I can enjoy feeling melancholy, and there is a good deal of satisfaction
about being thoroughly miserable; but nobody likes a fit of the blues.
Nevertheless, everybody has them; notwithstanding which, nobody can tell
why. There is no accounting for them. You are just as likely to have one
on the day after you have come into a large fortune as on the day after
you have left your new silk umbrella in the train. Its effect upon you
is somewhat similar to what would probably be produced by a combined
attack of toothache, indigestion, and cold in the head. You become
stupid, restless, and irritable; rude to strangers and dangerous toward
your friends; clumsy, maudlin, and quarrelsome; a nuisance to yourself
and everybody about you.
While it is on you can do nothing and think of nothing, though feeling
at the time bound to do something. You can't sit still so put on your
hat and go for a walk; but before you get to the corner of the street
you wish you hadn't come out and you turn back. You open a book and try
to read, but you find Shakespeare trite and commonplace, Dickens is dull
and prosy, Thackeray a bore, and Carlyle too sentimental. You throw the
book aside and call the author names. Then you "shoo" the cat out of
the room and kick the door to after her. You think you will write your
letters, but after sticking at "Dearest Auntie: I find I have five
minutes to spare, and so hasten to write to you," for a quarter of an
hour, without being able to think of another sentence, you tumble the
paper into the desk, fling the wet pen down upon the table-cloth,
and start up with the resolution of going to see the Thompsons. While
pulling on your gloves, however, it occurs to you that the Thompsons are
idiots; that they never have supper; and that you will be expected to
jump the baby. You curse the Thompsons and decide not to go.
By this time you feel completely crushed. You bury your face in your
hands and think you would like to die and go to heaven. You picture to
yourself your own sick-bed, with all your friends and relations standing
round you weeping. You bless them all, especially the young and pretty
ones. They will value you when you are gone, so you say to yourself,
and learn too late what they have lost; and you bitterly contrast their
presumed regard for you then with their decided want of veneration now.
These reflections make you feel a little more cheerful, but only for a
brief period; for the next moment you think what a fool you must be
to imagine for an instant that anybody would be sorry at anything that
might happen to you. Who would care two straws (whatever precise amount
of care two straws may represent) whether you are blown up, or hung
up, or married, or drowned? Nobody cares for you. You never have
been properly appreciated, never met with your due deserts in any one
particular. You review the whole of your past life, and it is painfully
apparent that you have been ill-used from your cradle.
Half an hour's indulgence in these considerations works you up into
a state of savage fury against everybody and everything, especially
yourself, whom anatomical reasons alone prevent your kicking. Bed-time
at last comes, to save you from doing something rash, and you spring
upstairs, throw off your clothes, leaving them strewn all over the room,
blow out the candle, and jump into bed as if you had backed yourself
for a heavy wager to do the whole thing against time. There you toss
and tumble about for a couple of hours or so, varying the monotony by
occasionally jerking the clothes off and getting out and putting them
on again. At length you drop into an uneasy and fitful slumber, have bad
dreams, and wake up late the next morning.
At least, this is all we poor single men can do under the circumstances.
Married men bully their wives, grumble at the dinner, and insist on the
children's going to bed. All of which, creating, as it does, a good deal
of disturbance in the house, must be a great relief to the feelings of a
man in the blues, rows being the only form of amusement in which he can
take any interest.
The symptoms of the infirmity are much the same in every case, but the
affliction itself is variously termed. The poet says that "a feeling
of sadness comes o'er him." 'Arry refers to the heavings of his wayward
heart by confiding to Jimee that he has "got the blooming hump." Your
sister doesn't know what is the matter with her to-night. She feels out
of sorts altogether and hopes nothing is going to happen. The every-day
young man is "so awful glad to meet you, old fellow," for he does "feel
so jolly miserable this evening." As for myself, I generally say that "I
have a strange, unsettled feeling to-night" and "think I'll go out."
By the way, it never does come except in the evening. In the sun-time,
when the world is bounding forward full of life, we cannot stay to sigh
and sulk. The roar of the working day drowns the voices of the elfin
sprites that are ever singing their low-toned _miserere_ in our ears.
In the day we are angry, disappointed, or indignant, but never "in the
blues" and never melancholy. When things go wrong at ten o'clock in the
morning we--or rather you--swear and knock the furniture about; but if
the misfortune comes at ten P.M., we read poetry or sit in the dark and
think what a hollow world this is.
But, as a rule, it is not trouble that makes us melancholy. The
actuality is too stern a thing for sentiment. We linger to weep over
a picture, but from the original we should quickly turn our eyes away.
There is no pathos in real misery: no luxury in real grief. We do not
toy with sharp swords nor hug a gnawing fox to our breast for choice.
When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep
it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to
them. However they may have suffered from it at first, the recollection
has become by then a pleasure. Many dear old ladies who daily look at
tiny shoes lying in lavender-scented drawers, and weep as they think of
the tiny feet whose toddling march is done, and sweet-faced young ones
who place each night beneath their pillow some lock that once curled on
a boyish head that the salt waves have kissed to death, will call me
a nasty cynical brute and say I'm talking nonsense; but I believe,
nevertheless, that if they will ask themselves truthfully whether they
find it unpleasant to dwell thus on their sorrow, they will be compelled
to answer "No." Tears are as sweet as laughter to some natures. The
proverbial Englishman, we know from old chronicler Froissart, takes his
pleasures sadly, and the Englishwoman goes a step further and takes her
pleasures in sadness itself.
I am not sneering. I would not for a moment sneer at anything that
helps to keep hearts tender in this hard old world. We men are cold and
common-sensed enough for all; we would not have women the same. No, no,
ladies dear, be always sentimental and soft-hearted, as you are--be the
soothing butter to our coarse dry bread. Besides, sentiment is to women
what fun is to us. They do not care for our humor, surely it would be
unfair to deny them their grief. And who shall say that their mode of
enjoyment is not as sensible as ours? Why assume that a doubled-up
body, a contorted, purple face, and a gaping mouth emitting a series
of ear-splitting shrieks point to a state of more intelligent happiness
than a pensive face reposing upon a little white hand, and a pair of
gentle tear-dimmed eyes looking back through Time's dark avenue upon a
fading past?
I am glad when I see Regret walked with as a friend--glad because I know
the saltness has been washed from out the tears, and that the sting must
have been plucked from the beautiful face of Sorrow ere we dare press
her pale lips to ours. Time has laid his healing hand upon the wound
when we can look back upon the pain we once fainted under and no
bitterness or despair rises in our hearts. The burden is no longer
heavy when we have for our past troubles only the same sweet mingling of
pleasure and pity that we feel when old knight-hearted Colonel Newcome
answers "_adsum_" to the great roll-call, or when Tom and Maggie
Tulliver, clasping hands through the mists that have divided them, go
down, locked in each other's arms, beneath the swollen waters of the
Floss.
Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver brings to my mind a saying of
George Eliot's in connection with this subject of melancholy. She
speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's evening." How wonderfully
true--like everything that came from that wonderful pen--the observation
is! Who has not felt the sorrowful enchantment of those lingering
sunsets? The world belongs to Melancholy then, a thoughtful deep-eyed
maiden who loves not the glare of day. It is not till "light thickens
and the crow wings to the rocky wood" that she steals forth from her
groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It is there she meets us. At her
shadowy gate she takes our hand in hers and walks beside us through
her mystic realm. We see no form, but seem to hear the rustling of her
wings.
Even in the toiling hum-drum city her spirit comes to us. There is a
somber presence in each long, dull street; and the dark river creeps
ghostlike under the black arches, as if bearing some hidden secret
beneath its muddy waves.
In the silent country, when the trees and hedges loom dim and blurred
against the rising night, and the bat's wing flutters in our face, and
the land-rail's cry sounds drearily across the fields, the spell sinks
deeper still into our hearts. We seem in that hour to be standing by
some unseen death-bed, and in the swaying of the elms we hear the sigh
of the dying day.
A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light
our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and
cheese--ay, and even kisses--do not seem the only things worth striving
for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and
standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we
are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains,
the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple
wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping
hands touch God's.