Part 14

I desire to notice, very briefly, some perils and pains of our condition,--briefly premising that, as only the initiated can fully sympathise, it will be sufficient, and therefore best, to indicate rather than expatiate.

We are in ever-growing danger of becoming too abstract,--of losing our sympathy with passing emotions,--and particularly with those shared by numbers. There was a time when we went to public worship with others,--to the theatre,--to public meetings; when we were present at picnic parties and other festivals, and heard general conversation every day of our lives. Now, we are too apt to forget those times. The danger is, lest we should get to despise them, and to fancy ourselves superior to our former selves, because now we feel no social transports.

A lesser danger is that of fearing to experience emotions. If a barrel-organ makes itself heard from the street,--or a salute, on anniversaries, from the castle,--or a crowd gathers on the ridge to enjoy a regatta,--what a strange thrill comes over us! What a shrinking from being moved! How we wonder when we recal some discourse, whereby the voice of the preacher roused the souls of a multitude at once,--or when we awake within us the echoes of some Easter anthem, or of the Hallelujah Chorus in Westminster Abbey,--or when we image to ourselves a crowded theatre, when one tragic fear or horror bound together all the spirits that came for pleasure! When we try to imagine a flow of talk in which minds uttered themselves without thought of individuals;--when we revive these scenes of our former lives, we gasp for breath,--we wonder what we could have been made of to endure the excitement;--we are certain that we should die on the spot if we encountered it now. It might be so: but we must remember that our present condition is the morbid one, and not the former. We must keep up our sympathies, as far as we may, by cherishing such festal feelings as may survive; and ever remembering that our grave, and solid, and abstract life is adapted to only a portion of our nature, and that our exclusion from spontaneous emotions,--from all experience of sympathetic transport,--is a heavy misfortune, under which it behoves us to humble ourselves.

Those of us are well off who have, like myself, the advantage of some outward symbol which serves as communication between them and the world. Flags are my resource of this kind. Little do those who hoist them imagine how a hidden invalid appropriates their signals! The Union Jack on the flag-staff, in the castle-yard, marks Sunday to me in a way I would not miss. When I look abroad on Sabbath mornings, it tells of rest and church-going; and it is a matter of serious business with me to see it brought down at sunset,--a mute token in which there is more pathos than I could tell. And then the flags on the churches of the opposite shore on festal days tell me of a stirring holiday world,--make me hear again the Park and Tower guns,--show me fireworks and illuminations, and arouse something of the hum and buzz of a gay and moving crowd. Once more, the foreign flags hoisted by ships coming into port,--mere signals for pilots in intention,--speak, unknown to any one, a world of things to me. I learned them long ago, by heart, and with my heart. When I see a foreign vessel come bounding towards the harbour, and perceive, the moment she hoists her flag, whether she has cut across from a Norway fiord, or has contested her way from the Levant, or found a path from the far Indies, or brings greetings from some familiar American port,--what a boon is that flag to me! Sometimes I point my telescope, to see the sailors’ lips move in the utterance of a foreign tongue: at all events, I see in a moment the peaks of Sulitelma or of the Andes, or the summits of the Ghauts, or tropical sands, or chilly pine forests spread before me, or palmy West Indian groves. It is morally good, and unspeakably refreshing, to have some such instrumentality of signals with the world without, as these flags are to me.

There is a corresponding danger, though a less serious one, in such sympathy as we have making us repine. Though we may go on from month to month without one momentary wish that things were otherwise with us than as they are, yet, on occasion--once, perhaps, in a year--some incident wakens a thrill of longing to be as we once were. Some notice of a concert, or a picture, brings up the associations of a London spring, with all its intellectual and social pleasures:--or the mere mention of a lane or hedge, at the moment the March sun is shining in, recals the first hunting for violets in our days of long walks:--or a foreign post-mark in autumn transports us to Alpine passes or the shores of Italian lakes; and a sickly longing for scenes we shall see no more comes over us. But the reaction is so rapid and sure, that there is little moral peril in this--only the evanescent pain, which gives place to that act of acquiescence which has in it more joy than can be gathered from all the lanes, mountains, and shores of the globe.

The occasional sense of our being too weak for the ordinary incidents of life, is strangely distressing. The cry of an infant makes us wretched for hours after, in spite of every effort of reason. I saw, through my telescope, two big boys worrying a little one, and I could not look to see the end of it. They were so far off that there was nothing to be done. The distress to me was such--the picture of the lives of the three boys was so vivid--that I felt as if I had no reason nor courage left. The same sort of distress recurred, but in a more moderate degree, when I saw a gentleman do a thing which I wish could dwell on his mind as it does upon mine. I saw, through the same telescope, a gentleman pick up from the grass, where children had been playing the moment before, under the walls of the fort, a gay harlequin--one of those toy-figures whose limbs jerk with a string. He carried it to his party, a lady and another gentleman, sitting on a bench at the top of the rocks, whose base the sea was washing. When he had shown off the jerkings of the toy sufficiently, he began to take aim with it, as if to see how far he could throw. “He never will,” thought I, “throw that toy into the sea, while there are stones lying all about within reach!” He did it! Away whirled harlequin through the air far into the sea below: and there was no appearance of any remonstrance on the part of his companions! I could not look again towards the grass, to see the misery of the little owner of the toy on finding it gone. There was no comfort in the air of genteel complacency with which the three gentry walked down from the rocks, after this magnanimous deed. How glad should I be if this page should ever meet the eye of any one of them, and strike a late remorse into them! To me the incident brought back the passions of my childhood--the shock I have never got over to this hour--on reading that too torturing story of Miss Edgeworth’s, about the footman, who “broke off all the bobbins, and put them in his pocket, rolled the weaving-pillow down the dirty lane, jumped up behind his lady’s carriage, and was out of sight in an instant.” I think these must be the words, for they burnt themselves in upon my childish brain, and have stirred me with passion many a time since; as this harlequin adventure will ever do.

Many will wonder at all this--will despise such sensitiveness to trifles, considering what deeds are done every day in the world. They do not know the pains and penalties of sickness--that is all: and it may do them no harm to learn what they are, while my fellow-sufferers may find some comfort in an honest recognition of them.

This sensitiveness takes worse directions, however, and inflicts more misery still. It subjects some of us to a scrupulosity, particularly about truth, which brings endless troubles. Every mistake of fact that we happen to know of afflicts us as if we were responsible for it,--and more than it ought if we were so responsible. We tend to an absurd restlessness to set everything right; and of course, above all, what concerns ourselves. If any kind friend pities us too much, and praises us for our patience under sufferings which he supposes to be greater than we are actually enduring, we remonstrate, and explain, as if his sympathy were not good for him and us, at any rate; and as if, having told only truth ourselves, it could matter much how our troubles are rated--whether over or under. We call up images of all who suffer far more than ourselves, and implore him to go and pity them--to honour them and not us. If he smiles and answers, well, he will go and pity and honour them--but he must be sorry for us, too--we smile, also, at our own scrupulosity, though we see in it only a new symptom of disease.

There is yet a worse direction taken by this sensitiveness--both morally and in experience worse. Though our observation of life encourages hope, on the whole, to a boundless extent, both as to affairs and to human character, it teaches some truths about individual characters which are almost too much for our weakened condition. It may be absurd--it may be wrong--to be more afflicted about the faults and failings of the best and most beloved people, than about the vices and gross follies of a lower order of men; but such affliction is, to us, quite inevitable. It is not wholly irrational; for it is a melancholy sight to witness the encroachment of any bad habit of mind in those who should be outgrowing such bad habits, instead of being mastered by them. But we know it to be the common order of things that every man, even the best, carries about with him through life some fault or failing (the shadowy side of his brightest quality, if nothing worse), and that it is the rarest thing in the world to see any strong tendency overcome after the age of resolution, the youthful season of moral heroism, is past: yet, knowing this, it is not the less painful to witness it, with the clearness and strength with which the spectacle offers itself to us, on our post of observation. While working in the world, side by side with those whose doings we now contemplate, we were willing to be deceived in each particular instance; willing to expect that the judgment and action of those we loved and clung to would, in each case, be accordant with their best gifts and graces; and, however often disappointed, we made allowance for the known frailty, and inconsistently hoped it would be better next time. We now see too clearly to be deceived. With the discernment of love, and the power of leisure, we can accurately calculate the allowance to be made--we can precisely measure the obliquity beforehand--and save ourselves at least from disappointment. But there is no solace in this. There is more pain in the proof of the permanent character of faults (permanence including inevitable growth), than in perpetual new evidence of their existence; more sorrow in our prophetic power now than in our credulous weakness of old. The accurate readers of human character may be admired and envied for their infallible knowledge of how men will think and act; but, if they have a true heart-love for those whom they watch, they cannot much enjoy their power. If they have not love, neither can they be happy; so that it requires a penetrative knowledge indeed, into the ways of God as well as man, for such skill to be reconcileable with peace and with our human affections. It is a burdensome knowledge for us to wield, in our weakened condition, and one which it requires an ever-strengthening faith to convert into a nourisher of love.

The faults I have alluded to are such only as are compatible with general sincerity--such as have a character of frailty. Those which include tendencies essentially low--untruth, double-dealing, and selfish policy--assume so disgusting an aspect, when tested by the trying light and amidst the solemn leisure of the sick-room, that it cannot be wrong to follow willingly the irresistible leadings of nature--to dismiss them with loathing, and invite to our arms the simple and heroic sincerity, and the cheerful devotedness to the honour of God and the interests of man, which here assume much of the radiance in which they come back in vision from beyond the grave. If it be true that our moral taste becomes more sensitive in our seclusion, I trust that such sensitiveness has not necessarily any fastidiousness in it, but that its relish of good grows in full proportion to its discipline. I trust that if its disgust deepens as the low and cowardly order of faults are stripped to nakedness, so does its appreciation become more expanded and generous in regard to qualities which befit our heroic and aspiring nature and destination.

As for our best resource under the liabilities I have alluded to, a mere reference will suffice. “Whatsoever things are honest, pure, holy, lovely--to think on these things;” to fill our souls with conceptions of the god-like, so that our sensitiveness may turn in time to a keen apprehension of all that is in affinity with these; this is what we have to do--partly for present solace, and much more for the chance of converting our weakness into power--our mortal discipline into a heavenly habitude.

As for the ordinary and familiar sufferings and dangers of our state, the weariness of life which every one but the physician wonders at, often as it is witnessed; the longing for non-existence, which some pious people, who admit no bodily origin of any mental affection, are very much shocked at; the despair during protracted violent pain, which, however, being dumb, is seldom known at the moment--these cannot be illustrated, nor remedied, by anything that can be said on paper. One can only suggest to the sufferer, and to wise nurses, that in the power of ideas we are furnished with an implement of natural magic which may possibly operate at the most hopeless times. It was in a sort of despair that the father of the lame child, inconsiderately led out too far, gave the boy his stick to ride home on; whereupon the aching foot actually traversed the needful mile without being felt to ache. So the wise nurse may possibly find that a nobler idea than any hope of rest or relief may reanimate a spirit under a far severer pain. And assuredly there are some who could tell how, in the midst of anguish, the briefest suggestion of endurance, the slightest spiritual touch upon deep filial affections, has made a miraculous truce for them with torment and despair.

Observers of the sick think very seriously of their liability to become wedded to their own ways, and engrossed by their own occupations. The fact is as they see it; but it would be happy for us if we had no worse mistakes to apprehend. Those of the sequestered who may re-enter the world will be pretty sure to fall in love with new ways and employments, and to feel a quite sufficient disgust with their own. And if they are never to re-enter life, is it not well for them that they can spend some energies, which would otherwise be corrosive, upon outward things? If their souls are too narrow and purblind to live beyond the bounds of their abode, the best thing for them is to get through the rest of their time as easily as they can, in the way that suits them best. If they are of a higher order, their observers may be assured of two things--that their investment of energy on the ways and occupations of their singular and trying life, is no more than a needful absorption of a power which would otherwise destroy them; and also, that there is no fear of these things becoming indispensable to them or sufficient for them. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when they find it wise to desist from their most esteemed employments, in condescension to their own weakness, and recognise in this discipline the lesson of the day. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when the insufficiency of such objects is felt as keenly and pressingly as by the Missionary on his way to the heathen, or the Prime Minister with the interests of nations in the balance before his eyes--or by the drowning man before whose soul life lies pictured in the instant of time which remains to him. This liability, though real, is insignificant and transient, compared with many others.

There is a safeguard against it, too, in our own weakness. There is even, for some, a danger of growing absolutely idle, from a sense of the littleness of what they can do. Formerly they acted on the rule--“not a day without a line,” and now, thrown out of their habit by the absolute incapacity of some days, and disheartened by the small show made by their utmost rational diligence, they give up, and do nothing,--or nothing with regularity. This is a fearful danger. Nowhere are habits of regular employment more necessary than in such a life as ours; and, if we cannot preserve the absolute erectness of rationality,--if we must lean to the error of particularity or of indifference--I have no doubt of the former being the safer of the two;--the least injurious, and the most curable under a change of influences.

One of our most humbling and trying liabilities I do not remember to have seen mentioned anywhere, though it is so common and so deeply felt, that I have no doubt of a response from every sick prisoner (of a considerate mind), whose eye will fall upon this page, I mean our unfitness for doubtful moral enterprise. For doubtful moral enterprise, let it be observed. Where the case is clear, where the right appears to our own eyes to be all on one side, whatever may be on the other, moral enterprise becomes our best medicine; it becomes health and new life to us, as I have elsewhere said, be the responsibility and the immediate consequences to ourselves what they may. But when the case is not so clear, when we are pressed (as all conscientious people, sick or well, strong or feeble, are at times) by antagonist considerations of duty, we cannot, as in our vigorous days, take a part in some clear hour, and strengthen ourselves to bear recurring doubts, and to take cheerfully even conviction of mistake, if experience should prove our conscientious decision to have been unsound. We are not in a condition to bear recurring doubts, or to take cheerfully a conviction of moral mistake. Our duty, in our depressed circumstances, is to avoid such moral disturbance as we have not force to quell. We must, in submission and compassion to our own weakness, evade a decision if we honestly can; and if we cannot, we must accept of help--human help--and proceed upon the opinion of the soundest and most enlightened mind we can appeal to.

If there are any who lift the eyebrows, and shrug the shoulders at the supposition of this case, and declare that there is infallible direction to be found, in all particular cases, in the principles of religion, in answer to prayer, in the guidance of clergy, or the general opinion of mankind, I warn such that they will discover, sooner or later, that there is yet something for them to learn of morals, of the human mind, and of God’s discipline of humanity.

There is no point of which I am more sure than that it is unwise in sick people to keep a diary. Some suppose this task to be one of the duties of the sick-room; whereas I am confident that it is one of the most dangerous of snares. The traveller, moving from scene to scene in high health and spirits, keeps a diary; he looks at it a few years after, and can scarcely believe his own eyes when he sees how many entries there are of his hunger, thirst, and sleepiness. He searches anxiously for a record of some fact, important to the determination of a truth in science--some fact of which he has a vague impression; he cannot find it, but finds in its stead that he was chilly on that morning, or went to bed hungry that night. If it be so in his case, how should the journal of a sick-room avoid becoming a register of the changes of a morbid state? Not only this; but it can scarcely contain anything better. The experiencing and recording instruments themselves, the mind and body, are in a morbid condition, and cannot be trusted to perceive and record faithfully. Moreover, our tendency is, at the best, to an intense and growing self-consciousness, and our efforts should, therefore, be directed to having our minds called out of themselves--to causing our days to pass away as little marked as possible. A diary of public events, a register of books read, or of the opinions of those whose opinions are valuable on the great questions of the time, may be more or less amusing and profitable to keep; but then the rule should be absolute to exclude all mention of ourselves: and my own belief is, that it is wisest to avoid the temptation altogether--to keep clear of all bondage to ourselves and to habit that can be declined.

I was unutterably moved, lately, by the reading of a diary, preserved in MS., of one of the most innocent, holy, and devoted of God’s human children; a creature who entered upon life endowed with good gifts, spiritual, intellectual, and external, and who wasted away in body, dwindled away in mind, and sank early to the grave, clearly through the force given by superstition to a corroding self-consciousness, to which she was by constitution liable. Her diary yields clear lessons which might profitably be made known, but that they are not apparently recognised by those who had the charge of herself in life, and hold her papers now. Among these lessons, one is to our present purpose. Her diary became more and more a register of frames and feelings, each mood of which was fearfully important to herself as a token of God’s dispositions towards her. To an eye which now reads the whole at once, side by side with the dates and incidents of her life, nothing can be clearer than that the risings and fallings of her spiritual state exactly corresponded with the condition of her health. In one portion, the record becomes almost too painful to be borne. While her days were passed in heavenly deeds, and her solitude in prayer, she sinks daily lower and lower in hope and cheer: and at last, after a record of most mournful humiliation, we find a notice which explains all--of the breaking of a blood-vessel. To us it is nothing strange to experience fluctuations of more than spirits--of heart and soul, and to ascertain, after a time, that they were owing to physical causes. We even anticipate these changes, and know that when we awake in the morning, we shall be harassed by such and such a thought; that at such an hour of the day we shall suffer under remorse for such and such an old act and word, or under fear of the consequences of conduct which, at other seasons, we know to be right. We have that to tell of ourselves, which seems as a key to the mournful diary I have mentioned. This experience, and such warnings as that which has so deeply moved me, should teach us the wisdom and duty of not cherishing--by recording--our personal cares, but rather of “casting them upon Him who careth for us.” The most fitting sick-room aspiration is to attain to a trusting carelessness as to what becomes of our poor dear selves, while we become more and more engrossed by the vast interests which our Father is conducting within our view, from the birdie which builds under our eaves, to the gradual gathering of the nations towards the fold of Christ, on the everlasting hills.

SOME GAINS AND SWEETS OF INVALIDISM.

“God Almighty! There is a soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distil it out!” SHAKSPERE.

“Yet have they special pleasures, even mirth, By those undreamt of who have only trod Life’s valley smooth; and if the rolling earth To their nice ear have many a painful tone, They know man does not live by joy alone, But by the presence of the power of God.” MILNES.

“But here we are;--that is a great fact; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is here; and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”

EMERSON.

It is harder to be brief about our gains and privileges than about our peculiar troubles: but I must try to be so; for the discoveries we make, though to us all glowing with freshness and beauty, are, to those who merely receive them, as trite as any old moralities whatever.

One great and strange blessing to us is, the abolition of the future--of our own future in this life.

It is commonly thought a chief privilege of childhood, that it is passed without thought of the future--that the present is all in all. I doubt the truth of this. My own experience in childhood was of a painful and incessant longing for the future--a longing which enhanced all its innumerable pains, and embittered many of its pleasures--a longing for strength of body and of mind, for independence of action--for an escape, in short, from the conditions of childhood. The privilege which I then missed I have found now. Let it be a comfort to all sorrowing friends of those who are under any sort of doom without an assigned period to know, that in such cases the sense of doom vanishes. When the future becomes a blank to us, it becomes presently invisible. And when we sustain this change we do not contract in our desires and interests, but, I humbly hope, the contrary. The thoughts which stretched forwards, with eagerness and anxiety, now spread themselves abroad, more calmly and with more disinterestedness. There is danger of our losing sympathy with the young, the healthy, the ambitious; for we soon require to be reminded of those states of mind, and those classes of interests which involve ambition, or any kind of personal regard to the future: but, if we can preserve these sympathies, it does appear to me that the change is, to ourselves, pure gain. The image of five, ten, twenty years of our present life, or decline into deeper suffering, ending in death, makes absolutely no impression upon us. We have not the slightest movement of a wish that it were otherwise;--we do not turn our heads half round to see if there be no way of escape: and this is because our interests are all occupied with immediate and pressing objects, in which we have ascertained our true life to consist. Of these objects we would not surrender one for the permission to go back to the most brilliant point of our lives. Wealth would be a trouble to us--a responsibility we would rather decline; and it is astonishing to us that any man can wish for more than is needed to furnish his children well for the probation of life. Ambition and its objects (of course, not including usefulness) appear to us so much voluntarily incurred bondage and fatigue. Subjection to the opinions of men--a dependence on their suffrages for any heartfelt object--seems a slavery so humbling and so unnecessary, that we could hardly wonder sufficiently at it, but for the recollection that all human desires and passions are the instruments by which the work of the race is done, and that ambition is far from being among the lowest of these instruments. Those of us who had known formerly, for a sufficient length of time, what it was to have fame, did not need to be laid by to discover how soon and how thoroughly it becomes disregarded (except for its collateral privileges), and left behind among our forgotten objects of desire: but our present position is the best for following out its true history--for tracing that path a reach beyond the point where moralists commonly leave it. The young aspirant is warned betimes, without practical effect, that the privileges of obscurity are irrecoverable: that, when he has become famous, he may long in vain for the quiet shelter of privacy, that he has left. He feels this, with a sense of panic, when he has gained the celebrity he longs for, and is undergoing his first agonies from adverse opinion. If he would but believe us, we watchers could tell him that, though he can never retreat into his original privacy, there is a yet more complete shelter before him, if he does not linger, or take up his rest short of his journey’s end. This shelter is not to be found in indifference, in contempt for human opinion--that ugly mask behind which some strive to hide the workings of an agonised countenance, while the scorchings of scorn beat fiercely on their brains, and the jeerings of ridicule torture their ears. There is no rest, no shelter, in contempt: and human opinion can never be naturally despised, though it has no claim to any man’s allegiance. The true and welcome ultimate shelter of the celebrated is in great interests--great objects. If they use the power their fame puts into their hands for the furtherance of any of the great ends for which Providence is operating, they find themselves by degrees in possession once more of the external freedom, the internal quiet, the genuine privacy of soul, which they believed forfeited for ever, while the consciousness of the gaze of the world was upon them. They read what is said of themselves in print just as if it was said of any other person, if it be laudatory; and with a quieter feeling still if it be adverse, as I shall presently describe.

It is sometimes said, that it is a pity when great men do not happen to die on the completion of the one grand achievement of their lives, instead of taming down the effect by living on afterwards like common men;--that Clarkson should have died on the abolition of the slave-trade,--Howard after his first or second journey,--Scott on the publication of his best romance,--and so on. But there is a melo-dramatic air about such a wish, which appears childish to moral speculators. We are glad to have Clarkson still, to honour freshly in his old age. We see more glory about the head of John Quincy Adams contending, as a Representative in Congress, for popular rights, than he ever wore as President of the United States. We should be glad that Rowland Hill should live and work as a common man for a quarter of a century after the complete realisation of his magnificent boon to society. In truth, we behold great men entering early upon their heaven, when we see them tranquilly retired, or engaged in common labours, after their most memorable task is accomplished. The worthiest of celebrated men would, I believe, be found, if their meditations could be read, anticipating with the highest satisfaction, as the happiest part of their prospect beyond the grave, their finding a level condition once more--being encompassed by equals--or, as the popular preacher puts it, starting fair from the new post. Such being the natural desire of simple hearts, there is a pleasure to spectators in seeing them, while still here, encompassed with fellowship--not set above, nor apart, though enjoying the natural recompenses of their deeds.

The words “natural recompenses” remind me of another gain conferred on us by our condition--scarcely separable, perhaps, from those I have mentioned--from the extinction of all concern about our future in this world, and the ordinary objects of pursuit; but yet to us so conspicuous, so heartfelt, as to demand record as a blessing by itself. I mean the conviction of the hollowness of all talk of reward for conduct;--the conviction of the essential blessedness of goodness. What can appear more trite? Where is the church or chapel in which it is not preached every Sunday? Yet we, who heard and believed through all the Sundays and week-days of many years, seem but now to have known this truth. Our knowledge is now tested by the indifference with which we behold men struggling for other objects, under a sort of insanity, as it appears to us, while the interests which animate us to sympathy are those of the pure in heart, seeing God before they die; and the dread which chills our souls is for the multitude who live in passion and die in moral insensibility. To us it appears so obviously the supreme good to have a healthy soul serenely reposing in innocence, and spontaneously working for God and man, that all divergence of aims from this end seems madness, and all imagery of rewards for moral desert the most profane of mockeries. It is a matter of wonder to us, that we ever conceived of royalty otherwise than as a title to compassion; of hereditary honours, as desirable; of fame, as an end; and we are apt to wonder at others, in their turn, that they do not perceive the most blessed of our race to be the moral reformers of each age, passing “from strength to strength,” although wearing out in their enterprise, and the placid well-doers, whether high or lowly in their service. The appendages themselves of such a state--the esteem, honour, and love which wait upon moral desert--almost vanish from our notice when we are contemplating the infinite blessedness of the peace of a holy heart.