Part 7

A day’s illness may teach something of this to a thoughtful mind; but the most inconsiderate can scarcely fail to learn the lesson, when the proof is drawn out over a succession of months and seasons. With me, it has now included several New Year’s Days; and what have they taught me? What any future New Year’s retrospect cannot possibly contradict, and must confirm: though it can scarcely illustrate further what is already as clear as its moon and stars.

During the year looked back upon, all the days, and most hours of the day, have had their portion of pain--usually mild--now and then, for a few marked hours of a few marked weeks, severe and engrossing; while, perhaps, some dozen evenings, and half-dozen mornings, are remembered as being times of almost entire ease. So much for the body. The mind, meantime, though clear and active, has been so far affected by the bodily state as to lose all its gaiety, and, by disuse, almost to forget its sense of enjoyment. During the year, perhaps, there may have been two surprises of light-heartedness, for four hours in June, and two hours and a half in October, with a few single flashes of joy in the intermediate seasons, on the occurrence of some rousing idea, or the revival of some ancient association. Over all the rest has brooded a thick heavy cloud of care, apparently causeless, but not for that the less real. This is the sum of the pains of the year, in relation to illness. Where are these pains now?--Not only gone, but annihilated. They are destroyed so utterly, that even memory can lay no hold upon them. The fact of their occurrence is all that even memory can preserve. The sensations themselves cannot be retained, nor recalled, nor revived; they are the most absolutely evanescent, the most essentially and completely destructible of all things. Sensations are unimaginable to those who are most familiar with them. Their concomitants may be remembered, and so vividly conceived of, as to excite emotions at a future time: but the sensations themselves cannot be conceived of when absent. This pain, which I feel now as I write, I have felt innumerable times before; yet, accustomed as I am to entertain and manage it, the sensation itself is new every time; and a few hours hence I shall be as unable to represent it to myself as to the healthiest person in the house. Thus are all the pains of the year annihilated. What remains?

All the good remains.

And how is this? whence this wide difference between the good and the evil?

Because the good is indissolubly connected with ideas--with the unseen realities which are indestructible. This is true, even of those pleasures of sense which of themselves would be as evanescent as bodily pains. The flowers sent to me by kind neighbours have not perished,--that is, the idea and pleasure of them remain, though every blossom was withered months ago. The game and fruit, eaten in their season, remain as comforts and luxuries, preserved in the love that sent them. Every letter and conversation abides,--every new idea is mine for ever; all the knowledge, all the experience of the year, is so much gain. Even the courses of the planets, and the changes of the moon, and the hay-making and harvest, are so much immortal wealth--as real a possession as all the pain of the year was a passing apparition. Yes, even the quick bursts of sunshine are still mine. For one instance, which will well illustrate what I mean, let us look back so far as the Spring, and take one particular night of severe pain, which made all rest impossible. A short intermission, which enabled me to send my servant to rest, having ended in pain, I was unwilling to give further disturbance, and wandered, from mere misery, from my bed and my dim room, which seemed full of pain, to the next apartment, where some glimmer through the thick window-curtain showed that there was light abroad. Light indeed! as I found on looking forth. The sun, resting on the edge of the sea, was hidden from me by the walls of the old priory: but a flood of rays poured through the windows of the ruin, and gushed over the waters, strewing them with diamonds, and then across the green down before my windows, gilding its furrows, and then lighting up the yellow sands on the opposite shore of the harbour, while the market-garden below was glittering with dew and busy with early bees and butterflies. Besides these bees and butterflies, nothing seemed stirring, except the earliest riser of the neighbourhood, to whom the garden belongs. At the moment, she was passing down to feed her pigs, and let out her cows; and her easy pace, arms a-kimbo, and complacent survey of her early greens, presented me with a picture of ease so opposite to my own state, as to impress me ineffaceably. I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture at the moment: but how was it at the end of the year? The pains of all those hours were annihilated--as completely vanished as if they had never been; while the momentary peep behind the window-curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture for evermore. This is an illustration of the universal fact. That brief instant of good has swallowed up long weary hours of pain. An inexperienced observer might, at the moment, have thought the conditions of my gain heavy enough; but the conditions being not only discharged, but annihilated long ago, and the treasure remaining for ever, would not my best friend congratulate me on that sunrise? Suppose it shining on, now and for ever, in the souls of a hundred other invalids or mourners, who may have marked it in the same manner, and who shall estimate its glory and its good!

It is clear that the conviction I speak of arises from the supposition--indispensable and, I believe, almost universal,--that pain is the chastisement of a Father; or, at least, that it is, in some way or other, ordained for, or instrumental to good. The experience of men leaves this belief uncontested, and incontestable. Otherwise, evil and pain would be, in their effects on sufferers, long-lived, if not as immortal as good. If we believed our sufferings to be inflicted by cruelty or malice, our pains would immediately take a permanent existence by becoming connected with our passions of fear, revenge, &c.; though still--as is known to students of the human soul,--the evil, however long sustained, must be finally absorbed in the good. We, of our age and state of society, however, have to do with none who believe pain to be inflicted by the malignity of a superior being. Those who are not so happy as to recognise in it a mere disguise of blessings otherwise unattainable, receive it, under some of the various theories of necessary imperfection, as something unavoidable, and therefore to be received placidly, if not gratefully. These would admit, as cheerfully as the adorers of a chastening Father, the richness of my wealth, as I lie, on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by the treasures of the departing year,--the kindly Year which has utterly destroyed for me so much that is terrible and grievous, while he leaves with me all the new knowledge and power, all the teachings from on high, and the love from far and near, and even the frailest-seeming blossom of pleasure that, in any moment, he has cast into my lap.

Thus has a succession of these friendly years now visited me and gone: and, as far as we can see, thus will every future one repeat the lesson. If any person disputes, no one can disprove, the result, wrought out, as it is, by natural experience. It is no contradiction, that some are soured by suffering. Their pains, like mine, are gone; and with them, as with others, it is ideas which remain; and ideas are essentially good, a part of the indestructible inner life which must, from its very nature, sooner or later part with its evil, through experience of the superabounding good of the universe. If one so soured by pain dies in this mood, the ideal part of him is that which remains to be carried into a fresh scene, where the mood cannot be fed by the experience which nourished it here. If he lives long enough to change his mood, there is every probability that the benignant influences which are perpetually at work throughout life and nature will dissolve and disperse his troubles, as the eastern lights, the breath of morning and the chirp of birds, steal in upon the senses of the troubled sleeper, and thence possessing themselves of his reason, convince him that the miseries of the night season were but a dream.

True and consoling as it may be for him, and for those about him, to find thus that “trouble may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” they have not fully learned the lessons of the sick-room if they are not aware that, while the troubles of that night season are thus sure to pass away, its product of thoughts and experiences must endure, till the stars which looked down upon the scene have dissolved in their courses. The constellations formed in the human soul, out of the chaos of pain, must have a duration compared with which, those of the firmament are but as the sparkles showered over the sea by the rising sun. To one still in this chaos,--if he do but see the creative process advancing,--it can be no reasonable matter of complaint, that his course is laid the while through such a region; and he will feel almost ashamed of even the most passing anxiety as to how soon he may be permitted to emerge.

SYMPATHY TO THE INVALID.

“The essence of friendship is entireness; a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.”

EMERSON.

“Our hands in one, we win not shrink From life’s severest due:-- Our hands in one, we win not blink The terrible and true.” MILNES.

If all sorrow teaches us that nothing is more universal than sympathy, long and irremediable sickness proves plainly, that nothing is more various than its kinds and degrees; or, it may be, than the manifestations of the sympathetic grief which is shared by all. In a sharp sickness of a few days or weeks, all good and kind people act and speak much alike; are busy and ingenious in hastening the recovery, and providing relief meantime. It is when death is not to be looked for, nor yet health, that the test is applied; that, on either hand, the genius and the awkwardness of consolation present themselves, with a vast gradation between these extremes. It is easy and pleasant to be grateful for all, and to appreciate the love and pity which inspire them; but it is impossible to relish all equally, or to give the same admiration to that which flows forth fully and freely, and that sympathy which is suppressed, restricted, or in any way changed before it reaches its object.

O! what a heavenly solace to the soul is free sympathy in its hour of need! There is but one that can vie with it; and that one is, in truth, an enhancement of the same emotions. Communion with

“Mercy, carried infinite degrees Beyond the tenderness of human hearts,”

is, indeed, the supreme, incommunicable delight which must be only referred to, because no sense of it can be conveyed by language; but, because it is of kindred nature, though separated by immeasurable distance, the solace of human sympathy ranks next to this. What a springing of the heart, like that on the discovery of a new truth, or entrance on a new enterprise in youth, attends the revelation to a sufferer of some stroke of genius in the consolations of one of the many who grieve for his affliction!

Many give their best thoughts to provide alleviations--whether in the form of medicines, or dainties for the mind or palate, for the eye or ear; and sweet is the enjoyment of the kindness which provides, whether the luxuries themselves can be relished or not. Some kind soul does a better service still, by affording opportunity for the sufferer to minister to other afflicted ones; to relieve some distress of poverty, or other want. This is sweet; but there are times when the personal trial needs some solace nearer and more direct than this. Then is the hour when the pain of sympathy in the hearts of friends impels them to cast about for relief, and tempts them to speak of hope to the sufferer who has no hope, or none compatible with the kind of consolation they attempt. Going back to the days when I, myself, was the sympathiser, I remember how strong is the temptation to imagine, and to assure the sick one, that his pain will not last; that the time will come when he will be well again; that he is already better; or, if it be impossible to say that, that he will get used to his affliction, and find it more endurable. How was it that I did not see that such offers of consolation must be purely irritating to one who was not feeling better, nor believing that he should ever be better, nor in a state to be cheered by any speculation as to whether his pain would, or would not become more endurable with time! Exactly in proportion to the zeal with which such considerations were pressed, must have been the sufferer’s clearness of perception of the disguised selfishness which dictated the topics and the words. I was (as I half suspected at the time, from my sense of restraint and uneasiness,) trying to console myself, and not my friend; indulging my own cowardice, my own shrinking from a painful truth, at the expense of the feelings of the sufferer for whom my heart was aching. I, who had no genius for consolation, at least in cases of illness, have been silently corrected by the benignest of reproofs,--by the experience of this genius in my own season of infirmity.

The manifestations of sympathetic feeling are as various as of other feelings; but the differences are marked by those whom they concern, with a keenness proportioned to the hunger of their heart. The sick man has even sometimes to assure himself of the grief of his friends, by their silence to him on circumstances which he cannot but feel most important. Their letters, extending over months and years, perhaps contain no mention of his trial, no reference to his condition, not a line which will show to his executors that the years over which they spread were years of illness. Though he can account for this suppression in the very love of his friends, yet it brings no particular consolation to him. Others, perhaps, administer praise;--praise, which is the last thing a humbled sufferer can appropriate;--praise of his patience or fortitude, which perhaps arrives at the moment when his resolution has wholly given way, and tears may be streaming from his eyes, and exclamations of anguish bursting from his lips. Such consolations require forbearance, however it may be mingled with gratitude. Far different was my emotion, when one said to me, with a face like the face of an angel, “Why should we be bent upon your being better, and make up a bright prospect for you? I see no brightness in it; and the time seems past for expecting you ever to be well.” How my spirits rose in a moment at this recognition of the truth!

And again--when I was weakly dwelling on a consideration which troubled me much for some time, that many of my friends gave me credit for far severer pain than I was enduring, and that I thus felt myself a sort of impostor, encroaching unwarrantably on their sympathies, “O! never mind!” was the reply. “That may be more than balanced hereafter. You will suffer more, with time--or you will seem to yourself to suffer more; and then you will have less sympathy. We grow tired of despairing, and think less and less of such cases, whether reasonably or not; and you may have less sympathy when you need it more. Meantime, you are not answerable for what your friends feel; and it is good for them--natural and right--whether you think it accurate or not.”

These words put a new heart into me, dismissed my scruples about the over-wealth of the present hour, and strengthened my soul for future need--the hour of which has not, however, yet arrived. It is a comfortable season, if it may but last, when one’s friends have ceased to hope unreasonably, and not “grown tired of despairing.”

Another friend, endowed both by nature and experience with the power I speak of, gave me strength for months--for my whole probation--by a brave utterance of one word, “Yes.” In answer to a hoping consoler, I told a truth of fact which sounded dismal, though because it was fact I spoke it in no dismal mood; and the genius at my side, by a confirmatory “Yes,” opened to my view a whole world of aid in prospect from a soul so penetrating and so true.

I know it is pleaded that there are sufferers not strong enough to bear the truth--who like to be soothed with hopes, well or ill-grounded; who find immediate comfort in being told that they will throw off their pain and be at ease. If there be such, I have never known them; and I doubt their existence. I believe that the tendency to make the worst of bodily complaints, on which so many satires (some just) are founded, is much aggravated, if not generally caused, by the tendency in the healthy and happy to disallow pain and a sad prospect. Children, weak and unpractised sufferers as they are, are found not to be consolable in the manner proposed. We all know the story of the little boy in the street, crying from the smart of a fall, who, when assured by a good-natured passenger that he should not cry, because he would be well to-morrow, answered, “Then I won’t cry to-morrow.”

The weakest sufferers are precisely those who are least able to appropriate the future and its good things. If this be true of the weak, and if the strong find it irritating to be medicined with soft fictions, or presented with anything but sound truth, the popular method of consolation appears to be excluded altogether. If my own life were to be lived over again, I should, from the strength of this conviction, convert most of its words of intended consolation into a far more consolatory condolence. Never again should the suffering spirit turn from me, as I fear it has often done--if too gentle to be irritated--yet sickening at hollow words of promise, when instant fellow-feeling was what was needed; and mournfully thinking, though too kind to say it, “‘the heart knoweth its own bitterness,’ and mine must endure alone.” The fair retribution has not followed, for never thus have I been left to feel.

I am here reminded of a sort of consolation, often offered, which I do not at all understand. I do not quarrel with it, however, for it may suit others less insensible to its claims. Sequestered sufferers, whose term of activity is over, and who apparently have only to endure as they may, and learn and enjoy what they can, till they receive their summons to enter on a new career, are referred for solace to their consciences--to their consciousness of services rendered to society, and duty done in active days. I strongly doubt whether Conscience was ever appointed to the function of Consoler. I more than doubt; I disbelieve it. According to my own experience, the utmost enjoyment that conscience is capable of is a negative state, that of ease. Its power of suffering is strong; and its natural and best condition I take to be one of simple ease; but for enjoyment and consolation, I believe we must look to other powers and susceptibilities of our nature.

It is inconceivable to me that our moral sense can ever be gratified by anything in our own moral state. It must be more offended by our own sins and weaknesses than by all the other sin and weakness in the world, in proportion as the evil is more profoundly known to it, and more nakedly disgusting, because it is stripped of the allowances and palliations which are admissible in all other cases. And this disgust is not compensated for by a corresponding satisfaction in our own good; for the very best good we can ever recognise in ourselves falls so far short of our own conceptions, so fails to satisfy the requisitions of the moral sense, that it can afford no gratification. A conscience which can enjoy itself on its own resources, must be of a very low degree--I should say of a spurious nature. In the highest state of health that I can conceive of--health spiritual and physical--I believe the function of the moral sense to be to delight itself in good wherever it is to be found, (and no wise person will look for it within himself,) to keep watch and ward against evil, and to cherish lowliness at home by its incessant consciousness of the imperfection there; an imperfection so keenly felt by an enlightened and accurate conscience, as to cause a wholesome going abroad for interests and gratifications, so that ease may be found in self-forgetfulness. The necessity which so many feel of a relief from their disappointed conscience--of adventitious merits on which to rely in the failure of their own--of a saving interposition between their own imperfections and the requisitions of God and duty; this prevalent need is an unanswerable rebuke to the presumption which talks of “the happiness of an approving conscience.” If it is thus in the season of vigour, health, and self-command, how inexpressibly absurd is the mistake of bringing such a topic as consolation to the sick and sequestered!--to the sick, whose whole heart is faint, and the mental frame disordered, more or less, in proportion as the body is jaded and the nerves unstrung; and to the sequestered, who perforce devour their own hearts, and find them the bitterest food! Why, one of the most painful trials of long sickness and seclusion is, that all old pains, all past moral sufferings, are renewed and magnified; that in sleepless nights, and especially on waking in the morning, every old sin and folly, and even the most trifling error, rises up anew, however long ago repented of and forgiven, and, in the activity of ordinary life, forgotten. Any sort of ghost is more easily laid than this kind. Though their “brains were out” long years ago, they continue to come--they present themselves in defiance of all--even the most sacred, exorcisms; so that it becomes one of the duties of the sick to bear their presence with composure, and cease to struggle for their exclusion. In the midst of this experience, to have one’s friends come, and desire one to look back upon one’s past life for complacency and self-gratulation, in order to assure one’s self how well one has used one’s powers and opportunities--how much one has done for society--how lofty and honourable a life one has led--and so forth,--O! what words can express the absurdity! If the consoler could but see the invisible array which comes thronging into the sick-room from the deep regions of the past, brought by every sound of nature without, by every movement of the spirit within; the pale lips of dead friends whispering one’s hard or careless words, spoken in childhood or youth--the upbraiding gaze of duties slighted and opportunities neglected--the horrible apparition of old selfishness and pusillanimities--the disgusting foolery of idiotic vanities; if the consoler could catch a momentary glimpse of this phantasmagoria of the sick-room, he would turn with fear and loathing from the past, and shudder, while the inured invalid smiles, at such a choice of topics for solace.

Then it might become the turn of the invalid to console--to explain how these are but phantoms--how solace does abound, though it comes from every region rather than the kingdom of conscience--and how, while the past is dry and dreary enough, there are streams descending from the heaven-bright mountain-tops of the future, forever flowing down to our retreat, pure enough for the most fastidious longing, abundant enough for the thirstiest soul. The consoler may then learn for life how easily all personal complacencies may be dispensed with, while the sufferer can tell of a true “refuge and strength,” and “present help,” and of this “river that gladdens the city of God,” and flows to meet us as we journey towards it.

But, the anxious consoler may say, Is it right so to banish these complacencies? If you really have served the world, however imperfectly in your own eyes--if you have sown thoughts in minds, and called forth affections in hearts--ought you to deny the facts, or that they are good?

By no means. If you assure me of these things as facts, you bring me good news. But I should feel it as good news--perhaps better--if the service had been rendered by anybody else; for the simple reason that the good would then be to me unmixed, which now it is not, nor can ever be. Call upon me, whenever you will, to rejoice that men have gained an idea--that the aged or children have been amused or strengthened--or that society has been relieved from an abuse, by anyone’s means. Rouse me from the depression of pain, wake me up from sleep for the better refreshment of this news, and I will rejoice; but do not think to enhance your tidings by telling me that these things are my doing. The only effect of that is, to remind me how much better the service might have been done. Surely we both believe that all truth and goodness are destined to arise sooner or later among men. To be visited with new or good ideas is a blessing: to be appointed to communicate them is an honour: but these blessings and honours are a ground for personal humility, not complacency. It is to me impossible to connect the idea of merit with any such destiny. There is nothing we have so little hand in as our own ideas; there is no occupation less voluntary than that of uttering them. And so will every servant of his race say of his own species of service. He will rejoice that something new and good is acquired or attained by his race; and he must naturally be thankful for the honour and enjoyment appointed to him as the medium: but he can find no ground for personal complacency in the matter. He will be utterly careless whether men know, a hundred years hence, through whom they received the benefit, or whether his name has been for ninety years lost to all but his intimate friends. If he were offered the choice between this reputation and the fact of his having conquered one unkind emotion, or made one single effort of endurance, he would eagerly prefer the secret genuine good to the blazoned apparent one.