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.
Then we have (not to dwell on a matter already spoken of) a peculiar
privilege in the peculiar loveliness which the image of Death assumes
to us. In our long leisure, all sweet and soothing associations of
rest,--of relief from anxiety and wearing thought,--of re-entrance upon
society,--(a society how sanctified!)--of the realisation of our best
conceptions of what is holy, noble, and perfect,--all affections, all
aspirations gather round the idea of Death, till it recurs at all our
best moments, and becomes an abiding thought of peace and joy. When we
hear or read of the departure of any one we knew,--of the death even of
the youngest or the most active,--a throb of congratulatory feeling is
our first emotion, rather than the shock which we used to experience,
and which we now see sustained by those around us. Reflection, or
tidings of survivors may change our view; but so does the image of Death
become naturally endeared to us, that our first spontaneous thought is
of favour to those who are selected for it. I am not recommending this
impression as rational, but intimating it as characteristic of a
peculiar condition. It is no slight privilege, however, to have that
great idea which necessarily confronts every one of us all clothed with
loveliness instead of horror, or mere mystery. Till now, we never knew
how any anticipation may be incessantly filling with sweetness.
It may be doubted whether there is a more heartfelt peace experienced at
any point of our moral progress than in the right reception of
calumnious injury. In the immediate return from the first recoil into
the mood of forgiveness, there is something heavenly even to the novice.
In the compassion for one’s calumniator there is pain; and it is a pain
which increases with experience of life, and with our insight into the
peril and misery of an unjust and malicious habit of mind; but in the
act of pitying forgiveness, there is a solace so sweet as to make one
wonder how long men will be in adopting this remedy for their injuries.
Any one who has been ambitious, and with success, will, if he be wise,
be ready to declare that not the first breath of fame was to him so
sweet as the first emotions of forgiveness, the first stirrings of the
love of enemies, after his earliest experience of the calumny by which
all public effort is sure to be assailed. I am not supposing cowardly
acquiescence in insult and injury. I am supposing the due self-assertion
made, or defence found not to be practicable. This is all that others
have to do with. A man’s self-communion on the matter is his own
private affair: and little know the systematic calumniators, who for
party’s or prejudice’s sake, assail those who can only return silence,
how they really work in some hearts they seek to wound. In some they may
excite rage or bitter anguish; but there are others,--probably many,--in
which they cause no severer pain than a pitying sorrow for themselves,
while they kindle a glow of courage, patience, and benignity,--they
cause a more exquisite mingling of sweet emotions,--than were ever
aroused by praise. The more defenceless the injured, the more private
and the more heavenly are these passages of his soul; and none are more
defenceless than sick prisoners. If subject to such injuries in the
world, where they could by their presence perpetually live down false
aspersions, (aspersions on their opinions as well as on their conduct,)
helpless indeed are they when living out of sight, dumb in regard to
society and through the press. Then, if their party foes take the
opportunity to assail and misrepresent their opinions and their acts,
those foes can have all their own way abroad in the world; but the very
air of our sick-room turns them from foes into best friends. After one
moment’s sickening at the poor malice and cowardice, our thoughts fix on
the high and holy truths to which they direct us,--on the transience of
error,--the nothingness of fame, in the serious passages of life,--the
powerlessness of assaults from without while we possess ourselves,--till
we end in a calm and sweet mood of contentedness for ourselves and
affectionate intercession for the victims of angry passion or of sordid
interests. It does not move us painfully to think of our
helplessness,--to contemplate leaving life without explaining our
opinions, or justifying our views and enterprises. What is just and true
will abide and prevail; and as for our claims to a share in the
reputation, they seem in the sick-room worthy of only a smile. If we
wrought for reputation, we must suffer, sooner or later, for the lowness
of the aim; and now may be our time for taking a new growth through
pain. But if we wrought for truth and good, we are not susceptible of
the venom of the party slanderer. His sting proves no sting, but a
beneficial touch rousing in us many tender, and resolute, and benignant
feelings. These may be awakened wherever such a touch reaches us; but
nowhere perhaps so sensibly as in the privacy and lowliness of the
sick-room. I need say nothing of the benefit brought to us, by the same
act, in the sympathy of generous minds. Of the blessing of sympathy I
have already said so much that I dare scarcely approach the subject
again. And never, as all know, does ministering affection so abound as
towards the injured. When injury and helplessness unite their claims,
there is no end to the multitude of hearts that throng to defend and
aid. They are far more than are needed; for few--extremely few--are
those who venture or who like to send the enmity of public life into the
retreats of privacy. Very rare, I believe, is the species of men who
insult when all the world knows there can be no reply. Still, such cases
are witnessed; and of their operation I have spoken.
The greater number of invalids are under no such liability; but all may
be subject to some injustice,--some misrepresentation which may reach
their knowledge; and their emotions, both of recoil and of renovation,
may be like in kind, and even equal in degree, to those I have
intimated. If occasions for forgiveness should arise,--(and to whom do
they not?)--may its relish be as sweet to them as it assuredly is to
some more extensively tried!
An inestimable gain from the longest sickness is the outgrowth of the
scruples and other conflicts which constitute the chief evil of merely
long sickness. Of some perils and pains of our condition I have spoken,
and I must therefore declare that there is a remedial influence in the
very infirmity which appeared to create them. If it be but continued
long enough,--if the struggle be not broken off before it is fairly
exhausted,--victory will declare itself on the side of peace. We may be
long in passing through the experience of weakness, humiliation and
submission; but up, through acquiescence, we must rise, sooner or
later,--true things separating themselves infallibly from the transient,
and all that is important revealing itself in its due proportions, till
our vision is cleared and our hearts are at rest. If the invalid of five
years can smile at some of the anxieties and scrupulosities of his first
season of retreat, much more clear-sighted must the ten years’ thinker
be in regard to the snares and troubles of his early or midway term. If,
amidst the gain, as little as possible be lost, the privileges of our
state may be such,--not as, indeed, to compare with those of health and
a natural mode of life,--but as may satisfy a humble and rational hope
that our season of probation is not lost, nor materially wasted.
* * * * *
The sick-room is a sanctuary of confidence. It is a natural
confessional, where the spontaneous revelations are perhaps as ample as
any enforced disclosures from disciple to priest, and without any of the
mischiefs of enforcement. We may be excluded from much observation of
the outer life of men; but of the inner life, which originates and
interprets the outer, it is scarcely possible that in any other
circumstances we could have known so much. Into what depths of opinion
are we not let down! To what soaring heights of speculation are we not
borne up! What is there of joy or sorrow, of mystery and marvel, in
human experience that is not communicated to us! And all this not as if
read in print,--not half-revealed, in the form of hints to such as can
understand,--not in general terms, as addressed to the general,--but
spoken fully and freely, with that particularity which fastens words
upon the soul for ever,--with those living tones of emotion which make
the hearer a partner in all that is and has been felt. Here, we learn
that the whole experience of humanity may be contained in one bosom,
through such participation as we ourselves entertain; and even that all
opinions, the most various and the most incompatible, may be deposited
in one intellect, for gradual review, without inducing scepticism, and
possibly to the strengthening of the powers and privileges of Faith.
Göthe, the seer of humanity, formed in himself the habit of agreeing
with all the opinions uttered to him, alleging as his ground that there
is always a sense in which everything is true, and that it is a good to
encourage, and an evil to discourage, any belief arrived at in natural
course. There are men with minds of a far lower order, but still
somewhat superior to the average, who do precisely the reverse,--they
see far enough to be aware that there is always something to be said to
the contrary of what they hear uttered; and they cannot help saying it.
They fall into a habit of invariable opposition, justifying the practice
to themselves by the plea of impartiality,--of resistance to
dogmatism,--of love of truth, and the like. I disapprove of both habits.
Both practically injure belief, and damage the interests of truth. The
natural operation of Göthe’s method was to encourage in many indolence
in the pursuit of truth and carelessness about opinions;--in some,
doubts of the very existence of truth; and in all reflective persons, a
keen sense of the insult conveyed, however unintentionally, by such
treatment. Far worse, however, is the influence of the antagonist order
of minds,--not only from their comparative numbers, for there is not a
Göthe in five hundred years,--but from the direct operation of their
method and their example. A man who forms a habit of intellectual
antagonism destroys more than can ever be repaired, both in his own mind
and in those which he influences. He allows no rest in any supposition
even to those who have not power or leisure to follow out the research.
He cuts their own ground from under them, and does not establish them on
any other, for he himself appears to be established on none. Men of this
order are, above all others, fickle in their opinions. Complacently
supposing themselves impartial investigators into truth, they are, in
fact, the sport of any one who, discerning and playing with their
weakness, can put them up to the assertion and defence of any opinions
whatever, and lead them into daily self-contradiction. What ensues is
seen at a glance:--they tamper with truth till the structure of their
own intellect becomes fatally impaired:--they denounce, as bigots, all
men of every order of mind who remain steady in any opinions, and
especially such as continue to hold opinions which they have themselves
quitted:--they never doubt of their own fluctuations being progression,
and that they are leaving all stable believers behind:--they learn no
caution in the publication of their so-called opinions from their own
incessant changes, but rather pique themselves on their eagerness to
exhibit and insist upon each new view, and enjoy the occasion it affords
for complacent amazement at all who hold the positions which they have
themselves abandoned.