the power of the master idea of our life. But for Him who “stirreth up
the nest,” and whose spirit “taketh and beareth them up” sunwards on her
wings, the flights of these eagle spirits would utterly fail. But for
the ideas inspired by Faith, there could be no enterprise, no true
solace, no endurance but of the low, merely submissive kind. Great is
the power of all thought, congenial with our nature, over disease of
body and morbid tendencies of the mind; but those which connect us with
the Maker of our frame and the Ordainer of our lot are absolutely
omnipotent. O! let the speculative observer of human nature consider
well, and observe that human nature to its extremest limits, before he
pronounces that our spirits are not created filial. Let him ponder well
the universal aspiration towards a spiritually-discerned parent, before
he declares the affection a mere venerable superstition. Let him feel in
health and full action,--(or, if he feels it not, let him detect in
others,) the pausing horror of a sense of orphanhood, beneath which the
moral universe falls in pieces under the hands of its myriad builders.
Let him see in the sick-chamber, where the outward and inward world seem
alike to the sufferer to be crumbling asunder, how irresistible is the
conviction of an upholding power, new-modelling all decaying things, and
imbuing them with immortality. If he himself can but learn what
protracted sickness is, let him ponder well whether a superstition,
however early and solemnly conveyed and cherished, could stand the
stress,--not merely of pain, but of the questionings prompted by pain.
Let him say if it can be anything but truth,--absolute congeniality with
our souls,--which can give such all-conquering power to the idea of our
filial relation to the Ruler of all things.
No one will venture to say how this power is enhanced by the earliest
associations. No one will presume to declare precisely how happy above
others are they, now sufferers, whose infant speech was practised in
prayer at a mother’s knee, and who can now forget the dreariness of the
night and the weight of the day in listening for the echoes of old
psalmody, and reviving snatches of youthful hymns and religious reverie.
No one will dare to say how far the sweet call to “the weary and heavy
laden” is endeared by the voice of the Shepherd having gone before us
over all the hills and vales of our life. But the true philosopher must,
as it seems to me, be assured that the power of these spiritual appeals
would ooze away, in proportion as our faculties are weakened by
disease, if they had not in them the divine force of truth to urge them
home.
See what this force is, in comparison with others that are tendered for
our solace! One and another, and another, of our friends comes to us
with an earnest pressing upon us of the “hope of relief,”--that talisman
which looks so well till its virtues are tried! They tell us of renewed
health and activity,--of what it will be to enjoy ease again,--to be
useful again,--to shake off our troubles and be as we once were. We
sigh, and say it may be so; but they see that we are neither roused nor
soothed by it.
Then one speaks differently,--tells us we shall never be better,--that
we shall continue for long years as we are, or shall sink into deeper
disease and death; adding, that pain and disturbance and death are
indissolubly linked with the indestructible life of the soul, and
supposing that we are willing to be conducted on in this eternal course
by Him whose thoughts and ways are not as ours,--but whose
tenderness.... Then how we burst in, and take up the word! What have we
not to say, from the abundance of our hearts, of that benignity,--that
transcendant wisdom,--our willingness,--our eagerness,--our sweet
security,--till we are silenced by our unutterable joy!
Whence this imbecility of the “hope of relief?”
Whence this power of the idea of God our Father?
Do we know of anything stronger and higher than ideas? In the strongest
and highest,--(even an omnipotent and infinite) idea,--if we have not
Truth, what _is_ Truth?
SOME PERILS AND PAINS OF INVALIDISM.
“But few that court retirement are aware
Of half the toils they must encounter there.”
COWPER.
“We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle.”
JOHNSON.
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.