Passages from an Old Volume of Life | Page 4

FROM
ASHES THE PULPIT AND THE PEW

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.
(September, 1861.)
This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman
populace. It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have
something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have
something to eat, and the papers to read.
Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our
carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to
Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new dresses
and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with. If the
young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its
respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a
caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed
nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one,
if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a
pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the
newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our
emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished
by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and
what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now
absolutely repulsive.
All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many
among us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency
with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the
terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French
Revolution. Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was the
medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the severest
penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines. They all became
consumptive soon after their entrance, so that, in the course of his ten
years' attendance, all the inmates died out two or three times, and were
replaced by new ones. He does not hesitate to attribute the disease from
which they suffered to those depressing moral influences to which they
were subjected.
So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants.
Take the first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad
disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of
two gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden
feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach,
changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees. The
lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients say,--went home,
and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at
the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures
death itself follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old,
gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's
return from Elba. One of our early friends, who recently died of the
same complaint, was thought to have had his attack mainly in
consequence of the excitements of the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a
devouring passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the
fire of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of
adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we
often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most
ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different
form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of
losing a drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their
families. Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal;
they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an
influenza, when that is prevailing.
The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men
cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll
up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We
confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his
work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as
interesting as a romance, but