THE SPECTATOR, January 11, 1890, pp. 49-50

A COMMENTARY IN AN EASY-CHAIR: THE INFLUENZA - FASHIONABLE DISORDERS - THE COMPLAINTS OF LITERATURE - A GREAT DOWNFALL.

THE influenza, it appears, is no longer a thing to speculate upon, but a thing which has come: and the little alarm and curiosity, not unmixed with amusement, with which we have all been looking for the possible arrival of what is after all an epidemic without a sting-except in rare and exceptional cases-may now be changed into the hope of seeing it soon float away. It is, and has always been, a sort of ghost of an epidemic, a shadowy illness picturesquely expressed by the suggestion of a passing influence like the "blight," equally well known and equally inexplainable, which sometimes falls like a curtain upon a spring day.

I remember reading somewhere, many years ago, an account of the influenza when it last appeared in England : how in a big ship, a great man-o'-war's man of those days, everybody was quite well and brisk one morning, and helpless, vanquished, useless, good for nothing, the next. There was no idea of dying, or even of being seriously ill. The thing came, no one knew whence,-knocked down all the bluejackets like so many nine­pins [1], made them wail, "Give me some drink, Titanius, like a sick girl," [2] -and by-and-by floated off again, to be heard of no more. The description of the great vessel fully equipped for war, with its little world of strong men, all for the moment incapable of saying " Boh!" to a goose, was highly whimsical, though I cannot remember where I read it, and expressed with much feeling the helpless languor and prostration of this strange complaint. A certain comic sense of the absurdity of being overcome by so small a matter was in the old record; but whether it is that we have grown graver, or that the complaint is more serious, I hear nobody laugh now. Perhaps, however, the joke was always purely English, and will come up again now we have ourselves got the infection. Certainly there is already beginning to appear a pleasant look of superiority among those to whom the distinction of having had it has early and satisfactorily come.

Is it not, however, a confusion of terms to associate la grippe, that favourite Parisian malady which is always about, with influenza? La grippe is, or used to be, as constant as the winter, no chance or occasional "influence" at all. I remember, many years ago, having an encounter in Paris with that complaint, which my doctor there, who was a clever young Englishman-now no longer young, but quite as clever, practising in London-informed me was the result of a specific poison, for all the world as if one had taken a dose of strychnine, or some other deadly thing: and required only to be got rid of by the use, in that special case, of ipecacuanha, to make a cure. And . he kept his word. The patient was a child, who, being plied constantly with the emetic in small doses, at last was sick and ejected something. And forthwith the fever fled like magic, the evil symptoms disappeared, the child slept, and was well. I don't know whether this simple remedy is a known one, or whether, if so, it has dropped, as medicines do, like diseases, into the limbo of a past fashion; but for the absolute efficacy of the cure on one occasion I can fully vouch.

It is curious to talk of a fashion in diseases; but it is nevertheless true. An epidemic, of course, is a different affair: though the fever that is in vogue at one period of our history is not the fever that is in vogue at another, yet we are always subject to blasts of noxious influence in this kind. But maladies which are not epidemic do unquestionably become the fashion in the most curious way. I wonder, for instance, whether the mysterious maladies which have lately crept among the cultivated classes of society are really to be attributed to overwork? Who had ever heard of overwork as a complaint fifty, nay, thirty years ago? But now it is rather a common, vulgar sort of thing not to have been prostrated by it, proving either that the non-sufferer has done no work to speak of, or has so rude and insensible an organisation as to be incapable of human nature's more delicate distresses. As a reason for this, we are told that people work more and live faster nowadays than in the placid times when the century was but half as old as it is now,-a reason, I confess, in which I put no faith whatever. Later still there has been a development of disease among literary persons which has moved some profane bystanders to unseemly laughter, and which certainly has its comic side. Imagine a company of refined and highly cultured people, persons of genius, the instructors of their day, each, male and female after their kind, though in excellent health otherwise, with his or her right arm in a sling, victims of Writer's Cramp! This is a complaint of which the last generation was quite unconscious. Scott never heard of it, one may be sure ; no, nor even Dickens, who was not averse to pose a little; nor our excellent Anthony of the Trollopes, who wrote enough, one may well believe, to weary out twenty right arms; nay, even in Grub Street the malady was unknown. And how about all the poor clerks, whose works, like Charles Lamb's, are collected in endless folios, and whose pens go steadily from day to day? The climax of this fashionable complaint was revealed to me the other day by the letter (dictated) of a dear little innocent girl, who has just had her first story (a little one) printed in a magazine. She has got writer's cramp on the strength of it, bless her heart! Could the power of fashion go further?

There is another name, I believe, for this complaint which suggests a very different sort of idea. This is "Scrivener's palsy."[3] What a tragic suggestion is in the title! It seems to picture a spare old man in a past century sitting out in all weathers, like the applewomen, writing with frozen fingers the letters of the poor folks who are no scholars to friends and lovers far away; or the drudge of some law-writer - engrossing at so much, or rather so little, a folio, the papers on which there must not be a blot; or those, poorest of the poor in our own day, who earn the meanest pittance by addressing circulars. These might well have their special complaint, compound of poverty and hard mechanical toil,- slaves of the thankless pen, to whom comes neither thanks nor praise nor credit, and only the scantiest dry bread hardly earned. One has seen the poor original of such a picture as the name suggests in a little Italian town, in some booth under the Duomo or near the Palazzo of the State, with his poor little lamp flaring, his teeth chattering, his scaldino [4] between his spare knees; and it is easy enough to understand how want and exposure, and long waiting and monotony and cold, should dry up the marrow in his bones. Many a fit subject for scrivener's palsy might be found, no doubt, in occupations more common among our own surroundings. The poor clerk who does his work all day in his office, and ekes out his scanty pay by keeping some shopkeepers' books at night; the poor copyist turning his monotonous head like an automaton from his subject to his paper, the weariest, endless movement! Well! but the complaint is very rare notwithstanding. and I never heard of a young clerk in his twenties who had been assailed by it, which it is consolatory to know.

Is it ill-natured to wonder whether Mr. Lewis Carroll, the beloved of all the children, gentlest magician who has led our sober selves into delightful lands of nonsense where all was topsy-turvy, has had writer's cramp? and whether it has gone to his head? It is perhaps not good that such a question should be asked under the immediate pressure of a great disappointment: a certain ferocity steals into the note of interrogation-a fierce suggestion is in the inquiry. Bitterly disappointed indeed are we; for here is a new book with that name, suggestive of endless fun and delightful bewilderment, upon the title-page [5]. With hopes of forgetting influenza and Christmas bills, and every other evil thing, we seize the happy volume, but only to fall back with a blank countenance and open mouth of horror. Alas! here is no dear land of topsy-turvy, no sedate little maiden unsurprised, no delightfully logical Duchess or inconsequent hatter to make our hearts light. Literature is going sadly wrong in these strange times, whether because of universal overwork, or writer's cramp, or influenza, or what, we cannot tell. I have heard a dreadful story to the effect that Mr. Lewis Carroll has been for ten years collecting all the funny things he could find-all the jokes, the humorous conversations, the nonsense-which in grave collegiate circles, among the wise of the earth, came under his notice. It is a dreadful thing to say of such a well- known and delightful writer. But, sadder still, I now believe it is true. Nothing, not even a surgical operation, could have convinced me of such a slanderous statement yesterday. But now, alas! I believe it. He has not only been collecting jokes for ten years, but he has made an index of them. He has taken the pains to point out that they are jokes, and the pages on which we shall find them. Oh, what a fearful falling-off is here! It was once a wonderful thing to believe that Alice had her origin in Oxford . She made us think better of the wit in the common-rooms and the talk at the high tables. But Alice has gone, to return no more; and the common-room is painfully evident, and those elaborately humorous concoctions that amuse the learned. Alas for Wonderland! it has closed its delightful gates, and even the paths that led to them are obliterated. Mr. Lewis Carroll, like the inimitable Alice, is vanished and gone. We know the gentleman's real name very well. He is a Fellow of his College, and has a pretty wit. The Dons all laugh whenever he opens his mouth: when he asks for the mustard, the mirth is boundless. And, alas! Our old friend has fallen to the level of his fate.

NOTES

[1] knocked down all the bluejackets like so many nine­pins: Bluejackets is a reference to the British Navy. Nine-pins, also called skittles, is a bowling game played with nine wooden pins. See The Diary of Samuel Pepys for further information. [back]
[2] "Give me some drink, Titanius, like a sick girl": A quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (I, ii, 135-6). Cassius, resentful, declares Caesar's character unworthy of his power and position and illustrates his views with his personal experience of the emperor's weaknesses. [back]
[3] Scrivener's palsy: An old-fashioned term for "writer's cramp". [back]
[4] scaldino: "a receptacle exactly in the form of a basket, but made of glazed earthenware. It is filled with ashes and charcoal, and is so common that there are as many of them in Italy as there are inhabitants-at least, in the north. And as they are very often put under the garments next to the body, it is not remarkable that the idea that the very agreeable warmth would be impregnating should have occurred". Godfrey Leland, Charles. Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition. New York: C. Scribner's sons; and London: T. F. Unwin, 1892, p. 160. Full e-text at The Internet Secret Texts Archive . [back]
[5]: Oliphant is probably referring to Sylvie and Bruno (1889), a story which compiles a wide range of materials (anecdotes, poems, short stories, etc.) Carroll had been collecting for years. He wrote in the Preface: "As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me-who knows how?-with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought-as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing-specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' " [back]

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