Sydney Fisher - The True Benjamin Franklin

In this, the best portrait for studying Franklin’s eye, we see at once that it is the eye of a very sensuous man, and we also see many details which mark the self-made man, the man who never had been and never pretended to be an aristocrat. This is in strong contrast to Washington’s portraits, which all disclose a man distinctly of the upper class and conscious of it.

But, in spite of this homeliness in the Duplessis portrait and the easy, careless manner in which the clothes are worn, there are no signs of what might be called vulgarity. The wonderful and many-sided accomplishments of the man carried him well above this. Brought up as a boy at candle- and soap-making, he nevertheless, when prosperous, turned instinctively to higher things and refined accomplishments and was comparatively indifferent to material wealth. Nor do we find in him any of that bitter hostility and jealousy of the established and successful which more modern experience might lead us to expect.

The Duplessis portrait conforms to what we read of Franklin in representing him as hale and vigorous at seventy-two. The face is full of lines, but they are the lines of thought, and of thought that has come easily and cheerfully; there are no traces of anxiety, gnawing care, or bitterness. In Paris, at the time the Duplessis portrait was painted, Franklin was regarded as a rather unusual example of vigor and good health in old age. John Adams in his Diary uses him as a standard, and speaks of other old men in France as being equal or almost equal to him in health.

Although not so free from disease as were his parents, he was not much troubled with it until late in life. When a young man of about twenty-one he had a bad attack of pleurisy, of which he nearly died. It terminated in an abscess of the left lung, and when this broke, he was almost suffocated by the quantity and suddenness of the discharge. A few years afterwards he had a similar attack of pleurisy, ending in the same way; and it was an abscess in his lung which finally caused his death. The two abscesses which he had when a young man seem to have left no ill effects; and after his two attacks of pleurisy he was free from serious sickness for many years, until at the age of fifty-one he went to England to represent the Province of Pennsylvania. Soon after landing he was attacked by an obscure fever, of which he does not give the name, and which disabled him for eight weeks. He was delirious, and they cupped him and gave him enormous quantities of bark.

After he had passed middle life he found that he could not remain entirely well unless he took a journey every year. During the nine years of his residence in Paris as minister to France he was unable to take these journeys, and as a consequence his health rapidly deteriorated. He had violent attacks which incapacitated him for weeks, sometimes for months, and at the close of the nine years he could scarcely walk and could not bear the jolting of a carriage.

In France his diseases were first the gout and afterwards the stone. He was one of those stout, full-blooded men who the doctors say are peculiarly liable to gout, and his tendency to it was evidently increased by his very sedentary habits. He confesses this in part of that clever dialogue which he wrote to amuse the Parisians:

“Midnight, October 22, 1780.

“ Franklin. – Eh! Oh! Eh! What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?

“ Gout. – Many things; you have ate and drank too freely, and too much indulged those legs of yours in their indolence.

“ Franklin. – Who is it that accuses me?

“ Gout. – It is I, even I, the Gout.

“ Franklin. – What! my enemy in person?

“ Gout. – No, not your enemy.

“ Franklin. – I repeat it; my enemy; for you would not only torment my body to death, but ruin my good name; you reproach me as a glutton and a tippler; now all the world, that knows me, will allow that I am neither the one nor the other.

“ Gout. – The world may think as it pleases; it is always very complaisant to itself, and sometimes to its friends; but I very well know that the quantity of meat and drink proper for a man, who takes a reasonable degree of exercise, would be too much for another, who never takes any.

“ Franklin. – I take – Eh! Oh! – as much exercise – Eh! – as I can, Madam Gout. You know my sedentary state, and on that account, it would seem, Madam Gout, as if you might spare me a little, seeing it is not altogether my own fault.

“ Gout. – Not a jot; your rhetoric and your politeness are thrown away; your apology avails nothing. If your situation in life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreations, at least, should be active. You ought to walk or ride; or, if the weather prevents that, play at billiards. But let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast, by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea, with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested. Immediately afterward you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to your sedentary condition. But what is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful garden of those friends, with whom you have dined, would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours!.. Wrapt in the speculations of this wretched game, you destroy your constitution. What can be expected from such a course of living, but a body replete with stagnant humors, ready to fall a prey to all kinds of dangerous maladies, if I, the Gout, did not occasionally bring you relief by agitating those humors, and so purifying or dissipating them?.. But amidst my instructions, I had almost forgot to administer my wholesome corrections; so take that twinge, – and that…”

He tried to give himself exercise by walking up and down his room. In that humorous essay, “The Craven Street Gazette,” in which he describes the doings of Mrs. Stevenson’s household, where he lived in London, there is a passage evidently referring to himself: “Dr. Fatsides made four hundred and sixty turns in his dining-room as the exact distance of a visit to the lovely Lady Barwell, whom he did not find at home; so there was no struggle for and against a kiss, and he sat down to dream in the easy-chair that he had it without any trouble.”

Some years afterwards, when he was in Paris, John Adams upbraided him for not taking more exercise; but he replied, “Yes, I walk a league every day in my chamber. I walk quick, and for an hour, so that I go a league; I make a point of religion of it.” This was not a very good substitute for out-of-door exertion. In fact, Franklin’s opinions on the subject of exercise were not wise. The test of exercise was, he thought, the amount of warmth it added to the body, and he inferred, therefore, that walking must be better than riding on horseback, and he even recommended walking up and down stairs. Walking, being monotonous and having very little effect on the trunk and upper portions of the body, is generally admitted to be insufficient for those who require much exercise; while running up and down stairs would now be considered positively injurious. But it is, perhaps, hardly in order to criticise the methods of a man who succeeded in living to be eighty-four and who served the public until the last year of his life.