the sun breeds idle maggots. As for the poet’s paradise, Cashmere, botanists tell us that, although, no doubt, fruits grow luxuriantly there, they are extremely flavourless. Then it is obvious that to abuse, antagonise, defy the weather, is one of the established rights of man. Upon our method of defying it, our health, in some measure, depends. How is our right to be maintained unhealthily?

Not by blind obedience to nature. We are correcting her, and must not let her guide us. Nature considers all men savages—and savages they would be, if they followed her. What is barbarism? Man in a state of nature. Nature, I say, treats us almost as if we were unable to light fires, or stich for ourselves breeches. Nature places near the hand of man in each climate a certain food, and tyrannizes over his stomach with a certain craving. Whales and seals delight the Esquimaux; he eats his blubber and defies the frost. So fed, the Esquimaux woman can stand out of doors, suckling her infant at an open breast, with the thermometer 40° below zero. As we go south, we pass the lands of bread and beef, to reach the sultry region wherein nature provides dates, and so forth. Even in our own range of the seasons, nature seeks to bind us to her own routine; in winter gives an appetite for flesh and fat, in summer takes a part of it away. We are not puppets, and we will not be dictated to; so we stimulate the stomach, and allow no brute instinct to tamper with our social dietary. We do here, on a small scale, what is done, on a large scale, by our friends in India, who pepper themselves into appetite, that they may eat, and drink, and die. We drink exciting beverage in summer, because we are hot; we drink it in winter, because we are cold. The fact is, we are driven to such practices; for if we did not interfere to take the guidance of our diet out of nature’s hands, she would make food do a large portion of the service which civilization asks of fire and clothing. We should walk about warm in the winter, cool in the summer, having the warmth and coolness in ourselves. Now, it is obvious that this would never do. We must be civilized, or we must not. Is Mr. Sangster to sell tomahawks instead of canes? Clearly, he is not. We must so manage our homes as to create unhealthy bodies. If we do not, society is ruined; if we do—and in proportion as we do so—we become more and more unfit to meet vicissitudes of weather. Then we acquire a social craving after fires, and coats, and cloaks, and wrappers, and umbrellas, and cork soles, and muffetees, and patent hareskins, and all the blessings of this life, upon which our preservation must depend. These prove that we have stepped beyond the brute. You never saw a lion with cork soles and muffetees. The tiger never comes out, of nights, in a great coat. The eagle never soars up from his nest with an umbrella. Man alone comprehends these luxuries; and it is when he is least healthy that he loves them best.

In winter, then, it is not diet, and it is not exercise, that shall excite in us a vital warmth. We will depend on artificial means; we will be warmed, not from within, but from without. We will set ourselves about a fire, like pies, and bake; heating the outside first. Where the fire fails, we will depend upon the dressing-room.

If we have healthy chests, we will encase ourselves in flannel; but if we happen to have chest complaint, we will use nothing of the sort. When we go out, we will empanoply our persons, so that we may warm ourselves by shutting in all exhalation from our bodies, and by husbanding what little heat we permit nature to provide for us.

In summer we will eat rich dinners and drink wine, will cast off three-fourths of the thickness of our winter clothing, and still be oppressed by heat. Iced drinks shall take the place of fire.