Jackson

MR. J. A. JACKSON, whose interesting experience I have just been reading in one of those signed editorials that add so much to the attractiveness of our more popular magazines, is, by his own description, a ‘vigorous, two-fisted he-man,’ who owes this emphatic masculinity to the jolly practice of exercising ten minutes a day to music.

But Mr. Jackson was not always so vigorous, so double-fisted, so, in a word, he. There was a time, not so very long ago, when he envied Mr. Kennedy, Walter Kennedy, who ‘came down to the office with the vigor and freshness of a boy — the man with the sparkle in his eye, indicating health, and a springy step that confirmed the indication. Answers to business problems that baffled the rest of us, came with surprising ease to Kennedy.’

It puzzled and, as we now say, intrigued Mr. Jackson; and he tactfully questioned the superman.

Kennedy laughed — no doubt a vigorous, two-fisted, he-laugh. ‘The splendid health and energy which I enjoy now,’ said he, ‘and which I expect to have when I am in my nineties, is due to certain exercises combined with music. It is a method I learned of a few months ago, when I was about as weakly, sickly, lackadaisical and nervous a chap as you’d meet in a month of Sundays. I was a wreck. Why, I expect to live to be at least a hundred, and I’ll be a real man every day I am on this old earth.’

The best of it is that what Kennedy and Jackson accomplished — I can do too! I also may become vigorous, twofisted, and ‘he.’

All I need is the phonograph; for, although I can, and do, perform the same gyrations in silence, I do not get the same results as Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson’s muscles began immediately to take on a ‘corded look’ (similar, I imagine, to those of Mr. Dempsey when about to strike M. Carpentier), which I miss in my own. Everybody soon noticed the improvement in him; nobody has noticed any improvement in me. If J. A. Jackson were writing this essay, he would, I dare say, have already finished it, and started another. It must be the music.

It is a commonplace of human nature that civilized man is so fundamentally averse to regular exercise, and at the same time so reasonably certain of its beneficial effect, that he frequently begins with determination, and rarely keeps at it long enough to do him any good. If regular exercise were a bad habit, it would be easier to acquire. But the practice offends no present conception of moral behavior, and is so unattractive to the average man that the few of exceptional strength of character (like myself) who do their exercises on the Sabbath have escaped observation. This, of course, would have been impossible, except by the hypocrisy of a ‘sacred concert,’ if we had done them to music. The exerciser might be impelled by vanity (as in my own case, who saw myself with apprehension growing wider and wider in proportion to my height), or by ambition (like Mr. Jackson, who found himself stumped by business problems that Mr. Kennedy handled with the careless ease of a schoolgirl disposing of an ice cream soda); he might exercise to postpone his death or to improve his appetite for breakfast; but, whatever his motive, nobody argued or pleaded with him to stop before it was too late. Everybody, in fact, knew that he would. It was a good habit, and some men, wise in self-knowledge, and wealthy enough to afford the painful luxury, every now and then hired an ex-pugilist to make them practise it.

But the addition of music may, and very likely will, make a great difference. Subtract music from the dance— and what enthusiastic maiden (or she-girl) would honestly exclaim, ‘I could dance forever!’ Add music to the daily exercises — and may we not presently hear a like spontaneous tribute to the inexhaustible joy of doing them? Already, in many cases — for I have no doubt that men of all ages and everywhere have read and been influenced by the experience of J. A. Jackson—this idea must have affected exercise as the invention of the typewriter has affected authorship, making what was once a quiet, self-respecting, and private occupation often (to put it bluntly) a neighborhood nuisance. It’s all very fine for the poet, composing a song to dawn, and up early to get the proper atmosphere; but think of the poor mother trying to put her babe to sleep in the house across the street! This, however, is an intruding thought; and indeed, if we substitute Mr. Jackson for the poet, the music might lull the babe, and the poor mother seize the opportunity to do her own daily exercises, without having to wind up the phonograph. Nay more, a little later in the morning, one band might suffice for several adjacent houses, and the entire neighborhood, men, women, and children, could begin the day by exercising together.

There is, it appears, a health-wave as well as a crime-wave, and the ancient slogan of Horace, mens sana in corpore sano, runs in effect through the advertising pages, cunningly modified to offset the natural laziness of civilized man by the promise of quick results. We are not only advised to exercise ten minutes a day to music, but we are told to eat yeast-cakes between meals, so that some future novelist may deduce that this was a social custom comparable to the earlier taking of snuff. A vitamine to the rescue! Hardly a page away from Mr. Jackson (whose very picture is so radiant of ‘pep’ that I almost sneeze and fall over backward when I look at it), I find the experience of ‘an old man at fifty,’ who made the happy discovery that ‘by practising a few simple exercises each morning before arising, he was gradually but surely winning back health and strength. Yes, actually exercising in bed! Just a series of gentle exercises, of an original sort, devised by himself, proved his salvation.’ He is now a ‘young man at seventy-two,’ and I have no doubt that many an honest citizen, with the book of directions by his bedside, tries to do those gentle exercises of an original sort before he gets up. This is not a matter that concerns the neighbors, and in most cases, I dare say, the gentle exercises will soon put him to sleep.

But the point of general interest is that this movement is not exclusively for the young: it is a call to us middleaged, irrespective of sex, — for what is sauce for the gander is sauce also for the goose, — to front our declining years with courage. If it lacked reasonable response, the call would soon cease. And it is altogether a braver and better way to front them, if we may believe a contemporary essayist, than was that of the middle-aged a hundred years ago.

‘ As we advance in life,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect. We try to arrest its last few tottering steps, and to make it linger on the brink of the grave. We can never leave off wondering how that which has been should cease to be, and would still live on, that we may wonder at our own shadow, and when “all the life of life is flown,”dwell on the retrospect of the past. This is accompanied by a mechanical tenaciousness of whatever we possess, and a sense of fallacious hollowness in all we see. Instead of the full, pulpy feeling of youth, everything is flat and insipid.’

Not much, Mr. Hazlitt.

If we find ourselves losing that ‘full, pulpy feeling of youth,’—I recommend the phrase to the ad-writers, — we will exercise ten minutes a day to music and get it back.

Only we must not expect too much and all at once. Without questioning Mr. Jackson’s rapid improvement, the common experience, I feel safe in saying, is not so promptly gratifying. It is more akin to that of the sedentary gentleman who pauses to satisfy an intelligent curiosity as to what the little crowd is looking at in the shop window, and sees Hercules in person demonstrating an exercising machine. Involuntarily he compares himself with Hercules— those arms and that torso which he knows so well in his bedroom mirror, with these arms and that torso on the other side of the plate glass. It would be fine to look like that in the bedroom mirror! And why not? Presently he is inside the store, buying a ‘Home Gymnasium’; and so impatient is he to begin, that he can hardly get it home fast enough. He attaches it to the wall, studies the directions, and exercises regularly for a whole week. Each morning and night he hopefully feels his biceps— but there is no material change. Even at the end of the week, he looks no more like Hercules in the bedroom mirror than he did at the beginning. It is very discouraging.

But some of us middle-aged are exercising as the middle-aged never did before.

And some of us, I hope, will stick to it, though we have to make up the music in our heads as we go along; for we, too, like Walter Kennedy, are determined to be real men every day we are on this old earth.

There is, however, one element of danger in the music: it may be questioned by those who unselfishly preoccupy themselves with such matters whether regular exercise is still a good habit. Mr. Jackson docs not describe the music, but I hope it is not sensuous.