פורום ארץ הצבי

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I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last''
twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry
of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and
music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read
a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found
it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost
my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too
energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me
pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me
the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels
which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order,
have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often
bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and
I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily--against
which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not
come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can
thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all
the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently
of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts
of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to
have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of
that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I
cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better
constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and
if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some
poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps
the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active
through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may
possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral
character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.''

. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.