DIO LEWIS, whose writings on bodiculture, if they are not very profound, have, at least, the merit of brevity and good sense, calls the attention of the public to the prevailing fallacy that strength is a synonym for health. He knows intelligent persons who really believe that you may determine the comparative health of two men by measuring their arms. The man whose arm measures twelve inches is twice as healthy as he whose arm measures but six. “This strange and thoughtless misapprehension,” he says, “has given rise to nearly all the mistakes thus far made in the physical-culture movement. I have a friend who can lift nine hundred pounds, and yet is a habitual sufferer form torpid liver, rheumatism, and low spirits. The cartmen of our cities, who are our strongest men, are far from being the healthiest class, as physicians will testify. On the contrary, I have many friends who would stagger under three hundred pounds, that are in capital trim.”
These truths seem so obvious, when thus stated and illustrated, as hardly to rise above commonplace. Why, then, repeat them? Because, by the vast majority of “health-lifters,” gymnasium-frequenters, and would-be athletes, they are either unknown or practically ignored. Every pale, sickly, pigmy-limbed man wants to be physically strong; to be a Hercules, a son of Anak, at least 130 Heenan, is absolutely essential, he thinks, to the enjoyment of perfect health. If he cannot expect to lift a ton, or to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, he must, at least, be able to take a daily “constitutional” of five miles and back, or to raise five hundred pounds without bursting a blood-vessel. But what is the meaning of the word “strong”? From the glibness with which some men repeat the term, one would suppose that nothing is easier than to define it, — that the proposition that a man is very strong is as simple as the proposition that he is six feet high. The truth is, however, that the word is ambiguous, — that under its seeming unity there lurks a real dualism of meaning, as a few facts will show.
In the first place, one of the most obvious tests of strength is the power of exertion. But great power of exertion may co-exist with extreme delicacy of organism, and even with organic disease. Napoleon, who slept four hours and was on horseback twenty, — who toiled so terribly that he half-killed his secretaries, — underwent fatigues that would have broken down nine out of ten “strong” men; yet his digestion was always delicate and easily deranged, and he died of an hereditary organic disease at the age of 55. Julius Cæsar was not what is popularly called a “strong” man; yet he was a prodigy of exertion and endurance. Again: it is a striking fact that great power of exertion in one direction does not always imply its existence in another. There are hundreds of men who can perform tasks that severely tax the muscles, and endure with impunity all kinds of exposure and hardship, who collapse under a continuous and severe strain upon the eyes, the brain, and the 131 nerves; and the converses is often seen. Dr. Elam, the author of that deeply interesting work, “A Physician’s Problems,” tells us that not long ago a friend reviewed with him the name of six or eight upper wranglers at the English Universities for the last twenty years, and that with very few exceptions, these and nearly all the “double first” men were alive and well; while, on the other hand, on reviewing the history of two boats’ crews of picked men, of whom they had full and accurate information, they found that not one of them was alive. Surely, such havoc as this was never found among mental athletes.
Again, while there is a recognized limit to physical endurance, the limit to mental toil or strain is by no means so well defined. A man may saw wood, plough the earth, or lay brick, until he is physically exhausted, and can do no more; but the limit of mental labor is far less evident. Look at the amount of work which that dwarf, hunchback, and invalid, — that “drop of pure spirit in cotton wool,” — Alexander Pope, contrived to perform! When he got up in the morning, he had to be sewed up in stiff canvas stays, without which he could not stand erect. His thin body was wrapped in fur and flannel, and his meagre, spectral legs required three pairs of stockings to give them a respectable look. Almost literally a pigmy in size, he was so deformed that his life was one long disease. Look at brave Samuel Johnson, so feeble as a child that the physician said he never knew another raised with such difficulty, — struggling all his life with a severe scrofulous disorder, that twisted his body into strange contortions, and with a constitutional depression and hypochondria, “a vile melancholy,” 132 that kept him, as he said, “mad half his life, or at least, not sober,” — so languid at times that he could hardly tell the hour on the clock, and yet, with one pair of hands and one brain, doing the work of an academy! In spite of his exhausting labors and still more exhausting diseases, he lived to the age of seventy-five. See, again, the giant labors performed by Channing, with his frail, clayey tabernacle; and note the vast amount of writing and other useful work performed by those physical ghosts of men, Professor Goddard, of Brown University, and the late Professor Hadley, of Yale! Need we add to these the cases of Torstenson, the Swedish General, who, afflicted with gout, had to be borne on a litter, yet by the rapidity of his movements astonished Europe; or that of General Wolfe, who, though the seeds of several fatal diseases were laid in his constitution from infancy, yet wrested from the French the Gibraltar of America; or that of Palmerston, who, according to Sir Henry Holland, under a fit of gout, which would have sent other men groaning to their couches, used to continue his work of reading or writing on public business almost without abatement, amid the chaos of papers which covered the floor as well as the tables of his room?
But, some one will ask, has that spectral-looking lawyer, or that statesman, who apparently performs such prodigies of labor, — that pale, lean man with a face like parchment, and nothing on his bones, — a constitution? We answer in the words of the London “Times” to a similar query some years ago, — “Yes, he has; he has a working constitution, and a ten times better one than you, my good friend, with your ruddy face, and strong, muscular frame. You look, indeed, the very picture of health, but you have, in reality, 133 only a sporting constitution, not a working one. You do very well for the open air, and, get on tolerably well with fine, healthy exercise, and no strain on your brain. But try close air for a week, — try confinement, with heaps of confused papers, blue books, law books, or books of reference to get through, and therefrom extract liquid and transparent results, and you will find yourself knocked up and fainting, when the pale, lean man is — if not ‘as fresh as a daisy,’ which he never is, being of the perpetually cadaverous type, — at least as unaffected as a bit of leather, and not showing the smallest sign of giving way. There are two sorts of good constitutions, good idle constitutions, and good working ones.”
Another test of strength is the power of enduring hardship, touching which we see repeated the paradox we have already noted. Far from being associated invariably with great muscular force, this power is often found in union with extreme delicacy of organization. Who, in catastrophes and seasons of great peril, has not seen frail, delicate women, who would scream and almost faint at the sight of a mouse, bear up under toils, perils, and sufferings which would kill the stoutest men? Who has forgotten the lignum-vitæ toughness of Dr. Kane? Though a sailor by profession, he never went to sea without suffering from sea-sickness; he had a heart disease and a chronic rheumatism; yet he had a vitality, — an iron endurance, — which enabled him to go through sufferings in the Arctic Seas under which big, burly sailors, and other men specially trained to endure such hardships, sank into the grave. William III, of England, was not a strong man, nor was Luxemburg, his fiery opponent in the Netherlands. A Greek educator would have deemed it an abuse of the 134 medical art to cherish the flickering flame of life in either of them. Yet it is doubtful whether among the two hundred thousand men whom they commanded, there was one with greater power of endurance than that of the hunchbacked dwarf that led the fiery hosts of France, or that of the asthmatic skeleton that conducted the stubborn troops of England.
In thinking of the ideal of humanity, — the great man, — we almost always picture him as a noble bodily presence, full of health and vigor, and with a mind as healthy and vigorous as its abode. Yet how often is this notion contradicted by the facts! In what mean and unsightly caskets have some of the rarest and most potent essences of nature been enclosed!
Among the tests of strength, longevity must be considered one; and here we are confronted by facts that make the explanation of “strength” still more difficult. Dr. Elam cites the names of twenty-five celebrated thinkers, than whom none have ever exerted a greater influence upon literature, history, and philosophy, who lived to the average age of ninety year. Yet many of them, it is well known, were prodigious workers and voluminous authors, and not a few of them, there is reason to believe, would be regarded by our modern physical-culture men as weaklings. One of them, Galen, wrote three hundred volumes, and lived nearly a century; another, who had a very feeble constitution, and wrote seven or eight hours daily, — Lewis Cornaro, — reached a full hundred years. On the other hand, Dr. Winship, the leading apostle of “muscular Christianity” in this century, who at one time could lift a weight of three thousand pounds, died at the age of forty-two. Ascertain the united ages of twenty-five of the most eminent farmers the world has seen, and is it probable that 135 the sum total would amount, as in the case of these thinkers, to twenty-two hundred and fifty years?
It is customary, where a seemingly feeble man, tortured with disease, shows a durability or toughness which an athletic man lacks, outliving and outworking him, to explain the mystery by saying that the former has “a better constitution” than the latter. But does this solve the riddle? Evidently not. It simply gives it another name. What is that thing which, for convenience, or to hide our ignorance, we call “constitution,” which may be constantly impaired, but has the ability to withstand so many shocks? It has been well observed by a thoughtful writer that “a table would not be called strong if two of its legs were cracked and several of its joints loose, however tough might be its materials, and however good its original workmanship. But if the table showed a power of holding together and recovering itself, notwithstanding every sort of rough usage, it might well be called strong, though it was ultimately broken up; and its strength might not unnaturally be measured by the quantity of ill-usage which it survived. It is precisely in this power of self-repair that the difference between a body and mere machine resides. The difficulty of saying what is meant by physical strength is in the difficulty of distinguishing between the mechanical and what, for fault of a better word, must be called the vital powers of the body. Look upon the body as a machine, and the broken arm, the tubercles in the lungs, or the cancer in the liver, prevent you from calling it strong; but, if it goes on acting for years, and wonderfully recovering itself again and again from the catastrophe which these defects tend to produce, there must be a strong something somewhere. What and where is that something?