Benjamin Ward Richardson

“ I commend good fashion and fine, nay exquisite, taste in dress as a good thing of itself, independently of health. I agree entirely with Mrs. Haweis that it is the bounden duty of every woman to make herself look as handsome as ever she can. If she have natural beauty, she ought to study how to maintain it in and through every period of her life—yes—to the last; for there is nothing more beautiful than beauty in old age. If she have moderate beauty, she should do her utmost to make the best of it. ”

“ Perfect sleep is the possession, as a rule, of childhood only. The healthy child, worn out with its day of active life, suddenly sinks to rest, sleeps its ten or twelve hours, and wakes, believing, feeling, that it has merely closed its eyes and opened them again; so deep is its twinkle of oblivion. The sleep in this case is the nearest of approaches to actual death, and at the same time presents a natural paradox, for it is the evidence of strongest life. ”

“ The costumes of the trim shopman, the slovenly mechanic, the country laborer, the flourishing squire, the tight-laced soldier, the club exquisite, the lugubrious doctor, the devil-may-care artist, and the awful ecclesiastic in his demented hat and sacred pinafore—these costumes and others betray a want of national taste and national unity which I for one, health-seeker as I would be, utterly repudiate. There can be no amalgamation of mind and heart while these distinctive outside declarations exist among us. ”

“ To my mind—and I wish to be as open to conviction on this point as any one can be—I fail to discern a single opening for the use of these lethal agents in the service of mankind save in the most exceptional conditions of disease, and then only under skilled and thoughtful supervision, from hands that know the danger of infusing a false movement and life into so exquisite an organism as a living, breathing, pulsating, impressionable human form. ”

“ We now often really transform play into work; and our minds are so constituted that what is one person's work is another person's play. What a backwoodsman would call his horse-like labor, a foremost statesman may call his light of pleasure. How shall we define it? What is play or recreation?
Men differ, I think, on the definition of work and play more than on almost any other subject: differ in practice as much as in theory in regard to it. I have had the acquaintance, and I may say the friendship, of a man who lives, it is said, for nothing but recreation, or pleasure, or play. ”

“ To say nothing of the expense to which it subjects many struggling men, to the loss of time it inflicts on them, to the neglect it inflicts at the fireside and home, to the spirit of contest of mind and fever of mind which it engenders; to say nothing, I repeat, of these things—all of which, nevertheless, are detrimental, indirectly, to the health of the men themselves and of those who surround them in family union—there is a direct harm often inflicted by the service, call it recreation if you like, which is not to its credit. ”

“ There are times in the life of man when the heart is oppressed, when the resistance to its motion is excessive, and when blood flows languidly to the centres of life, nervous and muscular. In these moments alcohol cheers. It lets loose the heart from its oppression, it lets flow a brisker current of blood into the failing organs; it aids nutritive changes, and altogether is of temporary service to man. So far alcohol is good, and if its use could be limited to this one action, this one purpose, it would be among the most excellent of the gifts of Nature to mankind. ”

“ It really matters little which of the intoxicants it is that is learned to be craved for; the craving for it will continue when it has struck an abiding impression. We know this fact well from the wide experience that has been gained of it in the cases of alcohol, tobacco, opium, chloral, hasheesh, absinthe, and arsenic. More incongruous things could scarcely be; incongruous to the senses, to the sensibilities, to the methods of taking, to the result of them; yet the craving for any one of them as it is may be established. The devotee to one will laugh at the devotee to another ”

“ We get, in fact, a little light on the nature of healthful recreation as we let our minds rest on this one and almost exceptional class of men of varied life and action of a mental kind. They come before us showing what recreation can effect through the mere act of varying the labor. The brain-worker who is divested of worry is at once the happiest and the healthiest of mankind—happiest, perchance, because healthiest; a man constantly re-created, and therefore of longest life. ”

“ Where the physical conditions of life are so unequal, where we waste in structure of body, whether we will it or not, at certain fixed seasons, and gain, whether we will it or not, at other fixed seasons, it is impossible to attain such excellence by any diversion of mind or variation of pursuit. For universal gladness the sun must play his part, doing his spiriting gently, but never actually hiding the brightness of his face. ”

“ This is death by Nature, and when mankind has learned the truth, when the time shall come—as come it will—that "there shall be no more an infant of days, nor an old man who hath not filled his days," this act of death, now, as a rule, so dreaded because so premature, shall, arriving only at its appointed hour, suggest no terror, inflict no agony. ”

“ For the loss of the child and the youth we mourn in the perfect purity of sorrow; for the loss of the man in his activity, we feel grief mingled with selfish regret that so much that was useful has ceased to be. In the loss of the aged, in their days of second childishness and mere oblivion, we sympathize for something that has passed away, and for a moment recall events saddening to the memory ”

“ The automatism of recreation is bad in every sense, and it is specially bad in the present day, because of the quality of it, as well as the limited quantity. There is no such diversity of recreation as is wanted to keep the body in health by the exercise of the mind. With one man the recreation is all taken out in cards, with another in chess, with a third in billiards, with a fourth in debate or gossip on some one persistent topic of discourse or argument, and so on, for what may be called the in-door recreative life. ”

“ Life was an enjoyment which nothing sullied except death, and which was purified even from death by the quick-consuming fire, that the life might begin again instantaneously and incorruptibly.
If by some grand transformation we could in our day approach to this conception which has been rendered to us by the history of art, and could act upon it, we should, in a generation or two, attain a degree of health which no sanitary provision, in the common meaning of that term, can ever supply. ”

“ When it is physiologically understood that what is called stimulation or excitement is, in absolute fact, a relaxation, I had nearly said a paralysis, of one of the most important mechanisms in the animal body—the minute, resisting, compensating circulation—we grasp quickly the error, in respect to the action of stimulants, in which we have been educated, and obtain a clear solution of the well-known experience that all excitement, all passion, leaves, after its departure, lowness of heart, depression of mind, sadness of spirit. ”

“ The domestic class therefore presents, on the whole, a fairly healthy life. The majority of its members are women and mothers; and, in the gladness with which they tender their love and adoration to the young and innocent life that comes into their charge, they find perchance, after all, the purest pleasure, the most enhancing, the most ennobling recreation, that, even in the midst of many cares and sorrows and bereavements, falls to the lot of any section of the great community. ”

“ If we could turn our houses into models of sanitary perfection; if we could release our toiling millions from half their daily labor; if we could tell want to depart altogether; if we could give means of education to every living human being—we should not remove care, and therefore we should not secure health, unless with it all we could also remove the idea of the distinction of labor and pleasure, the morbid notion that some must work and some must play, that the world may make its round. ”

“ The effects of fear are all but indentical with those of rage, and like rage grow in force with repetition. The phenomena are so easily developed in the majority of persons, they may actually be acquired by imitation, and may be intensified and perhaps induced by listening to the mere narratives of events which act as causes of fear. I am daily more and more convinced that not half the evils resulting from what may be called the promptings of fear in the young and the feeble are duly appreciated, and that fear is the worst weapon of physical torture the thoughtless coward wields. ”

“ From the day that he is completely enamored of the special pursuit it is little indeed that he is good for out of it in hours apart from the common vocation of his life. He becomes fretful if for a day he be deprived of his peculiar gratification; irritable if he joins with others in it who are not so skillful as himself; envious if he meets with a rival who is better at it than himself; and often actually sleepless in thinking and brooding over some event or events that have been connected with the previous play or venture. ”

“ It is well always to have a standard before us, though it be seemingly unapproachable, and the illustrations I have endeavored to supply of all work and all play, and of long-continued recreation thereupon, form the standard I now wish to set up for observation.
To make all England, and all the world, for the matter of that, a recreation ground; to make all life a grand recreation; to make all life thereby healthier, happier, and longer—this is the question before us. ”

“ Next the heart in independent action is the muscle called the midriff or diaphragm; and, as the diaphragm is a muscle of inspiration, the respiratory function plays second to the circulatory, and the two great functions of life are, in sleep, faithfully performed. In sleep of illness bordering on sleep of death, how intently we watch for the merest trace of breath, and augur that, if but a feather be moved by it or a mirror dimmed by it, there is yet life! ”

“ Longevity is the daughter of competency Of the many elements that make up happiness, mental organization, physical health, fancy, friends, and money—the last is, for the average man, greater than any other, except the first. Loss of money costs more lives than the loss of friends, for it is easier to find a friend than a fortune.
The contrast put before us in these forcible remarks is most striking. It is the key to the position in trying to unlock the secret as to what true recreation should be. ”

“ Some of them act with a sharpness of intensity that is peculiar, while others apparently excite no physical injury.
The passions which act most severely on the physical life are anger, fear, hatred, and grief. The other passions are comparatively innocuous. What is called the passion of love is not injurious until it lapses into grief and anxiety; on the contrary, it sustains the physical power. What is called ambition is of itself harmless; for ambition, when it exists purely, is a nobility lifting its owner entirely, from himself into the exalted service of mankind. ”

“ One victim of the war mania is cursed with fear until he fails to sleep; another believes all his estates are confiscated; a third imagines himself taking part in some bloody fray; a fourth, the subject of aural delusions, no sooner sleeps than he wakes up, roused by what he considers to be awful sounds afar off, but approaching nearer. ”

“ There is much difference, in fact, between the three classes of the community called the domestic, the agricultural, and the industrial, in respect to the work, the recreation, and the resultant health pertaining to each class. The domestic class as a whole is, by comparison with the industrial, fairly favored. The members of it lead, it is true, a monotonous life, and see often but little of the beauties of external nature, but they find in the amusements they provide for those who are about them some intervals of change which are, as far as they go, of service. ”

“ To the rule of natural death there are a few exceptions. Unswerving in her great purposes for the universal good, Nature has imposed on the world of life her storms, earthquakes, lightnings, and all those sublime manifestations of her supreme power which, in the infant days of the universe, cowed the boldest and implanted in the human heart fears and superstitions which in hereditary progression have passed down even to the present generations. ”

“ The corset and the waist-belt I must once more condemn as opposed to all that is healthful and all that is beautiful. By these appliances, through which an unequal pressure is exerted on one part of the body, the functions of the lungs, of the heart, and of the digestive organs are all kept under imperfect condition. The breathing is suppressed, the heart-beat is suppressed, the digestive power is suppressed. In this way the tripod of life—for life rests on the digestion, the respiration, and circulation—is made imperfect, and with that imperfection every other part of the body sympathizes. ”

“ Everything was existence—nothing less and nothing more. Every office, every duty, every act must have been an existence for the moment, varied but never divisible into one of two conditions, practical pain or practical pleasure. ”