THE MENTAL EFFECTS OF THE COLD.
THE mental effects of the severe cold on social and individual character are discernible enough in one or two different directions. We are told that what the body really does in this cold weather—say, when we are breathing air at the quite mo- derate temperature of 28° Fahrenheit—is to raise the tempera- ture of all the oxygen in it which passes into the blood, from 28° to 98°, or thereabouts, which is the temperature of the• blood ; in other words, through 70° Fahrenheit, or a good deal more than a third of the distance between the freezing and the boiling point of water. No doubt the automatic effort which is neces- sary to effect this change of temperature in every element of air which passes into the blood is a considerable one, and those who are conscious of winding-up and setting in motion the machinery for this elaborate manufacture of heat, might perhaps sympathise with Mr. Pecksniff's expression of pride in reference to the not less elaborate digestive machinery of the body, that it makes them feel as if they were "benefactors to the race." Unluckily for most Englishmen, very few of them are conscious that they do achieve this feat. But like M. Jourdain, when he discovered that he talked prose, they will probably be elated when they learn that they are the theatres of a functional activity of which they had never heard. But in spite of this ignorance, it is quite obvious that, after a dumb, inarticulate fashion, as Mr. Carlyle would say, men are well aware of a certain considerable addition to the draft on their energy in the severe weather over and above that which is made in ordinary weather. And this consciousness shows itself in a very different fashion in men of different constitutional type and moral temper. In some,—chiefly delicate persons, or persons past middle age and without a very large fund of energy,—the chief effect of this dim consciousness of a steady draft on their organic resources, is to exaggerate the economical reserve and frugal parsimony of their character. More than ever they lurk within themselves, and calcu- late anxiously the mode in which they may use their little store of energy to the best effect. They economise their moral fuel, by watching opportunities more keenly than in ordinary seasons, and taking care never to do anything superfluous, or which, from its inopportuneness, may need to be done over again. They ap- proximate, indeed, to the type of character which we may suppose to be impressed on the besieged inhabitants of a great city who are aware that the race between their resources and their needs will be a very close one indeed, and that every condition of life must be finely calculated, instead of leaving as usual a large margin to cover mistakes. There is a sort of feeling in such people that every day the severe cold lasts is a day needing sharp moral and intellectual discipline to get through their ordinary tasks. Getting-up itself is a great expense of energy ; the cold bath, for those who take it, involves about double the shock of ordinary days ; it is quite a dispensation to get the goloshes on for the snow, or the extra time needed for a slippery walk, or the extra care needed for a slippery drive ; then almost all the clocks lose, owing to freezing oil, and it takes another moral effort to resist the false testimony of the clocks and to compute the real from the apparent time ; again, the cold of the carriage or the railway train takes out a good bit in the way of fortitude ; the strong attractions of the fire, if not resisted, dissolve away a large amount of disposable time ; cold feet make serious drafts on the temper ; cold bed-rooms are apt to keep you up late at night over the fire ; cold beds cause a dreadful dwindling in the stock of sleep ; all this is without counting the resisting medium of real indisposition, from cold in the head, or in the teeth, or in the liver, which aggravates every difficulty twofold ; so that one way or another, a man of delicate health who really manages to get through his ordinary duties in the cold no worse than in mild weather, is compelled to be twice as crafty, and shrewd, and frugal in his management of himself and the distribution of his energies. But the total moral effect is very seldom to make him self-satisfied. The physical effect of the cold is far too humiliating for that. It makes him shrink into himself and feel of no account. He is issuing orders from a citadel which he thinks may have to capitulate every day. A man cannot feel very bumptious who is doing that. The sense of a dwindled existence takes down all his pride. He ekes out his moral resources frugally, but has no joy in his frugality. He is holding out,—that is all,—not winning glory for himself. There is no elastic pleasure in the sense of a minute economy of power. If you have to say to yourself, "There will be great complexity in this division. of the investments which I ought to make ; it will take energy ; I must put it off till it is warmer and 1 have more margin of strength,' you feel intensely what a limited creature you are, and that the moral rations on which you are living so parsi- moniously would hardly be worth consuming at all, if you did not hope for a time of more affluent power, after the siege is raised. There is nothing which produces intellectual modesty so effectually as feeling just equal to life and no more, and that is the effect the cold produces on a good many people. At the same time, it is apt to make them calculating and in a moral sense frigid. When they read of a great calamity like the burn- ing of the emigrant ship or the railway slaughter at Oxford, they are apt to say to themselves, "I can do no good there ; can I afford to subject myself to the pain of reading about all this suffer- ing? Better pass it over, and hear of it only what I must." Now, that is hardly an attractive state of feeling. Tenuity of moral resource is always unamiable, and seems to mark an ungenerous nature, whereas it really only implies one with a somewhat niggardly supply of the requisite force for living.
But there are people on whom the cold seems to have quite a different kind of effect. Either because they are young, or, if not young, because their organisation is one which supplies heat freely at small expense to the supply of nervous force, they find the cold simply a novelty, -which gives a fillip to their energies and adds a zest to life. Mr. Alfred Garrod threw out not long ' declared that the earthquake of Lisbon had destroyed his faith in ago in a scientific journal a suggestion that perhaps it is the difference in temperature between the external skin and the beat of the blood, which supplies the springs of those magnetic currents of which nervous action in a large degree possibly consists, and that the greater that difference of temperature, the more lively is the action of the batteries of which the nerves are the conducting wires. If that were so, that would certainly account for the sort of abounding self-gratulation which seems to possess some men in dwelling on the mere fact that "the thermometer showed 18° of frost last night ; "—only it would make it still more difficult to account for the apparently frozen-up energies which cold causes to the people of whom we have already spoken. But to the people who exult in cold, the human race appears all the nobler for sustaining so many degrees of frost ; and as for them, they treat the low temperature as a gospel of great joy. Indeed, their bearing seems to indicate something more like the deep well - spring of satisfaction arising from a good conscience than anything else. You see the traces of this state of feel- ing in Dickem's Christmas stories, where frost and benevolence always flow together in great spring tides. If feeling does not gush when water is frozen, it is always, with Dickens, the sign of deliberate malignity of heart. And unquestionably there are a good number of persons to whom severe weather brings a self-satisfaction and a desire to overflow benignity over other people which you never see at other times. They go about say- ing, either literally or by smiles and lavish rubbing of the hands, 'Here is the thermometer more than half-way between freezing- point and zero, yet I exult in it ; I walk, I skate, I ride ; I beat my breast heartily ; I restore circulation to my feet by jovial stamping ; I have for the first time in life a purpose to fulfil to which I am quite equal ; I eat and drink all the more heartily for the severe weather ; I make a joyful noise in everything I do, to attract the attention of the world to my great success in defying the cold ; I smile jubilantly, and return jubilant smiles jubilantly, for I feel a successful man, and without any mean envy I recognise all comrades who are successful in the same way. Heroes should support each other, and they are heroes who find nothing but new stimulus in such cold as this."
For our own parts, we believe that this condition of mind can be accounted for better than by Mr. Garrod's physical theory of the genesis of strong magnetic currents. We suspect that people who feel warm inside when there is great cold outside, regard themselves as having in some sense triumphed over circumstances, like the virtuous man who holds his own when weighed down by calamities, or like the poet who makes a witty verse out of what seemed impossible rhymes ; and they infer that their fertility in resource deserves the appreciation and approbation of mankind. It is said that a man who recovers from what his physicians tell him is a very fatal disease always holds his head a little higher for the achievement, and thinks (truly, perhaps,) that there is encourage- ment to his fellow-creatures in the fact,--encouragement for which they owe him admiration and thanks. If so, the state of mind of the man who rather likes cold is essentially analogous. He thinks of himself as leading a forlorn-hope which refuses to succumb to hos- tile influences,—nay, which only feels the hostile influences as agree- able excitements. That is a distinguished part to play, and as so many can play it who can play no other distinguished part in the world, they naturally feel something of the glow of heroic achieve- ment, when they become conscious of their position. They have always been taught that the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties is praiseworthy. Is not, then, not merely the pursuit, but the positive production of heat under difficulties, equally praiseworthy? Perhaps so, but the result is certainly apt to appear in too buoyant and even blatant a conceit. If cold unduly depresses the self-love of the modest man who retires before it into his inmost citadel, it certainly unduly lifts up the horn of the man who successfully defies it. And on the whole, we doubt if in either direction cold can be said to improve the character of the Saxon race.
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