It has always struck me as a breach of faith in Charles Lamb to have
published the fact that dear, 'rigorous' Mrs. Battle's favourite suit
was Hearts: and is in my eyes, notwithstanding Mr. Carlyle's posthumous
outburst, the only blot on his character. His own confession, though
tendered with a blush, that there is such a thing as sick whist stands
on totally different grounds; it is not a relaxation of principle, but
an acknowledgment of a weakness common to human nature. One of the most
advanced thinkers and men of science of our time has frankly admitted
that his theological views are considerably modified by the state of
his health; and if one's ideas on futurity are thus affected, it is no
wonder that things of this world wear a different appearance when
viewed from a sick bed. It is not difficult to imagine that whist, for
example, played on the counterpane by three good Samaritans, to while
away the hours for an afflicted friend, differs from the game when
played on a club card-table. Common humanity prevents our saying what
we think of the play of an invalid who may be enjoying his last rubber;
and if the ace of trumps _is_ found under his pillow, we only smile and
hope it will not occur again.
On the other hand, literary taste would, one would think, be the last
thing to vary with our physical condition; yet those who have had long
illnesses know better, and will, I am sure, bear me out in the
assertion that there are such things as sick books. I do not, of
course, speak of devotional works. I am picturing the poor man when he
is getting well after a long bout of illness; his mind clear, but
inert; his limbs painless, but so languid that they hardly seem to
belong to him; and when he regards their attenuated proportions with
the same sort of feeble interest that is evoked by eggshell china—they
are not useful, still it would be a pity if they broke.
Then it is that one feels a loathing of the strong meats of literature,
and a liking for its milk diet. As to metaphysics, one has had enough
and to spare of _them_ when one was delirious; while the 'Fairy Tales
of Science' do not strike one just then as being quite so fairylike as
the poet represents them. As to science, indeed, there is but one thing
clear to us, namely, that the theory of evolution is a mistake; for
though one's getting better at all is undoubtedly a proof of the
survival of the fittest, we are well convinced that we have retrograded
from what we were. It would puzzle Darwin himself to fix our position
exactly, but though we lack the tenacity, and especially the colour, of
the sea-anemone, we seem to be there or thereabouts in the scale of
humanity. When last prostrated by rheumatic fever, or its remedies, I
remember, indeed, to have been inclined to mathematics. When very ill I
had suffered agonies in my dreams from the persecutions of an
impossible quantity, and perhaps the association of ideas suggested, as
I slowly gathered strength, a little problem in statics. It had been
taught me by my dear tutor at Cambridge, whom undergraduates have long
ceased to trouble, as a proof of the pathos that dwells in figures; and
I kept repeating it to myself, with the letters all misplaced, till I
became exhausted by tears and emotion.
As a general rule, however, even mathematics fail to interest the
convalescent. 'Man delights not him; no, nor woman neither;' but
Literature, if light in the hand, and always provided that he has his
back to the window, is a pleasure to him only next to that of his new
found appetite and his first chicken. His taste 'has suffered a sick
change,' but that by no means implies it has deteriorated. On the
contrary, his critical faculty has fled (which is surely an immense
advantage), while he has recovered much of that power of appreciation
which rarely abides with us to maturity. He is not on the outlook for
mistakes, slips of style, anachronisms; he derives no pleasure from the
discovery of spots in the sun, but is content to bask in the rays of
it. He does not necessarily return to the favourites of his youth,
though he has a tendency that way, but the shackles of convention have
slipped away from him with his flesh, and he reads what he likes, and
not what he has been told he ought to like. He has been so long removed
from public opinion, that, like a shipwrecked crew in an open boat, it
has ceased to affect him; only, instead of taking to cannibalism, he
takes to what is nice. As his physical appetite is fastidious, so his
mental palate has a relish only for titbits. If ever there was a time
for a reasonable being to 'dip' into books, or to enjoy 'half-hours
with the best authors,' this is it; but weak as the patient is, he
commonly declines to have his tastes dictated to; perhaps there is an
unpleasant association in his mind, arising from Brand and Liebig, with
all 'extracts;' but, at all events, those literary compilations oppress
and bewilder him; he objects to the extraordinary fertility of 'Ibid,'
an author whose identity he cannot quite call to mind, and prefers to
choose for himself.
Biography is out of the question. Long before he has got through that
account of the hero's great grandmother, from whom he inherited his
talents, which is, it seems, indispensable to such works, he yawns, and
devoutly wishing, notwithstanding its fatal consequences to the fourth
generation, that that old woman had never been born, falls into fitful
slumber.
Travels are in the same condemnation; he has not the patience to watch
the traveller taking leave of his family at Pimlico, or to follow his
cab as he drives through the streets to the railway station, or to
share the discomforts of his cabin—all necessary, no doubt, to his
eventual arrival in Abyssinia, but hardly necessary to be described.
Moreover, the convalescent has probably travelled a good deal on his
own account during the last few weeks, for the bed of fever carries one
hither and thither with the velocity, though not the ease, of the
enchanted carpet in the 'Arabian Nights.' The desire of the sick man is
to escape from himself and all recent experiences.
He thinks he will try a little History. Alison? No, certainly not
Alison. 'They will be proposing Lingard next,' he murmurs, and the
little irritation caused by the well-meant suggestion throws him back
for the next six hours. Presently he tries Macaulay, whom some
flatterer has fulsomely called 'as good as a novel,' but, though the
trial of Warren Hastings gives him a fillip, the rout of Sedgemoor does
away with the effect of it, and, happening upon the character of
Halifax, he suffers a severe relapse. As a bedfellow, Macaulay is too
declamatory, though, at the same time, strange to say, he does not
always succeed in keeping one awake. To the sick man Carlyle is
preferable; not his 'Frederick,' of course, and still less his 'Sartor
Resartus,' which has become a nightmare, without head or tail, but his
'French Revolution.' One lies and watches the amazing spectacle without
effort, as though it were represented on the stage. The sea of blood
rolls before our eyes, the roar of the mob sounds in our ears; we are
carried along with the unhappy Louis to the very frontier, and just on
the verge of escape are seized and brought back—King Coach—with him to
Paris, in a cold perspiration.
Some people, when in health and of a sane mind (Mr. Matthew Arnold one
_knows_ of, and there may be others), take great delight in 'Paradise
Regained;' all we venture to say is that in sickness it does not
suggest its title. It is said that barley-water goes well with
everything; if so, the epic is the exception which proves the rule.
Milton is tedious after rheumatic fever, Spencer is worse.
'"Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time,"'
murmurs the invalid, 'I can't stand them.' He does not mean anything
depreciatory, but merely that—
'Like strains of martial music
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavour,'
which he is not fit even to think of. He cannot read Keats's
'Nightingale,' but for quite another reason. What arouses 'thoughts too
deep for tears' in the hale and strong is to the sick as the sinking
for an artesian well. 'The Chelsea Waterworks,' as Mr. Samuel Weller
observed of Mr. Job Trotter (at a time when the metropolitan water
supply would seem to have been more satisfactory than at present), 'are
nothing to him.' On the other hand, Shelley's 'Skylark,' and the
'Dramatic Fragments' of Browning, are as cordials to the invalid, while
the poems of Walter Scott are like breezes from the mountains and the
sea. In that admirable essay, 'Life in the Sick-room,' the authoress
justly remarks, speaking of the advantage of objectivity in sick books,
'Nothing can be better in this view than Macaulay's "Lays," which carry
us at full speed out of ourselves.'
But it is not always that the invalid can read the poets at all; like
Mrs. Wititterley, his nerves are too delicately strung for the touch of
the muse. His chief enjoyment lies in fiction, to the producers of
which he can never feel too grateful. I remember, on one occasion when
I was very reduced indeed, taking up 'Northanger Abbey,' and reading,
with almost the same gusto as though I had been a novelist myself, Miss
Austen's defence of her profession. She says:
'I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with
novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very
performances to the number of which they are themselves adding, joining
with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such
works, and scarcely even permitting them to be read by their own
heroine, who, if she accidentally takes up a novel, is sure to turn
from its insipid pages with disgust. Let us not desert one another; we
are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more
extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary
corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much
decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many
as our readers; and while the abilities of the
nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth abridger of the history of England are
eulogised by a thousand pens, there seems a general agreement to slight
the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend
them.'
I had quite forgotten till I came upon this passage that Miss Austen
had such 'a kick in her,' and I remember how I honoured her for it and
sympathised with her sentiments. 'When pain and anguish wring the
brow,' we all know who is the comforter; but next to her, and when the
brow is getting a little better, we welcome the novelist.
With our face aslant on the pillow, we once more make acquaintance with
the characters that have been the delight of our youth, and find they
delight us still, but with a difference. The animal spirits of Smollett
and Fielding are a little too much for us; there is not sympathy enough
in them for our own condition; they seem to have been fellows who were
never ill. Perhaps 'Humphrey Clinker,' though it drags at the end, and
the political disquisitions are intolerable, is the funniest book that
ever was written; but the faculty of appreciation for it is not now in
us. We turn with relief to Scott, though not to 'Scott's Works,' in the
sense in which the phrase is generally used, as though they were a
foundry from which everything is issued of the same workmanship and
excellence; whereas there is as much difference between them as there
was in her Majesty's ships of old between the gallant seventy-four and
the crazy troopship. The invalid, however, as I have said, is far from
critical; he only knows what he likes. Judged by this fastidious
standard, he finds 'Waverley' somewhat wearisome, and, as to the first
part of it in particular, wonders, not that the Great Unknown should
have kept it in his desk for years as a comparative failure, but that
he should have ever taken it from that repository. 'The Antiquary,'
which in health he used to admire, or think he did, exceedingly, has
also a narcotic effect; but 'Rob Roy' revives him, and 'Ivanhoe' stirs
him like a trumpet-call.
What is very curious, just as the favourite literature of a cripple is
almost always that which treats of force and action, so upon our
sick-bed we turn most gladly to scenes of heroism and adventure. The
famous ride in 'Geoffrey Hamlyn,' where the fate of the heroine,
threatened with worse than death from the bush-rangers, hangs upon the
horse's speed, seems to us, as we lie abed, one of the finest episodes
in fiction. 'Tom Cringle's Log,' too, becomes a great favourite, not
more from its buoyancy and freshness than from the melodramatic scenes
with which it is interspersed.
In some moods of the sick man's mind, his morbid appetite tends,
strange to say, to horrors. He 'snatches a fearful joy' from the weird
and supernatural. I have known those terrible tales of Le Fanu,
entitled 'In a Glass Darkly,' which for dramatic power and eeriness no
other novelist has ever approached, devoured greedily by those whose
physical sustenance has been dry toast and arrowroot.
The works of Thackeray are too cynical for the convalescent; he is for
the present in too good a humour with destiny and human nature to enjoy
them. He prefers the more cheerful aspects of life, and resents the
least failure of poetic justice.
Taking the tenants of the sick ward all round, indeed, I have little
doubt that the large majority would give their vote for Dickens. His
pathos, it is true, is too much for them. Their hearts are as waxen as
though Mrs. Jarley herself had made them. They are just in the
condition to be melted by 'Little Nell,' and overcome by the death of
Paul Dombey. They read 'David Copperfield' with avidity, but are
careful to avoid the catastrophe of Dora and even the demise of her
four-footed favourite. The book that suits them best is 'Martin
Chuzzlewit.' Its genial comedy, quite different from the violent
delights of 'Pickwick,' is well adapted to their grasp; while its
tragedy, the murder of Montague Tigg—the finest description of the
breaking of the sixth commandment in the language—leaves nothing to be
desired in the way of excitement. But here we stray beyond our bounds,
for 'Martin Chuzzlewit' is not a 'sick book;' or rather, it is one of
the very few productions of human genius on the merits of which the
opinions of both Sick and Sound are at one.