Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861




"There'll be a weddin' in the ol' house," she said, "before there's
roses on them bushes ag'in. But it won' be my poor Elsie's weddin', 'n'
Ol' Sophy won' be there."

When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not
that Elsie's life might be spared. She dared not ask that as a favor of
Heaven. What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to those
about her an ever-present terror? Might she but be so influenced by
divine grace, that what in her was most truly human, most purely
woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable instinct which
had pervaded her being like a subtile poison: that was all she could
ask, and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and tenderer love than her
own.

* * * * *


GYMNASTICS.


So your zeal for physical training begins to wane a little, my friend? I
thought it would, in your particular case, because it began too ardently
and was concentrated too exclusively on your one hobby of pedestrianism.
Just now you are literally under the weather. It is the equinoctial
storm. No matter, you say; did not Olmsted foot it over England under
an umbrella? did not Wordsworth regularly walk every guest round
Windermere, the day after arrival, rain or shine? So, the day before
yesterday, you did your four miles out, on the Northern turnpike, and
returned splashed to the waist; and yesterday you walked three miles
out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees. To-day
the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to
remain so; exercise is a humbug; you will give it all up, and go to the
Chess-Club. Don't go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the Gymnasium.

Chess may be all very well to tax with tough problems a brain otherwise
inert, to vary a monotonous day with small events, to keep one awake
during a sleepy evening, and to arouse a whole family next morning
for the adjustment over the breakfast-table of that momentous
state-question, whether the red king should have castled at the fiftieth
move or not till the fifty-first. But for an average American man, who
leaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace
of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders, utterly
exhausted in the daily effort to put ten dollars more of distance
between his posterity and the poor-house,--for such a one to kindle up
afresh after office-hours for a complicated chess-problem seems much as
if a wood-sawyer, worn out with his week's work, should decide to order
in his saw-horse on Saturday evening, and saw for fun. Surely we have
little enough recreation at any rate, and, pray, let us make that little
un-intellectual. True, something can be said in favor of chess--for
instance, that no money can be made out of it, and that it is so far
profitable to us overworked Americans: but even this is not enough. For
this once, lock your brains into your safe, at nightfall, with your
other valuables; don't go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the
Gymnasium.

Ten leaps up a steep, worn-out stairway, through a blind entry to
another stairway, and yet another, and we emerge suddenly upon the floor
of a large lighted room, a mere human machine-shop of busy motion, where
Indian clubs are whirling, dumb-bells pounding, swings vibrating, and
arms and legs flying in all manner of unexpected directions. Henderson
sits with his big proportions quietly rested against the weight-boxes,
pulling with monotonous vigor at the fifty-pound weights,--"the
Stationary Engine" the boys call him. For a contrast, Draper is floating
up and down between the parallel bars with such an airy lightness, that
you think he must have hung up his body in the dressing-room, and is
exercising only in his arms and clothes. Parsons is swinging in the
rings, rising to the ceiling before and behind; up and down he goes,
whirling over and over, converting himself into a mere tumbler-pigeon,
yet still bound by the long, steady vibration of the human pendulum.
Another is running a race with him, if sitting in the swing be running;
and still another is accompanying their motion, clinging to the
_trapeze_. Hayes, meanwhile, is spinning on the horizontal bar, now
backward, now forward, twenty times without stopping, pinioned through
his bent arms, like a Fakir on his iron. See how many different ways
of ascending a vertical pole these boys are devising!--one climbs with
hands and legs, another with hands only, another is crawling up on
all-fours in Feegee fashion, while another is pegging his way up by
inserting pegs in holes a foot apart,--you will see him sway and
tremble a bit, before he reaches the ceiling. Others are at work with a
spring-board and leaping-cord; higher and higher the cord is moved, one
by one the competitors step aside defeated, till the field is left to a
single champion, who, like an India-rubber ball, goes on rebounding till
he seems likely to disappear through the chimney, like a Ravel. Some
sturdy young visitors, farmers by their looks, are trying their
strength, with various success, at the sixty-pound dumb-bell, when some
quiet fellow, a clerk or a tailor, walks modestly to the hundred-pound
weight, and up it goes as steadily as if the laws of gravitation had
suddenly shifted their course, and worked upward instead of down. Lest,
however, they should suddenly resume their original bias, let us cross
to the dressing-room, and, while you are assuming flannel shirt or
complete gymnastic suit, as you may prefer, let us consider the merits
of the Gymnasium.

Do not say that the public is growing tired of hearing about physical
training. You might as well speak of being surfeited with the sight of
apple-blossoms, or bored with roses,--for these athletic exercises are,
to a healthy person, just as good and refreshing. Of course, any one
becomes insupportable who talks all the time of this subject, or of any
other; but it is the man who fatigues you, not the theme. Any person
becomes morbid and tedious whose whole existence is absorbed in any
one thing, be it playing or praying. Queen Elizabeth, after admiring a
gentleman's dancing, refused to look at the dancing-master, who did it
better. "Nay," quoth her bluff Majesty,--"'tis his business,--I'll none
of him." Professionals grow tiresome. Books are good,--so is a boat;
but a librarian and a ferryman, though useful to take you where you
wish to go, are not necessarily enlivening as companions. The annals
of "Boxiana" and "Pedestriana" and "The Cricket-Field" are as pathetic
records of monomania as the bibliographical works of Mr. Thomas Dibdin.
Margaret Fuller said truly, that we all delight in gossip, and differ
only in the department of gossip we individually prefer; but a monotony
of gossip soon grows tedious, be the theme horses or octavos.

Not one-tenth part of the requisite amount has yet been said of athletic
exercises as a prescription for this community. There was a time when
they were not even practised generally among American boys, if we may
trust the foreign travellers of a half-century ago, and they are but
just being raised into respectability among American men. Motley says
of one of his Flemish heroes, that "he would as soon have foregone his
daily tennis as his religious exercises,"--as if ball-playing were then
the necessary pivot of a great man's day. Some such pivot of physical
enjoyment we must have, for no other race in the world needs it so
much. Through the immense inventive capacity of our people, mechanical
avocations are becoming almost as sedentary and intellectual as the
professions. Among Americans, all hand-work is constantly being
transmuted into brain-work; the intellect gains, but the body suffers,
and needs some other form of physical activity to restore the
equilibrium. As machinery becomes perfected, all the coarser tasks are
constantly being handed over to the German or Irish immigrant,--not
because the American cannot do the particular thing required, but
because he is promoted to something more intellectual. Thus transformed
to a mental laborer, he must somehow supply the bodily deficiency. If
this is true of this class, it is of course true of the student, the
statesman, and the professional man. The general statement recently made
by Lewes, in England, certainly holds not less in America:--"It is rare
to meet with good digestion among the artisans of the brain, no matter
how careful they may be in food and general habits." The great majority
of our literary and professional men could echo the testimony of
Washington Irving, if they would only indorse his wise conclusion:--"My
own case is a proof how one really loses by over-writing one's self
and keeping too intent upon a sedentary occupation. I attribute all my
present indisposition, which is losing me time, spirits, everything, to
two fits of close application and neglect of all exercise while I was at
Paris. I am convinced that he who devotes two hours each day to vigorous
exercise will eventually gain those two and a couple more into the
bargain."

Indeed, there is something involved in the matter far beyond any merely
physical necessity. All our natures need something more than mere bodily
exertion; they need bodily enjoyment. There is, or ought to be, in all
of us a touch of untamed gypsy nature, which should be trained, not
crushed. We need, in the very midst of civilization, something which
gives a little of the zest of savage life; and athletic exercises
furnish the means. The young man who is caught down the bay in a sudden
storm, alone in his boat, with wind and tide against him, has all the
sensations of a Norway sea-king,--sensations thoroughly uncomfortable,
if you please, but for the thrill and glow they bring. Swim out after a
storm at Dove Harbor, topping the low crests, diving through the high
ones, and you feel yourself as veritable a South-Sea Islander as if you
were to dine that day on missionary instead of mutton. Tramp, for a
whole day, across hill, marsh, and pasture, with gun, rod, or whatever
the excuse may be, and camp where you find yourself at evening, and
you are as essentially an Indian on the Blue Hills as among the Rocky
Mountains. Less depends upon circumstances than we fancy, and more upon
our personal temperament and will. All the enjoyments of Browning's
"Saul," those "wild joys of living" which make us happy with their
freshness as we read of them, are within the reach of all, and make us
happier still when enacted. Every one, in proportion as he develops his
own physical resources, puts himself in harmony with the universe, and
contributes something to it; even as Mr. Pecksniff, exulting in his
digestive machinery, felt a pious delight after dinner in the thought
that this wonderful apparatus was wound up and going.

A young person can no more have too much love of adventure than a mill
can have too much water-power; only it needs to be worked, not wasted.
Physical exercises give to energy and daring a legitimate channel,
supply the place of war, gambling, licentiousness, highway-robbery, and
office-seeking. De Quincey, in like manner, says that Wordsworth made
pedestrianism a substitute for wine and spirits; and Emerson thinks the
force of rude periods "can rarely be compensated in tranquil times,
except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war."
The animal energy cannot and ought not to be suppressed; if debarred
from its natural channel, it will force for itself unnatural ones. A
vigorous life of the senses not only does not tend to sensuality in the
objectionable sense, but it helps to avert it. Health finds joy in mere
existence; daily breath and daily bread suffice. This innocent enjoyment
lost, the normal desires seek abnormal satisfactions. The most brutal
prize-fighter is compelled to recognize the connection between purity
and vigor, and becomes virtuous when he goes into training, as the
heroes of old observed chastity, in hopes of conquering at the Olympic
Games. The very word _ascetic_ comes from a Greek word signifying the
preparatory exercises of an athlete. There are spiritual diseases which
coil poisonously among distorted instincts and disordered nerves, and
one would be generally safer in standing sponsor for the soul of the
gymnast than of the dyspeptic.

Of course, the demand of our nature is not always for continuous
exertion. One does not always seek that "rough exercise" which Sir John
Sinclair asserts to be "the darling idol of the English." There are
delicious languors, Neapolitan reposes, Creole siestas, "long days and
solid banks of flowers." But it is the birthright of the man of the
temperate zones to alternate these voluptuous delights with more heroic
ones, and sweeten the reverie by the toil. So far as they go, the
enjoyments of the healthy body are as innocent and as ardent as those of
the soul. As there is no ground of comparison, so there is no ground of
antagonism. How compare a sonata and a sea-bath or measure the Sistine
Madonna against a gallop across country? The best thanksgiving for each
is to enjoy the other also, and educate the mind to ampler nobleness.
After all, the best verdict on athletic exercises was that of the great
Sully, when he said, "I was always of the same opinion with Henry
IV. concerning them: he often asserted that they were the most solid
foundation, not only of discipline and other military virtues, but also
of those noble sentiments and that elevation of mind which give one
nature superiority over another."

We are now ready, perhaps, to come to the question, How are these
athletic enjoyments to be obtained? The first and easiest answer is, By
taking a long walk every day. If people would actually do this, instead
of forever talking about doing it, the object might be gained. To be
sure, there are various defects in this form of exercise. It is not a
play, to begin with, and therefore does not withdraw the mind from its
daily cares; the anxious man recurs to his problems on the way; and each
mile, in that case, brings fresh weariness to brain as well as body.
Moreover, there are, according to Dr. Grau, "three distinct groups
of muscles which are almost totally neglected where walking alone is
resorted to, and which consequently exist only in a crippled state,
although they are of the utmost importance, and each stands in close
_rapport_ with a number of other functions of the greatest necessity to
health and life." These he afterwards classifies as the muscles of the
shoulders and chest, having a bearing on the lungs,--the abdominal
muscles, bearing on the corresponding organs,--and the spinal muscles,
which are closely connected with the whole nervous system.

But the greatest practical difficulty is, that walking, being the least
concentrated form of exercise, requires a larger appropriation of
time than most persons are willing to give. Taken liberally, and in
connection with exercises which are more concentrated and have more play
about them, it is of great value, and, indeed, indispensable. But so
far as I have seen, instead of these other pursuits taking the place of
pedestrianism, they commonly create a taste for it; so that, when the
sweet spring-days come round, you will see our afternoon gymnastic class
begin to scatter literally to the four winds; or they look in for a
moment, on their way home from the woods, their hands filled and scented
with long wreaths of the trailing arbutus.

But the gymnasium is the normal type of all muscular exercise,--the only
form of it which is impartial and comprehensive, which has something for
everybody, which is available at all seasons, through all weathers,
in all latitudes. All other provisions are limited: you cannot row
in winter nor skate in summer, spite of parlor-skates and ice-boats;
ball-playing requires comrades; riding takes money; everything needs
daylight: but the gymnasium is always accessible. Then it is the only
thing which trains the whole body. Military drill makes one prompt,
patient, erect, accurate, still, strong. Rowing takes one set of muscles
and stretches them through and through, till you feel yourself turning
into one long spiral spring from finger-tips to toes. In cricket or
base-ball, a player runs, strikes, watches, catches, throws, must learn
endurance also. Yet, no matter which of these may be your special hobby,
you must, if you wish to use all the days and all the muscles, seek the
gymnasium at last,--the only thorough panacea.

The history of modern gymnastic exercises is easily written: it is
proper to say modern,--for, so far as apparatus goes, the ancient
gymnasiums seem to have had scarcely anything in common with our own.
The first institution on the modern plan was founded at Schnepfenthal,
near Gotha, in Germany, in 1785, by Salzmann, a clergyman and the
principal of a boys' school. After eight years of experience, his
assistant, Gutsmuths, wrote a book upon the subject, which was
translated into English, and published at London in 1799 and at
Philadelphia in 1800, under the name of "Salzmann's Gymnastics." No
similar institution seems to have existed in either country, however,
till those established by Voelckers, in London, in 1824, and by Dr.
Follen, at Cambridge, Mass., in 1826. Both were largely patronized
at first, and died out at last. The best account of Voelckers's
establishment will be found in Hone's "Every-Day Book"; its plan seems
to have been unexceptionable. But Dr. James Johnson, writing his
"Economy of Health" ten years after, declared that these German
exercises had proved "better adapted to the Spartan youth than to the
pallid sons of pampered cits, the dandies of the desk, and the squalid
tenants of attics and factories," and also adds the epitaph, "This
ultra-gymnastic enthusiast did much injury to an important branch of
hygiene by carrying it to excess, and consequently by causing its
desuetude." And Dr. Jarvis, in his "Practical Physiology," declares the
unquestionable result of the American experiment to have been "general
failure."

Accordingly, the English, who are reputed kings in all physical
exercises, have undoubtedly been far surpassed by the Germans, and
even by the French, in gymnastics. The writer of the excellent little
"Handbook for Gymnastics," George Forrest, M.A., testifies strongly to
this deficiency. "It is curious that we English, who possess perhaps
the finest and strongest figures of all European nations, should leave
ourselves so undeveloped bodily. There is not one man in a hundred who
can even raise his toes to a level with his hands, when suspended by the
later members; and yet to do so is at the very beginning of gymnastic
exercises. We, as a rule, are strong in the arms and legs, but weak
across the loins and back, and are apparently devoid of that beautiful
set of muscles that run round the entire waist, and show to such
advantage in the ancient statues. Indeed, at a bathing-place, I can pick
out every gymnast merely by the development of those muscles."

It is the Germans and the military portion of the French nation,
chiefly, who have developed gymnastic exercises to their present
elaboration, while the working out of their curative applications was
chiefly due to Ling, a Swede. In the German manuals, such, for instance,
as Eiselen's "Turnuebungen," are to be found nearly all the stock
exercises of our institutions. Until within a few years, American skill
has added nothing to these, except through the medium of the circus; but
the present revival of athletic exercises is rapidly placing American
gymnasts in advance of the _Turners_, both in the feats performed and
in the style of doing them. Never yet have I succeeded in seeing a
thoroughly light and graceful German gymnast, while again and again I
have seen Americans who carried into their severest exercise such
an airy, floating elegance of motion, that all the beauty of Greek
sculpture appeared to return again, and it seemed as if plastic art
might once more make its studio in the gymnasium.

The apparatus is not costly. Any handful of young men in the smallest
country-village, with a very few dollars and a little mechanical skill,
can put up in any old shed or shoe-shop a few simple articles of
machinery, which will, through many a winter evening, vary the monotony
of the cigar and the grocery-bench by an endless variety of manly
competitions. Fifteen cents will bring by mail from the publishers of
the "Atlantic" Forrest's little sixpenny "Handbook," which gives a
sufficient number of exercises to form an introduction to all others;
and a gymnasium is thus easily established. This is just the method of
the simple and sensible Germans, who never wait for elegant upholstery.
A pair of plain parallel bars, a movable vaulting-bar, a wooden horse,
a spring-board, an old mattress to break the fall, a few settees where
sweethearts and wives may sit with their knitting as spectators, and
there is a _Turnhalle_ complete,--to be henceforward filled, two or
three nights in every week, with cheery German faces, jokes, laughs,
gutturals, and gambols.

But this suggests that you are being kept too long in the anteroom. Let
me act as cicerone through this modest gymnastic hall of ours. You will
better appreciate all this oddly shaped apparatus, if I tell you in
advance, as a connoisseur does in his picture-gallery, precisely what
you are expected to think of each particular article.

You will notice, however, that a part of the gymnastic class are
exercising without apparatus, in a series of rather grotesque movements
which supple and prepare the body for more muscular feats: these are
calisthenic exercises. Such are being at last introduced, thanks to Dr.
Lewis and others, into our common schools. At the word of command, as
swiftly as a conjuror twists his puzzle-paper, these living forms are
shifted from one odd resemblance to another, at which it is quite lawful
to laugh, especially if those laugh who win. A series of windmills,--a
group of inflated balloons,--a flock of geese all asleep on one leg,--a
circle of ballet-dancers, just poised to begin,--a band of patriots
just kneeling to take an oath upon their country's altar,--a senate of
tailors,--a file of soldiers,--a whole parish of Shaker worshippers,--a
Japanese embassy performing _Ko-tow_: these all in turn come like
shadows,--so depart. This complicated attitudinizing forms the
preliminary to the gymnastic hour. But now come and look at some of the
apparatus.

Here is a row of Indian clubs, or sceptres, as they are sometimes
called,--tapering down from giants of fifteen pounds to dwarfs of four.
Help yourself to a pair of dwarfs, at first; grasp one in each hand,
by the handle; swing one of them round your head quietly, dropping the
point behind as far as possible,--then the other,--and so swing them
alternately some twenty times. Now do the same back-handed, bending the
wrist outward, and carrying the club behind the head first. Now
swing them both together, crossing them in front, and then the same
back-handed; then the same without crossing, and this again backward,
which you will find much harder. Place them on the ground gently after
each set of processes. Now can you hold them out horizontally at arm's
length, forward and then sideways? Your arms quiver and quiver, and down
come the clubs thumping at last. Take them presently in a different and
more difficult manner, holding each club with the point erect instead of
hanging down; it tries your wrists, you will find, to manipulate them
so, yet all the most graceful exercises have this for a basis. Soon you
will gain the mastery of heavier implements than you begin with, and
will understand how yonder slight youth has learned to handle his two
heavy clubs in complex curves that seem to you inexplicable, tracing
in the air a device as swift and tangled as that woven by a swarm of
gossamer flies above a brook, in the sultry stillness of the summer
noon.

This row of masses of iron, laid regularly in order of size, so as to
resemble something between a musical instrument and a gridiron, consists
of dumb-bells weighing from four pounds to a hundred. These playthings,
suited to a variety of capacities, have experienced a revival of favor
within a few years, and the range of exercises with them has been
greatly increased. The use of very heavy ones is, so far as I can find,
a peculiarly American hobby, though not originating with Dr. Windship.
Even he, at the beginning of his exhibitions, used those weighing only
ninety-eight pounds; and it was considered an astonishing feat, when,
a little earlier, Mr. Richard Montgomery used to "put up" a dumb-bell
weighing one hundred and one pounds. A good many persons, in different
parts of the country, now handle one hundred and twenty-five, and Dr.
Windship has got much farther on. There is, of course, a knack in
using these little articles, as in every other feat, yet it takes good
extensor muscles to get beyond the fifties. The easiest way of elevating
the weight is to swing it up from between the knees; or it may be thrown
up from the shoulder, with a simultaneous jerk of the whole body; but
the only way of doing it handsomely is to put it up from the shoulder
with the arm alone, without bending the knee, though you may bend the
body as much as you please. Dr. Windship now puts up one hundred and
forty-one pounds in this manner, and by the aid of a jerk can elevate
one hundred and eighty with one arm. This particular movement with
dumb-bells is most practised, as affording a test of strength; but there
are many other ways of using them, all exceedingly invigorating, and all
safe enough, unless the weight employed be too great, which it is very
apt to be. Indeed, there is so much danger of this, that at Cambridge it
has been deemed best to exclude all beyond seventy pounds. Nevertheless,
the dumb-bell remains the one available form of home or office exercise:
it is a whole athletic apparatus packed up in the smallest space; it is
gymnastic pemmican. With one fifty-pound dumb-bell, or a pair of half
that size--or more or less, according to his strength and habits,--a
man may exercise nearly every muscle in his body in half an hour, if he
has sufficient ingenuity in positions. If it were one's fortune to be
sent to prison,--and the access to such retirement is growing more and
more facile in many regions of our common country,--one would certainly
wish to carry a dumb-bell with him, precisely as Dr. Johnson carried an
arithmetic in his pocket on his tour to the Hebrides, as containing the
greatest amount of nutriment in the compactest form.

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