Practical Essays | Page 7

races trouble themselves little about their
political constitution, about despotism or liberty; they enjoy the passing
moments of a despot's smiles, and if he turns round and crushes them,
they quietly submit. We live in dread of tyranny. Our liberty is a
serious object; it weighs upon our minds. Now any weight upon the
mind is so much taken from our happiness; hilarity may attend on
poverty, but not so well on a serious, forecasting disposition. Our
regard to the future makes us both personally industrious and politically
anxious; a temper not to be amused with the relaxations of the Parisian
in his café on the boulevards, or with the Sunday merry-go-round of the

light-hearted Dane. Our very pleasures have still a sadness in them.
Then, again, what are to be our amusements? By what recreative
stimulants shall we irradiate the gloom of our idle hours and vacation
periods? Doubtless there have been many amusements invented by the
benefactors of our species--society, games, music, public
entertainments, books; and in a well-chosen round of these, many
contrive to pass their time in a tolerable flow of satisfaction. But they
all cost something; they all cost money, either directly, to procure them,
or indirectly, to be educated for them. There are few very cheap
pleasures. Books are not so difficult to obtain, but the enjoying of them
in any high degree implies an amount of cultivation that cannot be had
cheaply.
Moreover, look at the difficulties that beset the pursuit of amusements.
How fatiguing are they very often! How hard to distribute the time and
the strength between them and our work or our duties! It needs some art
to steer one's way in the midst of variety of pleasures. Hence there will
always be, in a cautious-minded people, a disposition to remain
satisfied with few and safe delights; to assume a sobriety of aims that
Helps might call dulness, but that many of us call the middle path.
* * * * *
[FALLACY OF PRESCRIBING TASTES.]
II. A second error against the limits of the human powers is the
prescribing to persons indiscriminately, certain tastes, pursuits, and
subjects of interest, on the ground that what is a spring of enjoyment to
one or a few may be taken up, as a matter of course, by others with the
same relish. It is, indeed, a part of happiness to have some taste,
occupation, or pursuit, adequate to charm and engross us--a ruling
passion, a favourite study. Accordingly, the victims of dulness and
ennui are often advised to betake themselves to something of this
potent character. Kingsley, in his little book on the "Wonders of the
Shore," endeavoured to convert mankind at large into marine naturalists;
and, some time ago, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from
Carlyle, regretting that he himself had not been indoctrinated into the

zoology of our waysides. I have heard a man out of health,
hypochondriac, and idle, recommended to begin botany, geology, or
chemistry, as a diversion of his misery. The idea is plausible and
superficial. An overpowering taste for any subject--botany, zoology,
antiquities, music--is properly affirmed to be born with a man. The
forces of the brain must from the first incline largely to that one species
of impressions, to which must be added years of engrossing pursuit.
We may gaze with envy at the fervour of a botanist over his dried
plants, and may wish to take up so fascinating a pursuit: we may just as
easily wish to be Archimedes when he leaped out of the bath; a man
cannot re-cast his brain nor re-live his life. A taste of a high order,
founded on natural endowment, formed by education, and strengthened
by active devotion, is also paid for by the atrophy of other tastes,
pursuits, and powers. Carlyle might have contracted an interest in frogs,
and spiders, and bees, and the other denizens of the wayside, but it
would have been with the surrender of some other interest, the
diversion of his genius out of its present channels. The strong emotions
of the mind are not to be turned off and on, to this subject and to that. If
you begin early with a human being, you may impress a particular
direction upon the feelings, you may even cross a natural tendency, and
work up a taste on a small basis of predisposition. Place any youth in
the midst of artists, and you may induce a taste for art that shall at
length be decided and strong. But if you were to take the same person
in middle life and immure him in a laboratory, that he might become an
enthusiastic chemist, the limits of human nature would probably forbid
your success.
Such very strong tastes as impart a high and perennial zest