Visions of America: Public Representations of the United States Circulating in India from 1870-1900

American Nerves

Suicide is on the increase in the United States, and the Americans are rather proud of the fact. A tendency to kill oneself is a sign of nerve-disease, and nervousness is only one of the sequels of civilization. Such is the theory of Dr. Beard; and Dr. Beard is the physician to whom all the languid hypochondriacs of the New World flee. There may be something in it. A people who can afford to be nervous must have a good deal of leisure on their hands. They must be free from the wholesome necessity of finding the wherewithal for four meals per diem, and are therefore entitled to consider what the old dramatists call the megrims, like gout, a most genteel kind of trouble. Until the Americans made money we heard nothing of their nerves. They were luxuries which, like diamonds, Saratoga trunks, and six-thousand dollar trotters, could be dispensed with. The man who cleared the forest all day, and nooned with his long legs over a log, could not pester himself with such trifles. Nor could Colonel Hiram Y. Stoggins, with a coonskin contract on hand, indulge in nerves, and more than could that mother of the Republic whose boast it was that she could her weight in wild oats. One cannot well imagine an Apache squaw troubled with hysteria, or an Arapahoe brave with dyspepsia; and most assuredly the Western governor who devoted the morning to ploughing his prairie-farm, and the afternoon to the affairs of the State, was not a nervous man. The early Americans, like colonists generally, had no time for nonsense. They did not go to Long Beach, or Newport, or Virginia Springs, because they had not been invented; and so lived out their days, neither very rich nor more nervous than the fashion of the period demanded.

Nervousness and its attendant evils are the outcome of later years, and since the Civil War they have increased enormously. The people have grown rich, and desire to grow still richer. They struggle, plot, and gasp in the race for wealth. A Wall street broker leads a life compared with which a jobber in Capelcourt is a mere dilettante. He cannot even afford a holiday. He may send his family to a watering place; but the only relaxation he gives himself is to rush out by an express train at night, drive from the station in time to catch the hotel dinner, talk Erie and seven-thirties in the billiard-room till mid-night, and then, after a short rest, hurry off to town and the feverish world in which he lives all the week long. His wife and daughters know scarcely any way of spending life except dancing in close hotel ball-rooms; or in a buggy driving, where the hot dry climate is not hotter, and drier, and more nervously exhausting than ordinary. Few of them ride; none of them walk. Fox-hunting is an exotic in Tenessee and Virginia; but it would be an unladylike pastime for the "women of America;" and croquet, lawn-tennis, and other out-of-door exercises have comparatively few followers. A nation that can find its craving for social superiority only gratified through dollars is naturally eager to acquire them, and to spend them with astoutation. The Americas of an earlier generation were mostly illiterate; the majority of the European emigrants are poor and ignorant. But as they grow wealthier they not unreasonably desire that their children should be educated. Hence, like everything else in the New World, the schools are run at express speed, and the scholars are compelled to cram learning as their parents cram food--the greatest amount and the most variety in the briefest possible period. They are endlessly reciting and committing to memory, and striving to be first until the child's nervous energy is exhausted before if leaves school, and the school is too often only the road to the asylum. The children of parents whose brain has lain fallow for ages are suddenly stimulated to bear a crop that exhausts the untilled soil. It is the same with their stomachs. Digestive organs inheriting a sound capacity for disposing of smoked sausages and sauerkraut, are suddenly confronted with the soft crabs and terrapin, the canvas-backs and salmon, the strawberry cakes, the ices, and the endless other representatives of what Dugald Dalgetty would have called the "vivers" of the Land of Promise. The result is often a break-down. Or, if the alimentary  tract pulls through, the untrained gourmet bequeaths a dyspeptic interior to his heirs, who, freed from the active exercise, the out-of-door life, and the early frugality enforced on their parents, supply further additions to the American legion who are victims of nervousness, epilepsy, neurasthenia, insanity, and the rest of it.

Men prematurely bald, old, "unable to carry their liquor," and anxious beyond their face years are getting conspicuously common in America. The slow sententious Yankee of the stage is becoming rare in the cities, and the cool individual who offers the suspicious stranger a cigar-light stuck in the muzzle of a revolver is happily confined to Deadwood Creek or Gouge Eye Gulch. The women are more lovely than ever. Their faces are the faces of angels chiselled in marble; but the pallor is unhealthy, and the liveliness of the American girl is, to a great extent, incipient disease. It is, like their beauty, part of that nervousness which is afflicting their race. Their minds are untroubled by the cares of house-keeping, for most of them live in hotels or in boarding-houses. In Europe they contract dazzling marriages. But they soon fade; and while the English nation, and even her sister of Cannula, who leads much the same kind of life, is still in her prime, the once beautiful Americaine is often a lean hysterical haunter of health resorts. The future is not a pleasant prospect. As men of leisure depart from the busy multitude, it is difficult to see what they are to do with their money. There is a limit to the number of greenbacks which people can spend on a house, and even a modest fortune is cumbersome to carry about in diamonds and watch chains. They can, of course, always go to Paris; but a Tuileries American, as this hybrid Gaul used to be called in Napoleonic days, ceases to be an American, while, if he stays at home, it is hard to see how the rich average Republican is to spend his money in any other way than that which has produced and is increasing the nervousness of his race. Competitive examinations, which will, in time, add their worry to the endless voting and electing of the present time, are calculated to intensify the trouble. But for long the evil will not be much noticed. The country will be fertilised by a continuous stream of fresh-faced, simple-lived emigrants from "used-up Europe." These will mingle with the humbler natives and since the true-born Yankee of New England and the "fust family," American of the South are notorious for the fewness of their children, will keep up the population of the United States. Meantime, the learned folks, without the fear of patriotic papers before their eyes, will affirm that the European is not naturalised in the New World. At best he is a nervous edition of the gallant from whence he sprang and were it not for the new blood that is ever-recruiting this jaded life, would dwindle away and become extinct--World.

From The Pioneer. April 11, 1882. Page 7.

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