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Page 49
And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist
your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount
patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical
man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we
should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland),
visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory
ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your
faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in
action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a
better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to
fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This
inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,"
continued Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our British people.
The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought
somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much
expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life."
Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as
expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote
seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who stay in Europe
long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses
itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar
observation when they return to their native shores. They find a
wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate
eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. It
is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true
that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far
from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How
different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate
demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity,
vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally
accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not
the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr.
Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a
story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the
heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to
all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was
irresistibly conveyed.
Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a
young girl's character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to
some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical
peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak.
Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of
bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of
phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the
more or less of tension about which I am making such a fuss is a very
small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn
treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things
should be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension
in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much
mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the
material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its
place and function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard
made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house
many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man and
another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what little
there is, is very important." And the remark certainly applies to this
case. The general over-contraction may be small when estimated in
foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on
the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. This follows as a
necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made
reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that
so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense
and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening,
exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you
never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep
your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe
eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite
breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner
panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly
forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to
your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete,
and your muscles all relaxed?
Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning
quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is
that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic
performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary
progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the
rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well,
our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many
parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are
found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every
great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.
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