This Strenuous Age
Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world in which we used
to live. The poor old thing is being "speeded up." There is "efficiency"
in the air. Offices open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked
apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president has declared
that there are more foot pounds of energy in a glass of peptonized
milk than in--something else, I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet
somehow I feel out of it.
My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after midnight. They
have taken to sleeping out of doors, on porches and pergolas. Some, I
understand, merely roost on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They
take deep breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.
This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain, just as it
ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and humbly, that I am not in
it. I am being left behind. Take, for example, the case of alcohol.
That, at least, is what it is called now. There were days when we called
it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of it breathed
romance. That time is past.
The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low that he has a good
word for it. Quite right, I am certain. I don't defend it. Alcohol,
they are saying to-day, if taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the
outer coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric tissue, so I
am informed, a useless wreck.
This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain. I don't
dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere punk. I know it. I've
felt it doing it. They tell me--and I believe it--that after even
one glass of alcohol, or shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man's
working power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful thing.
After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity for sustained rigid
thought is cut in two. And after about six glasses the man's working
power is reduced by at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits
there--in his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,
even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking rigidly, not
sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless chunk of geniality, half hidden
in the blue smoke of his cigar.
Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is going it is gone.
Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a winter evening, or a Tom Collins
on a summer morning, or a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein
of beer on a bench beside a bowling-green--I wish somehow that we could
prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whisky and gin as
we used to. But these things, it appears, interfere with work. They have
got to go.
But turn to the broader and simpler question of _work_ itself. In my
time one hated it. It was viewed as the natural enemy of man. Now the
world has fallen in love with it. My friends, I find, take their deep
breathing and their porch sleeping because it makes them work better.
They go for a week's vacation in Virginia not for its own sake, but
because they say they can work better when they get back. I know a
man who wears very loose boots because he can work better in them: and
another who wears only soft shirts because he can work better in a soft
shirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they
thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away
out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country--he
wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it--but he claims that if he
walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell for work on Monday.
Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder if I stand
alone in this thing. Am I the _only_ person left who hates it?
Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that the lunch I like
best--I mean for an ordinary plain lunch, not a party--is a beef steak
about one foot square and two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I
can't, but I can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to
ask, twenty-five years ago.
Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously about the meagre
lunch they eat. One tells me that he finds a glass of milk and a prune
is quite as much as he cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit
and a glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One lunches
on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the yolk. I have only two
friends left who can eat a whole egg at a time.
I understand that the fear of these men is that if they eat more than
an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy after lunch. Why they object
to feeling heavy, I do not know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing
better than to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy
friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that is wicked. I
merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.
Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There has spread
abroad along with the so-called physical efficiency a perfect passion
for _information_. Somehow if a man's stomach is empty and his head
clear as a bell, and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out
for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all though,
instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled
with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of
battleships in the Japanese navy.
I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the new
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_ the thing. They
sit in their apartments at night with a glass of water at their elbow
reading the encyclopaedia. They say that it is literally filled with
facts. Other men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of
the United States (they say the figures in it are great) and the Acts
of Congress, and the list of Presidents since Washington (or was it
Washington?).
Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a cold baked
apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go to work in the morning,
so they tell me, with a positive sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt
that they do. But, for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of
it. I am left behind.
Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition, and the female
franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic marriage, together with
proportional representation, the initiative and the referendum, and the
duty of the citizen to take an intelligent interest in politics--and I
admit that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.
But before I _do_ go, I have one hope. I understand that down in Hayti
things are very different. Bull fights, cock fights, dog fights, are
openly permitted. Business never begins till eleven in the morning.
Everybody sleeps after lunch, and the bars remain open all night.
Marriage is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition of
morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it has been anywhere
since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.
