"It is worth," said Dr. Johnson, "a thousand pounds a year to have the
habit of looking on the bright side of things."
It is worth more than all money to have the capacity, the power, the
will to see the bright side of things, to possess the assurance that
there is a veritable and persisting bright side of things, when the mind
is gloomed by physical weakness and the heart is conscious only of
languor and distress. At such a dull time even a long-established habit
may desert us; with our faculties clouded and obscured we are tempted to
doubt the entire philosophy of our former life; we sink down into the
sheets of discomfort, and roll our heads restlessly on the pillow of
discontent; we almost extract a morbid satisfaction from the fuliginous
surrenderings of pessimism. Mrs. Gummidge at our bedside might be as
unwelcome as Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, or Zophar the
Naamathite; but there is a Widow in the soul of all men as mournful and
lugubrious as the tearful sister of Mr. Peggotty, and in our weakness it
is often this dismal self-comforter we are disposed to summon to our
aid. "My soul is weary of my life," cried Job; "I will leave my
complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul."
Now, there is not a wise doctor in the world, nor any man who truly
knows himself, but will acknowledge and confess the enormous importance
to physical recovery of mental well-being. The thing has become
platitudinous, but remains as difficult as ever. If Christian Science on
its physiological side had been an easy matter it would long ago have
converted the world. The trouble is that obvious things are not always
easy. It is obvious to the victim of alcoholic or nicotine poisoning
that he would be infinitely better in health could he abjure alcohol or
tobacco; he does not need to be philosophised or theologised into this
conviction; he knows it better than his teachers. His necessity is a
superadded force to the will within his soul which has lost the power of
action. And so with the will of the sick person, who knows very well
that if he could rid himself of dejection and heaviness his health would
come back to him on swallows' wings. Obvious, palpable, more certain
than to-morrow's sun; but how difficult, how hard, nay, sometimes how
impossible! An honest man like Father Tyrrell confesses that in certain
bouts with the flesh faith may desert us, even the religious faith of a
life-time may fall in ruins round our naked soul.
I was once speaking on this subject to Sir Jesse Boot, telling him how
hard I had found it to amuse and distract the mind of one of my children
in the extreme weakness which fell upon her after an operation. I told
him that I had searched my book-shelves for stories, histories,
anthologies, and journeyings; that I had carried to the bedside piles of
books which I thought the most suitable; and that I had read from these
books day after day, succeeding for some few minutes at a time to
interest the sick child, but ending almost in every case with failure
and defeat. I found that humour could bore, that narrative could
irritate, that essays could worry and perplex, that poetry could
depress, and that wit could tease with its cleverness. Moreover, I found
that one could not go straight to any anthology in existence without
coming unexpectedly, and before one was aware of it, upon some passage
so mournful or sad or pathetic that it undid at a sentence all the good
which had been done by luckier reading. My friend, who is himself a
great reader, and who has borne for some years a heavy burden of
infirmity, agreed that cheerful reading is of immense help in sickness
and also confessed that it is difficult to find any one book which
ministers to a mind weakened by illness or tortured by insomnia.
The present volume is the outcome of that conversation. I determined to
compile a book which from the first page to the last should be a happy
book, a book which would come to be a friend of all those who share in
any way the sickness of the world, a book to which everybody could go
with the sure knowledge that they would find there nothing to depress,
nothing to exacerbate irritable nerves, nothing to confirm the mind in
dejection. And on its positive side I said that this book should be
diverse and changeful in its happiness. I planned that while
cheerfulness should be its soul, the expression of that cheerfulness
should avoid monotony with as great an energy as the book itself avoided
depression. My theory was a book whose pages should resemble rather an
_olla podrida_ of variety than a tautological joint of monotonous
nutriment. And I sought to fill my wallet rather from the crumbs let
fall by the happy feasters than from the too familiar table of the great
masters.
"To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful
occupation." But one must go from conception to execution, crossing the
gulf that separates "these two hemispheres of Art." "The man," says
Balzac, "who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded
as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But
gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it
to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning
with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean,
dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly
destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this
headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in
sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in
painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--this is the task of
execution."
Even the compiler knows something of this passion of the artist,
experiences some at least of the convulsions of this headlong life,
makes acquaintance certainly with this task of execution. To conceive
such a volume as a Bed-Book of Happiness is one matter, to make it in
very fact a Bed-Book of Happiness is another and a much harder matter.
For, to begin with, one's judgment is not nearly so free and one's field
of selection not nearly so wide as the anthologist's whose book is for
all sorts and conditions of men, who may be as merry as he wishes on one
page, as solemn as he chooses on the next, and as pathetic or
sentimental as he likes on the page beyond. One has had to reject, for
instance, humour that is too boisterous or noisy, wit that is too
stinging and acrimonious, anecdotes that are touched with cruelty,
essays that, otherwise cheerful, deviate into the shadows of a too
sombre reflection. One has sought to compile a book of cheerfulness that
is kind and of happiness that is quiet and composed. One has had always
in mind the invalid just able to bear the effort of listening to a
melodious voice. To amuse, to distract, to divert, and above all to
charm--to bring a smile to the mind rather than laughter to the
lips--has been the guiding principle of this book, and the task has not
been easy. It is really extraordinary, to give but one instance of my
difficulties, how frequently the most amusing work of comic writers is
ruined by some chuckling jests about coffins, undertakers, or graves. If
any reader in full health miss from this throng of glad faces, this
muster of elated hearts, the most amusing and delightful of his familiar
friends, let him ask himself, before he pass judgment on the
anthologist, before he mistake a deliberate omission for a careless
forgetfulness, whether those good friends of his, amiable and welcome
enough at the dinner-table, are the companions he would choose for his
most wearisome hours or for the bedside of his sick child. And if in
these pages another should find that which neither amuses nor diverts
his mind, that which seems to him to miss the magic and to lack the
charm of happiness, let him pass on, with as much charity as he can
spare for the anthologist, remembering the proverb of Terence and
counting himself an infinitely happier man for this clear proof of his
superior judgment.
I wished to include in this book, from the literature of other
countries, such gentle, whimsical humour as one finds in the letters of
FitzGerald or the Essays of Lamb. But, with all my searching I could
find nothing of that kind, and judges whom I can trust assure me that no
other literature has the exquisite note of happiness which sounds
through English letters so quietly, so cheerfully, and so contentedly.
Therefore my Bed-Book is almost entirely an English Bed-Book, for I
liked not the biting acid of Voltaire's epigrams any more than the
rollicking and disgustful coarseness of Boccaccio or Rabelais. It is an
interesting reflection, if it be true, that English literature is _par
excellence_ the literature of Happiness.
"He who puts forth one depressing thought," says Lady Rachel Howard,
"aids Satan in his work of torment. He who puts forth one cheering
thought aids God in His work of beneficence." I have acted in the faith
that life is essentially good, that the universe presents to the natural
intuition of man a bright and glorious expression of Divine happiness,
that to be fruitful, as George Sand has it, life must be felt as a
blessing. One of the characters in a novel by Dostöevsky says, "Men are
made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to
say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth.' All the righteous, all
the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy."
Happiness, in its truest and only lasting sense, is the condition of a
soul at unity with itself and in harmony with existence. To bring the
sick and the sad and the unhappy at least some way on the road to this
blissful state, is the purpose of my book; and it leaves me on its
travel round the world with the wish that to whatever bedside of
sickness, suffering, and lethargy it may come, it may bring with it the
magic and contagious joy of those rare and gracious people whose
longed-for visits to an invalid are like draughts of rejoicing health. I
hope that my fine covers may soon be worn to the comfort of an old
garment, that my new pages may be quickly shabbied to the endearment of
a familiar face, and that the book will live at bedsides deepening and
sweetening the reader's affection for its faded leaves till it come to
seem an old, faithful, and never-failing friend, one who is never at
fault and never a deserter, and without whom life would lose one of its
fondest companionships.