Felix Leopold Oswald

“ Our cities are atmospheric bake-ovens. They exclude the horizontal air-currents that sweep freely through the shady arcades of the forest, but they admit sunlight and retain their self-created heat, their dust, and their sudorific vapors. We have inherited, the antique passion for whitewashed houses and stone fences that reflect the sun's rays with a distressing glare, while we have abolished the intramural gardens and free public baths that alleviated the summer sufferings of the ancient Mediterranean cities; but our hyperborean diet is perhaps a still more prolific source of evil. ”

“ How many thousands of hunters and soldiers have slept in the open fields, and how many times did we wade through the dew-drenched brambles of the Ardennes, my little brother and I, to see the sun rise, and breathe the mountain wind, at the only hour when the air is both fragrant and cool, inspiring thoughts which music can only awaken for a fleeting moment!—if such hours are mortiferous, there can not be a more agreeable way of ending what our latter-day epicures are pleased to call life. ”

“ Nor is it necessary to send them to bed at the very time when all nature awakens from the torpid influence of the day-star; sleep in the atmosphere of a stifling bedroom would bring no rest and no pleasant dreams. But an hour after sunset there will be a change; the night-wind rises and the fainting land revives; cool air is a febrifuge and Nature's remedy for the dyspeptic influences of a sultry day. Open every window, and let your children share the luxury of the last evening hour; after breathing the fresh night-air for a while, they will sleep in peace. ”

“ Have dogmas and hearsays entirely closed our senses to the language of instinct, to the meaning of the discomfort, the distracting uneasiness under the burden of a load of calorific covers and bandages, while every pore of our skin cries out for relief, for the cooling influence of the free open air? Keep your children under lock and key, lest the sun should spoil their complexion or their morals, let them pass their days in an underground dungeon like Kaspar Hauser, but do not load them with woolen trappings at a time when even a linen robe becomes a Nessus-shirt. ”

“ Is there any crime against Nature which draws down a more terrible curse than that of stripping our Mother Earth of her sylvan covering? The hand of man has produced this desert, and I verily believe every other desert on the surface of this earth. Earth was Eden once, and our misery is the punishment of our sins against the world of plants. The burning sun of the desert is the angel with the flaming sword who stands between us and paradise. ”

“ The sympathetic thrill by which the mind accompanies a daring gymnastic feat and the enthusiasm of athletic contests form the most salutary and perhaps the only normal gratification of that love of excitement which is either the legitimate manifestation of a healthy instinct, or else a wholly irremediable disease of our nature. The soul needs emotions as the body needs exercise, and the exciting sports of the palæstra met both wants at once. ”

“ RECREATION.
"Mirth is a remedy."—Thomas Hobbes.
HAPPINESS is the normal condition of every living creature, for in a state of nature every normal function is connected with a pleasurable sensation. "To enjoy is to obey"; if human life were what it could be and what its Author intended it to be, the path of duty would be a flowery path, the reward of virtue would not be a crown of thorns; man, like all his fellow-creatures, would attain to his highest well-being by simply following the promptings of his instincts. Wild animals have not lost their earthly paradise ”

“ The wood-thrush, it is true, does not modulate her anthems in a whining drawl; the pine-tree lifts his head without fear of provoking his Creator by a want of crawling humility; no dread of a joy-hating priest-god disturbs the gambols of the squirrel and the aërial dances of the brook-midge; the butterfly and the humming-bird do not think it necessary to "mortify the eye with dreary drab," but their happiness imparts a lesson not less divine for being at variance with the doctrines of an atrabilious fanatic. ”

“ The voice of instinct adds its testimony to the teaching of science. In the language of our senses, every feeling of discomfort suggests its own remedy. If the proximity of a glowing stove begins to roast your shins, the alarmed nerves cry out—not for patent ointments, not for anti-caustic liniments and "pain-killers," but for a lower temperature. Nothing else will permanently appease them. Millions of prisoners, school-children, and factory-slaves, pine for lung-food as a starving man yearns for bread; and that hunger can not be stilled with cough-pills, but only with fresh air. ”

“ The children of the wilderness need no holidays; to them life itself is a festival and earth a play-ground for manifold games, not the less entertaining for being sometimes spiced with danger or prompted by hunger and thirst.
But in process of time the daily life of a combatant in the harder and harder struggle for existence became so joyless and wearisome that the clamors of an unsatisfied instinct suggested the institution of periodical festivals: pleasure-days intended to offset the tedium of monotonous toil, as gymnastic exercises tend to counteract the influence of sedentary occupations. ”

“ Joy has been called the sunshine of the heart, yet the same sun that calls forth the flowers of a plant is also needed to expand its leaves and ripen its fruits; and without the stimulus of exhilarating pastimes perfect bodily health is as impossible as moral and mental vigor. And, as sure as a succession of uniform crops will exhaust the best soil, the daily repetition of a monotonous occupation will wear out the best man. ”

“ The parched palate's petition for a cooling liquid is not plainer than the brain's craving for rest and slumber when a high temperature adds its somniferous tendency to the drowsy influence of a full meal. On warm summer days all Nature indulges in a noontide nap; I have walked through tropical forests that were as silent under the rays of a vertical sun as a Norwegian pine-grove in the dead of a polar night; nor would it be easy to name a single animal that does not appear sleepy after meals. ”

“ The men that inculcated a belief in the possibility of witchcraft and demoniac possession are responsible for the agonies of the three million human beings that perished in the flames of the stake; the dogma of total natural depravity guided the arm that aimed its poisoned daggers at the heart of every social, political, or scientific reformer. But the direst of all the evils which made the rule of the miracle-mongers the unhappiest period in the history of this earth was, after all, their total neglect of physical education—the logical outcome of their Nature-hating insanity. ”

“ But, with that exception, it may be laid down as a general rule that the virulence and duration of every disease are proportioned to the degree and the contumacy of the provocation—a retribution proportioned to the degree of the guilt, we should say, if Nature did not administer her code after the principle that ignorance of the law constitutes no excuse. The ignorant mother who, with the best intentions in the world, forces her child to sleep in an air-tight bedroom, incurs the penalties of an inexorable law as surely as the vicious father who tempts his child to a life of infamy. ”

“ Fast running is, on the whole, a more valuable accomplishment than long walking, for no one knows when he may owe his life, and more than his life, to the ability of outrunning a pursuer or a fugitive scoundrel; but walking and trotting matches against time will help to cure our children of that miserable snail-pace which has come to be the fashion of every public promenade. Reduced to a funeral-march, the "regulation walk" loses half its value—the hygienic value of the only kind of out-door exercise which the children of the upper ten or twenty can count upon. ”

“ We have emerged from the aphanasia of the middle ages, that fearful eclipse of reason and happiness that followed like an unnatural night upon the bright sunrise of Grecian civilization, and the spiritual lethargy of that night has been shaken off by all that deserve the name of men; how is it, then, that so much of its physical torpor still remains behind? Have we really forgotten that God is the creator of our bodies as well as of our souls? Our limbs seem to have been paralyzed by long disuse ”

“ But you continue the dose, and Nature, true to her highest law to preserve life at any price, finally adapts herself to an abnormal condition—adapts your system to the poison at whatever cost of health, strength, and happiness. Your body becomes an opium-machine, an arsenic-mill, a physiological engine moved by poison, and performing its vital functions only under the spur of the unnatural stimulus. But by and by the jaded system fails to respond to the spur, your strength gives way, and, alarmed at the symptoms of rapid deliquium, you resolve to remedy the evil by removing the cause. ”

“ Out-doors, in the baby-carriage, "cold draughts" have to be guarded against, and a load of extra wrappers completely counteract the benefit of the fresh air; faint with nausea and suffocating heat the little mummy lies motionless on its back, resplendent in its white surplice, a fit candidate for the honors of a life whose every movement of a natural impulse will be suppressed as a revival of barbarism and an insurrection against the statutes of an orthodox community. ”

“ If we have learned to interpret the fact that a child whose mind is not yet biased by any hearsays is sure to prefer pure and cold air to the miasmatic "comfort" of a close room, the troglodyte-habit will disappear, as intemperance will vanish if we recognize the significance of that other fact—that to every beginner the taste of alcohol is repulsive, and that only the tenth or twelfth dosis of the obnoxious substance begins to be relished; just as the Russian stage-conductor relishes the atmosphere of his ambulant dungeon, whatever may have been his feelings of horror on the first trip. ”

“ They do not complain to a stranger, unless he should be able to interpret the language of their haggard faces and weary eyes; but no one who has fathomed the depth of their misery will charge me with exaggeration if I say that, to the vast majority of the unfortunates, loss of feeling and of reason would be a blessing. What do they feel but unsatisfied hunger in a hundred forms, and what can reason tell them but that they have been defrauded of their birthright to happiness; that not only their opportunity but their capacity for enjoyment is ebbing away ”

“ A swallow's nest protects her brood from cold and rain without debarring them from the fresh air; a human domicile, too, should combine comfort with the advantage of perfect ventilation; and our clothes, like the fur of a squirrel or the feather-mantle of a hawk, should keep us warm and dry without interfering with the cutaneous excretions and the free movement of our limbs.
Measured by these standards, the winter dress of an American schoolboy is nearly the best, the summer dress of the average American, French, and German nursling about the worst that could possibly be devised. ”

“ The annals of pagan despotism furnish no parallel to the pages stained with blood and tears that record the horrors of the inquisitorial butcheries and man-hunts of the middle ages. The history of science is the history of a day with a bright morning and a sunny evening, but interrupted at the noontide hour by a total eclipse of common sense and reason. ”

“ How, then, can it be reconciled with the immutable laws of life that the greatest bane of our physical organism overcomes us so unawares that consumption is proverbially referred to as the insidious disease? Should it really be possible that Nature has failed to provide any alarm-signals against a danger like this? The truth is, that none of her protests are more pathetic or more persistent than those directed against the habit that is fraught with such pernicious consequences to our respiratory organs. ”

“ If we could weigh the nameless discomforts, the weariness, the physical and moral nausea, and the unsatisfied hunger after the life-air and freedom of the wilderness, endured by millions of factory-children, shopkeepers, and counting-house drudges, if we could weigh all their misery against the hardships of the savages and half-savage nomads, we might agree with the Benthamites, that, measured by the criterion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, modern civilization is a very indifferent success. ”

“ Nature will condone his beefsteaks, pork-fritters, and some of his cocktails; his mince-pies will not rise and bear witness against him. But the happier biped who can waive those prerogatives will free his stomach from the necessity of digesting winter food in a summer climate, and, in return, will enjoy the freedom of the land, the privilege to work, play, eat, rest, laugh, or get mad, at any time he pleases. He has reconciled himself to Nature, and shares the natural rights of the creatures who have not forfeited their earthly paradise ”

“ The civilization of Greece, Dutch art, the science of Bagdad and Cordova, sprang up, like water from the rock of Moses. Can historians point out a single instance of an unmanned people regaining their manhood? The bodily degeneracy of a whole nation dooms it to a hopeless retrogression in prosperity and political power.
The first use we should make of our regained liberty is, therefore, the reëstablishment of those institutions to whose influence the happiest nations of antiquity owed their energy and their physical prowess, their martial and moral heroism, their fortitude in adversity. ”

“ The drowsy heat of the afternoon invites to slumber as the cool hours before the noon of night invite to music, reverie, or sentimental conversation, and our midsummer-night dreams would be no worse for a moonlight ramble on the mountains or in the garden-suburbs of a large city. ”

“ For years the infinite patience of Nature labors every night to undo the mischief of every day, and before noon the surfeited organs again report ready for duty. Habitual excess in eating and drinking sometimes begets an unnatural appetency that enables the glutton to indulge his penchant to the last, only with this difference, that the relish for special kinds of food has changed into a vague craving for repletion, just as the fondness for a special stimulant is apt to turn into a chronic poison-hunger. ”