Part 10
I will not dwell on the reflection. A glimpse into this hell ought to suffice, (though we to whom imagery comes unbidden, and cannot be banished at will, have to bear much more than occasional glimpses;) a glimpse ought to suffice to set all to work to procure for every one of these sufferers, bread and warmth, if possible, and as soon as possible; but above everything, and without the loss of an hour, an entrance upon their spiritual birthright. Every man, and every woman, however wise and tender appearing and designing to be, who for an hour helps to keep closed the entrance to the region of ideas,--who stands between sufferers and great thoughts, (which are the angels of consolation sent by God to all to whom he has given souls,) are, in so far, ministers of hell,--not themselves inflicting torment, but intercepting the influences which would assuage or overpower it. Let the plea be heard of us sufferers who know well the power of ideas,--our plea for the poor,--that, while we are contriving for all to be fed and cherished by food and fire, we may meanwhile kindle the immortal vitality within them, and give them that ethereal solace and sustenance which was meant to be shared by all, “without money and without price.”
It seems but just (if we may venture so to speak), that there should be the renovating power in ideas that I have described, for our worst sufferings arise from an unmitigated power of ideas in another sort. I am not qualified by experience to speak of severe continued bodily torment, but all testimony seems to concur with all our experience, that there is no such instrument of torture as a besetting thought. The mere description of the suffering, given by those who know it, seems to have wrought upon the general mind, for a kind of shudder goes round when it is mentioned, though it can no more be conceived of by the gay and occupied, than the continual dropping of water on the head can be imagined by him whose transactions with the element consist in a plunge bath every morning. It is known, however, that herculean men have shrunk to shadows under the infliction, that it has reduced heroes to tremble at the whispering wind, or the striking of the clock, that it turns the raven-hair gray, lets down genius into idiocy, and starves the most vigorous life into an atrophy. How then are the sick to meet this woe, which comes upon them with force exactly proportioned to their weakness!
If every sick prisoner in our land were questioned, and could and would answer truly, I believe all would reply (all who have minds) that their worst pangs are in the soul. For the moment,--for the hour,--no agony is, I know, to be compared with some pains of body; but when the question is of months and years (including the seasons of delicious reaction from bodily pains), I am confident that the peculiar misery of our condition--subjection to a besetting thought--will be owned to absorb all others. Whether the thought relate to any intellectual matter, or whether it be self-abasement and self-weariness at the perpetually-recurring apparition of sins, follies, trifling old misadventures and misbehaviour, or whether some more serious cause of remorse, the tormenting and weakening effects are much alike; the cold horror at waking up to the thought in the middle of the night, knowing that we shall sleep no more; the misery of opening our eyes upon a new day, with the spell of the thought full upon us; the dread of giving ourselves up to thinking, and yet the inability to read, while the enemy is hovering about the page; the faint resolution, broken almost as surely as formed, not to speak of this trouble to our nearest and closest friend, and the ending in speaking of it, in our agony, to many besides. O! there is no aching, no shooting or throbbing pain of fibre or nerve that can (taken with its alternations) compare in misery with this! Even the anticipation becomes in time the worst, though the bodily pain is known to be real and unavoidable, while the ideal one is clearly seen to be baseless, or enormously exaggerated. The close observer of a sick sufferer may see the drops stand on the forehead, and the quiver pass over the lip, at the bare thought of the certain return of a periodical pain; but worse to endure is the sickening of the soul, at the certainty that at such an hour we shall be under the spiritual dominion of a haunting demon, the foe, as foolish as cruel, whom we defy now with our reason, but shall then succumb to in every faculty. Here is an ordeal for the proud! yet it is not less fearful to the humble; for the humble can no more dispense with self-respect than the proud.
Some may wonder at such a history of an unknown trouble,--some who, when anything harasses them, mount a horse, and gallop over the sea-sands or the race-course, or visit their friends or the theatre, or resort to music, or romp with children. Let them remember that we cannot do these things,--that the very weakness which subjects us to these troubles, forbids our escape from them. We know, as well as they, that if once we could feel the open air upon our brows, our feet on the grass, our bodies in exercise and vigour, all would be well with us; but, as we cannot use these remedies, the knowledge is of no immediate avail. If we can get to the window and look abroad, that is well, as far as it goes; but we are most subject to our tyrant in the night, and in midwinter,--at times when we cannot look abroad; and it may even happen, too, that the tyrant dims the sun at noon-day, and blots out the landscape, or renders us blind to it. What then is to be done? We evade the misery, when we can, by stirring books, (the most objective that can be had), or by seeing what we can of the world by the telescope, or by resorting to some sweet familiar spring of poetry; but this last expedient is impaired by the fear of mixing painful associations with pleasures too sacred and dear to be endangered. Or we defy the foe in reckless anguish, or we endure in silent patience.
But there is something far better to be done,--not always; but still, not seldom. We can turn the forces of ideas against themselves--meet them with their own weapons. We can call in the power of an idea to overcome the tyranny of another idea; and then we come off conquerors, and with a soul-felt joy.
It is a joy to recur, in memory or imagination, to any moral conflict, past or possible, in which all our faculties are needed, and wherein that force is at least conceived to be employed which must otherwise corrode us. But if any such enterprise actually presents itself--confronts us at the moment--how great is the blessing! It may bring toil and difficulty to ourselves, and doubt and blame from others; but if it be clear to ourselves, how keen is the sense of life it gives at some seasons, though it may overpower our weakness at others! It seems hard, when we are feeble and suffering, to have irksome labour to do, to have to oppose the wishes and feelings of some whom we love, and to arouse argument when our longing is for unbroken and lasting rest: but, if our duty be but clear to ourselves, (or for the most part clear, with doubts only in our most sickly hours,) what a new position we find ourselves in, permitted once more to take the offensive side against evil, in alternation with the weary perpetual defensive posture! Happy they, who have been brought up in allegiance to Duty, more or less strict; and happiest they whose loyalty has been the strictest! In the hour of nature’s feebleness, and apparent decay, they find themselves under the eye and hand of the Physician of souls, who has for them a cordial of heavenly virtue--of heavenly virtue for them, but of no virtue to such as have let their moral nature take its chance, and who, in their hour of extreme need, are no more capable of spiritual enterprise than of a bodily flight beyond the precincts of their pain. They must languish in self-corrosion; while they who happily find how Duty gives “power to the faint,” “mount up with wings as eagles.” With every emergency of singular or unpopular moral action, every occasion for saying with courage a true word, or advocating a neglected cause--with every opportunity, in short, of spiritual enterprise, they soar afresh, and their eyes kindle anew in the light of life.
But this kind of solace could not be,--nor any effectual kind,--but for 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.