CHAPTER II--THE GLOW OF HEALTH

We now turn from the criticism of popular delusions to the study of the positive contents of a happy life. We shall take up first the sense of well-being that comes from perfect health and abounding physical vitality, and the depression that follows upon their absence.

Modern discoveries in physiology and pathology are constantly making more certain the intimate nature of the connection between good spirits and good health, low spirits (in the absence of specific occasions) and poor health. Everyone realizes the seriousness of acute disease. But what is constantly ignored or forgotten, and what is sometimes unknown, is that the feeling of dissatisfaction with life, or its extreme form, melancholy, is an inevitable accompaniment, not merely of the great majority of diseases, but also of all forms of impaired bodily vitality, whatever their nature and whatever their cause. Among the most widespread of the diseases which may produce depression are anaemia, the diseases of imperfect digestion, of imperfect excretion in their various forms, and most nervous diseases. The influence upon the spirits of imperfect excretion has given rise to the old joke: Is life worth living? It depends upon the liver.

What appear to have been diseases of the digestive organs have poisoned many lives which, because of a unique combination of outer success and inner resources, should have been among the most happy conceivable. One of the best known instances of this is Thomas Carlyle. From the time he was twenty-four till he was nearly sixty he suffered with acute indigestion which not merely at times produced intense pain, but which threw over his life for this entire period a black pall of melancholy. Says one of his biographers, John Nichol, (Thomas Carlyle, p. 158): “The melancholy, 'often as of deep misery frozen torpid' that runs through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life, and paint the springs of nature in winter lure, the 'hoarse sea,' the 'bleared skies,' the sunsets 'beautiful and brief and wae (sad)' compels our compassion in a manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne and other color dramatists, because we feel it as as genuine as the melancholy of Burns. 'Look up there' said Leigh Hunt, pointing to the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man.' 'Eh, it's a sair sicht' (sad sight) was the reply." At the height of his success (1840, aged fortyfive) Carlyle wrote: "I shall never be other than ill, wearied, sick-hearted. bilious, heartless, and forlorn." "A huge nightmare of indigestion, insomnia, and fits of black impatience with myself and others, -self chiefly-" (1847). “Although beginning 'Frederick the Great' he is glad to get home to a slighter measure of dyspepsia, inertia, and other heaviness, ineptitude, and gloom" (1852). His biographer Froude writes as follows: "One asks with wonder why he found existence so intolerable He was now successful far beyond his hopes. The fashionable world admired and flattered him. The cleverest men had recognized his genius, and accepted him as their equal or superior. He was listened to with respect by all; and, far more valuable to him, he was believed in by a fast increasing circle as a dear and honored teacher. His money anxieties were over. Why could not Carlyle, with fame and honor and troops of friends, and the gates of a great career thrown open before him, and a great intellect and a conscience untroubled by a single act which he need regret, bear and forget too? Why, indeed! The only answer is that Carlyle was Carlyle." So much for the biographer. But Carlyle himself knew better: "I declare solemnly without exaggeration that I impute nine-tenths of my present wretchedness, and rather more than nine-tenths of all my faults to this infernal disorder in the stomach." In view of this statement of Carlyle's, of whose substantial truth there can be no doubt, it is no wonder that DeQuincey, who suffered in the same way from the same causes, should write as follows: "The whole process and elaborate machinery of digestion are felt to be mean and humiliating when viewed in relation to our mere animal economy. But they rise into dignity, and assert their own supreme importance, when they are studied from another station, viz., in relation to the intellect and temper. No man dares then to despise them. It is then. seen that these functions of the human system form the essential basis upon which the strength and health of our higher nature repose, and that upon these functions chiefly the genial happiness of life is dependent. All the rules of prudence, or gifts of experience that life can accumulate, will never do as much for human comfort and welfare, as would be done by a stricter attention, and a wiser science, directed to the digestive system."*

In the case of Carlyle, the symptoms were so definite that he could not doubt for a moment the existence of disease. But where the failure of the organs to do their work is less marked, the depression may appear without being attributed by the victim to physical causes. Amiel is an example. He was a professor of philosophy at Geneva, who died some twenty years ago, and left behind him a Journal Intime which has been widely read and greatly admired. The book has a markedly pessimistic tone throughout. Amiel says that a wave of gloom came over him every day after dinner, and, after reaching its height by the middle of the afternoon, gradually passed away. No physician

*The above quotations, with the exception of the first, are from Biographic Clinics (First Series) by George M. Gould, M. D. It is his opinion that the disorders of the stomach, from which Carlyle, DeQuincey and many other eminent men suffered, were due directly to eyestrain. Most of the experts appear to believe that there is a great deal of truth in this contention. But whatever the nature of the ultimate cause of their maladies may have been, the broad fact remains that the gloom which overspread their lives was due to a failure of certain of the bodily organs to function properly.