AMONG the favorite topics of newspaper declamation, there is none upon which certain moralists of the press are fonder of preaching a quarterly homily, than upon the importance of early rising. Of course, the arguments for the practice are the old, hackneyed, stereotyped ones upon which the changes have been rung a thousand times, — “straw that has been threshed a hundred times without wheat,” as Carlyle would say. “Early to bed, and early to rise,” etc. There is a freshness, a briskness, a sparkling liveliness in the first hours of the day, which all the subsequent ones lack; let it stand but an hour or two, and it is already settled upon its lees; it is stale, flat, and vapid. Again, the early riser seizes the day by the forelock; he drives it, instead of being driven, or rather dragged along, by it. Then, all the great men, — especially those who have distinguished themselves in literature, science, and the arts, — were early risers. Homer, Virgil, Horace, among the ancients, and Paley, Priestly, Parkhurst, and Franklin, among the moderns, all left their pillows early. Sir Thomas More and Bishops Jewel and Burnet sprang upon their feet at four in the morning. The Great Frederic of Prussia, Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and Napoleon, were early risers. “When you begin to turn in bed,” said the Duke of Wellington, “it is time to turn out.” Jefferson declared at the close of his life, “The sun has not caught me in bed for fifty years.”
230Did not Sir Walter Scott write all his great novels before breakfast, and was it not in the same early hours that Dr. Albert Barnes penned those Commentaries of which a million volumes have been sold in this country and Europe? Was it not between the hours of five and eight in the morning that John Quincy Adams penned most of his public papers? Was it not in the same three hours that Gibbon wrote his immortal “Decline and Fall,” and has not Buffon told us that to the studies of those three hours daily the world is indebted for the noble work which established his fame as the greatest of natural historians? Did not Judge Holt, who was curious concerning longevity, and questioned every old man that came before him, about his modes of living, find that, amid all their different habits, they agreed in one thing, — they got up betimes? These stale anecdotes, eked out with the old quotation from Thomson,
“Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?”
and other passages from the poets in which they try to inveigh people from their beds by singing of the beauty of the dappled morn, the dewy grass, the warbling birds, and preserving a studied silence concerning the rising fog, the chill air, and the raw, underdone feeling of the world generally, — comprise all the arguments which, for half a century, the wit of the early risers has been able to scrape together for the practice.
Now all this may carry great weight with some people with whom an uneasy conscience, an overloaded stomach, or a hard bed, may, like Macbeth, “murder sleep.” It is not strange that your old bachelor, who is happy neither in bed nor out, — or your henpecked husband, who dreads a morning curtain lecture, — or your ghostly, pale-faced, 231 dyspeptic student, who fancies that by rising with the lark he is to become a giant in law, medicine, or theology, — cries up this foolish notion. Making a merit of necessity, they may grow grand and intolerant on the strength of their virtue, and crow like chanticleer over those who can appreciate the luxury of “t’other doze.” But those who have no torturing conscience, dyspepsia, or “Damien’s bed of steel,” to make Alcmena nights for them, are not to be dragged from their warm pillows on such pretences as these. Talk of the healthiness of early rising! Who can believe that such violent changes from the sleeping to the waking state, — from warm to cold, — are beneficial to the system? Why is it, if they are not unnatural, that the poets, refining upon the torments of the damned, make one of their greatest agonies to consist in being suddenly transported from heat to cold, from fire to ice? Are they not, at certain revolutions, according to Milton, “haled out of their beds” by “harpy-footed furies,” — fellows by whom they are made to
“ — feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce”?
“But think,” we hear some one exclaim, “of the amount of time saved by early rising”! When all other arguments are exhausted, the early riser will call for slate and pencil, and proceed to prove to you by a painful arithmetical calculation that you may add some six or seven years to your life by crawling out of bed at five o’clock instead of seven. Of course, he makes it convenient to forget, in his calculation, the two hours one loses by hurrying to bed that much sooner, in order to humor his foolish eccentricity; as if one should try to lengthen a yard-stick by cutting off a foot from one end 232 and adding it to the other. Admitting that we may add to our days by rising early, is the longest life necessarily the best? Or is it desirable to spin out one’s years to three-score and ten, if, to do so, he must cheat himself of all life’s comforts and luxuries, — abjure his morning snooze, “feed on pulse, and nothing wear but frieze”? The lapse of years alone is not life; we should count time by heart-throbs, — by the number of delicious or pleasing sensations.
As to one’s growing wealthy by early rising, we leave it to the candle-end-saving economists to say whether it is cheaper to keep one’s self warm by coal at ten dollars a ton than between a mattress bed and comforters. Recollect that you wear out no clothes, consume no oil, eat no breakfasts, while you are coquetting with “tired nature’s sweet restorer.” Then, as to growing wise by early rising, — has not knowledge-seeking been associated, from time immemorial, with the midnight oil? Have not all the great works of genius which have conferred immortality on their authors, been written while the rest of the world was hushed in slumber, — in the “wee small hours ayant the ’twal”? Is not every elaborate literary production said to smell of the lamp, thus showing that, in the opinion of authors and critics, Apollo has not time to attend to his votaries until he has unharnessed his steeds from the chariot of the sun? Did not Pope’s best thoughts come to him, like owls, in the night-time; and did not Swift, according to a contemporary, “lie abed till eleven o’clock, and think of wit for the day”? But, admitting an exception or two to the general rule, — because Sir Walter Scott wrote whole books before breakfast, is anyone foolish enough to flatter himself that he can dash off Waverleys and Ivanhoes simply by striking a light at four in the 233 morning, — poscente ante diem librum cum lumine? Boobies and dunces will be boobies and dunces still, though they keep their eyes wide open from January to December. Early rising will no more convert a fool into a wise man, — a commonplace man into a man of genius, — than eating opium will make him a Coleridge or a De Quincey. The examples of Frederic the Great and the Emperor Napoleon may weigh with their admirers; but we believe it would have been far better for humanity if they had loved their pillows. It was only after a desperate and most unnatural struggle that the former triumphed in his youth over the charms of sleep, which he found it harder to resist than in after life to rout the Austrians; and he succeeded only by invoking the assistance of an old domestic whom he charged, on pain of dismissal, to pull him out of bed every morning at two o’clock. As to the poet Thomson’s panegyrics on early rising, who usually snored away the whole forenoon in bed, and was so lazy that he used to eat peaches from the trees in his garden with his hands in his waistcoat pocket, — literally browsing, like a giraffe, — our judgment of his counsel is pithily expressed by an American poet, Saxe:
“Thomson, who sang about the Seasons, said
It is a glorious thing to rise in season;
But then he said it, — lying, — in his bed
At ten o’clock A. M., — the very reason
He wrote so charmingly. The simple fact is,
His preaching wasn’t sanctioned by his practice.”
It is all very well to “take Time by the forelock”; but what if, in the effort to do so, one exhausts himself too much to hold him? George Eliot, in one of her novels, portrays a thrifty farmer’s wife who rose so early in the morning to do her work, that by ten o’clock it was all over, and she was at her wits’ end to know what to do 234 with her day. No doubt it is “the early bird that catches the worm”; but, as the pillow-loving boy said to his father, “it is the early worm that gets caught.” Intemperance in early-rising, like every other excess, is sure to bring its penalty along with it. Nature will not be cheated out of her dues, and if they are not paid in season, she will exact them, with compound interest, out of season. It is well known that the early riser often compensates himself for his greeting to the dawn by frequent naps in the afternoon or evening. Josiah Quincy tells us in the “Life” of his father, that the latter rose every morning in winter and summer, for many years, at four o’clock. The effect of this outrage upon Nature was that he was sure to drop to sleep, wherever he was, when his mind was not entirely occupied, — sometimes even in company, when the conversation flagged, and always as soon as he took his seat in his gig or sulky, in which he drove to town. John Quincy Adams, who was addicted to the same vice of intemperate early rising, with similar consequences, once accompanied him to the Harvard Law School, to hear Judge Story lecture. “Now Judge Story,” continues the biographer, “did not accept the philosophy of his two friends in this particular, and would insist that it was a more excellent way to take out one’s allowances of sleep in bed, and be wide awake when out of it, — which he himself most assuredly always was. The Judge received the two Presidents gladly, and placed them in the seat of honor on the dais by his side, fronting the class, and proceeded with his lecture. It was not long before, glancing his eye aside to see how his guests were impressed by his doctrine, he saw that they were both of them sound asleep, and he saw that the class saw it too. 235 Pausing a moment in his swift career of speech, he pointed to the two sleeping figures, and uttered these words of warning: “Gentlemen, you see before you a melancholy example of the evil effects of early rising!” The shout of laughter with which this judicial obiter dictum was received effectually aroused the sleepers, and it is to be hoped that they heard and profited by the remainder of the discourse.”
There is a class of moralists at the present day with whom it is a favorite dogma that no one can ever reach a high degree of goodness except by passing through a certain number of self-imposed trials. It has been justly said of such persons that their whole mind seems wrapt up in the office of polishing up little moral pins and needles, and running them into the most tender parts of their skins. It is chiefly men of this stamp who advocate the heresy of early rising. Were they content to stick pins into themselves, we would leave them to get all the moral discipline that is possible from the practice. But they insist on other persons imitating them; and what is more offensive, they are continually putting on airs on account of their eccentricity. Not content with “shaking hands with himself mentally,” and thinking he has done a great thing, the early riser must vaunt himself of his achievements herein. Indeed, there are few things in the way of bragging that will compare with what an English essayist calls “the insulting triumph, the outrageous animation of the man who has dressed by candle-light in the month of December.” It is not merely that he speaks of the exploit with a chuckle, or the
“— sort of satisfaction
Men feel when they’ve done a noble action.”
236but he looks down upon you who hug your pillow, with an air of superiority, as if you lacked moral backbone, or were a pigmy in virtue.
There is a caustic proverb, “We are all good risers at night,” which strikingly shows how unnatural is this practice of getting up early. We have long been puzzled to account for the origin of so disagreeable a practice; but a recent English writer suggests an explanation which is as satisfactory as it is original and ingenious. For those who have to labor in the fields, or to get their living by hunting, there are obvious advantages in making the most of the daylight. Now philosophers have remarked that an instinct, like a physical organ, often survives after its original function has become unimportant. Animals retain rudimentary claws or wings which have become perfectly useless, a legacy from their remote ancestors; a dog still turns himself three times around before he lies down, because his great-great-grandfathers did so in the days when they were wild beasts, roaming amongst the long grass; and every tamed animal preserves for a time certain instincts which were useful to him only in his wild state. The sentiment about early rising is such a traditionary instinct, which has wandered into an era where it is not wanted.