My Unknown Chum: "Aguecheek"

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUFFERING

 
I am old,
And my infirmities have chained me here
To suffer and to vex my weary soul
With the vain hope of cure. * * *
Yet my captivity is not so joyless
As you would think, my masters. Here I sit
And look upon this eager, anxious world, —
Not with the eyes of sour misanthropy,
Nor envious of its pleasures, – but content, —
Yea, blessedly content, 'mid all my pains,
That I no more may mingle with its brawlings.
 

Human suffering is an old and favourite theme. From the time when the woes of Job assumed an epic grandeur of form, and the adventures and pains of Philoctetes inspired the tragic muse of Sophocles, down to the publication of the last number of the London Lancet, there would seem to have been no subject so attractive as the sufferings of poor humanity. Literature is filled with their recital, and, if books were gifted with a vocal power, every library would resound with wailings. Ask your neighbour Jenkins, who overtakes you on your way to your office, how he is, and it is ten chances to one that he will entertain you with an account of his influenza or his rheumatism. It is a subject, too, which age cannot wither nor custom stale. It knows none of the changes which will at times dwarf or keep out of sight all other themes. The weather, which forms the raw material of so much conversation, is nothing compared to it. There is nothing which men find so much pleasure in talking about as their own ailments. The late Mr. Webster, of Marshfield, was once stopping for a single day in a western city, where he had never been before, and where there was a natural curiosity among many of the inhabitants to see the Defender of the Constitution. He therefore set apart two hours before the time of his departure for the reception of such persons as might seek the honour of a shake of his hand. The reception took place in one of the parlours of a hotel, the crowd filing in at one door, being introduced by the mayor, and making their exit by another. In the course of the proceedings, a little man, with a lustrous beaver in one hand and a gold-headed cane in the other, and whose personal apparel appeared to have been got up (as old Pelby would have said) without the slightest regard to expense, and on a scale of unparalleled splendour, walked forward, and was presented by the mayor as "Mr. Smith, one of our most eminent steamboat builders and leading citizens." Mr. Webster's large, thoughtful, serene eyes seemed to be completely filled by the result of the combined efforts of the linen-draper, the tailor, and the jeweller, that confronted him, and his deep voice made answer – "Mr. Smith, I am happy to see you. I hope you are well, sir." "Thank you, thir," said the leading citizen, "I am not very well. I wath tho unfortunate ath to take cold yethterday by thitting in a draught. Very unpleathant, Mr. Webthter, to have a cold! But Mrs. Smith thays that the thinks that if I put my feet in thome warm water to-night, and take thome-thing warm to drink on going to bed, that I may get over it. I thertainly hope tho, for it really givth me the headache, and I can't thmell at all." Mr. Webster expressed a warm interest in Mr. Smith's case, and a hope that Mrs. Smith's simple medical treatment would result beneficially, and then turned with undisturbed gravity to the next citizen, who, with some six hundred others, was anxiously waiting his turn. We are all like Mr. Smith. We laugh, it is true, at his affectations, but we are as likely to force our petty ailments upon a mind burdened with the welfare of a nation; and we never tire of hearing ourselves talk about our varying symptoms. Politeness may hold us back from importuning our friends with the diagnosis of our case, but our self-centred hearts are all alike, and a cold in the head will awaken more feelings in its victim than the recital of all the horrors of the hospital of Scutari. Nothing can equal the heroic fortitude with which we bear the sufferings of our fellows, or the saintliness of our pious resignation and acquiescence in the wisdom of the divine decrees when our friends are bending under their afflictive stroke.

I wish to say a few words about suffering. Do not be afraid, beloved reader, that I am going to carry you into rooms from which the light is excluded, and which are strangers to any sound above a whisper, or the casual movement of some of the phials on the mantel-piece. I am going to speak of suffering in its strict sense of pain, – bodily pain, – and sickness is not necessarily accompanied with pain. I cannot regard your sick man as a real sufferer. His fever rages, and he tosses from side to side as if he were suffering punishment with Dives; but from the incoherent phrases which escape from his parched lips, you learn that his other self is rapt in the blissfulness that enfolds Lazarus. He prattles childishly of other lands and scenes – he thinks himself surrounded by friends whose faces once were grateful to his sight, but who long since fell before the power with which he is struggling – or he fancies himself metamorphosed into a favourite character in some pleasant book which he has lately read. After a time he wakes forth from his delirium, but he cannot even then be called a sufferer. On the contrary, his situation, even while he is so entirely dependent upon those around him, is really the most independent one in the world. His lightest wish is cared for as if his life were the price of its non-accomplishment. All his friends and kinsmen, and neighbours whom he hardly knows by sight, vie with each other in trying to keep pace with his returning appetite. He is the absolute monarch of all he surveys. There is no one to dispute his reign. The crown of convalescence is the only one which does not make the head that wears it uneasy. He has nothing to do but to satisfy his longings for niceties, to listen to kind words from dear friends, to sleep when he feels like it, and to get better. I am afraid that we are all so selfish and so enslaved by our appetites, that the period of convalescence is the pleasantest part of life to most of us.

Therefore I shut out common sickness, fevers, and the like, from any share in my observations on suffering. If you ask me what I should be willing to consider real bodily pain, – since I am unwilling to allow that ordinary sick men participate in it, – I should say that you can find it in a good, old-fashioned attack of rheumatism or gout. I think it was Horace Walpole who said that these two complaints were very much alike, the difference between them being this: that rheumatism was like putting your hand or foot into a vice, and screwing it up as tight as you possibly can, and gout was the same thing, only you give the screw one more turn. It is no flattery to speak of the victim to either of these disorders as a sufferer. The rheumatic gout is a complaint which possesses all the advantages and peculiarities which its compound title denotes. It unites in itself all the potentiality of gout and all the ubiquity of rheumatism. Its characteristics have been impressed upon me in a manner that sets at defiance that weakness of memory which generally accompanies old age. Sharp experience, increasing in sharpness as my years pile up, makes that complaint a specialty among my acquirements. These stinging, burning, cutting pains deserve the superlative case, if any thing does. Language (that habitual bankrupt) is reduced to a most abject state when called upon to describe rheumatic gout. The disease does not seem to feel satisfied with poisoning your blood by its aciduousness, it makes your flesh tingle and burn, and, like the late Duke of Wellington, does not rest until it has conquered the bony part. The very bone seems to be crumbling wherever the demon of gout pinches. There are moments in the life of every gouty man when it seems as if nothing would be so refreshing as to indulge for a while in the use of that energetic diction, savouring more of strength than of righteousness, which is common among cavalry troops and gentlemen of the seafaring profession, but which, in society, is considered to be a little in advance of the prejudices of the age. No higher encomium could be passed upon a gouty man than to say that, with all his torments, he never swore, and was seldom petulant. But there are very few whose merits deserve this canonization.

But gout, with all its pains, has yet its redeeming characteristics. That great law of compensation which reduces the inequalities of our lot, and makes Brown, Jones, and Robinson come out about even in the long run, is not inoperative here. The gout is painful, but its respectability is unquestionable. It is the disease of a gentleman. It is a certificate of good birth more satisfactory than any which the Heralds' College or the Genealogical Association can furnish. It is but right, too, that the man who can date back his family history to Plymouth or Jamestown in this country, and to Runnymede on the other side of the Atlantic, should pay something for such a privilege. A man may never have indulged in "the sweet poison of the Tuscan grape" himself, but can he reasonably complain of an incontrovertible testimony to the fact that his ancestors lived well! Chacun à son goût: for myself, I should much prefer my honoured family name, with all its associations with the brave knight who made it famous, accompanied by the only possession which I have received by hereditary right, to the most unequivocal state of health burdened with such a name as Jinkins.

Mentally and spiritually, the gout is far from being a useless institution. It ripens a man's judgment, and prunes away the radical tendencies of his nature. It will convert the wildest of revolutionists into the stiffest of conservatives. It teaches a man to look at things as they really are, and not as enthusiasm would have them represented. No gouty man would ever look to the New York Tribune as the exponent of his religious or political creed. His complaint has a positive character, and it makes him earnest to find something positive in religion and politics. The negativeness of radicalism tires him. He deprecates every thing like change. He thinks that religion, and society, and government were established for some better end than to afford a perpetual employment to the destructive powers of visionary reformers and professional philanthropists. He longs to find constancy and stability in something besides his inexorable disorder.

There is another disorder which people generally seem to consider a very trifling affair, but which any one who knows it will allow to be productive of the most unmistakable pain. I refer to neuralgia. Who pities a neuralgic person? Any healthy man, when asked about it, will answer in his ignorance that it is "only a headache." But ask the school teacher, whose throbbing head seems to be beating time to the ceaseless muttering and whispering of her scholars as they bend over their tasks – ask the student, whose thoughts, like undisciplined soldiers, will not fall into the ranks, and whose head seems to be occupied by a steam engine of enormous power, running at the highest rate of pressure, with the driver sitting on the safety-valve – ask them whether neuralgia is "only a headache"! Who can tell the cause of the prevalence of this scourge? whether it proceeds from our houses overheated with intolerable furnaces and anthracite coal, or from our treacherous and unconstant climate so forcibly described by Choate: "Cold to-day; hot to-morrow; mercury at eighty degrees in the morning, with wind at south-west; and in three hours more a sea turn, with wind at east, a thick fog from the very bottom of the ocean, and a fall of forty degrees of Fahrenheit." The uncertainty which seems to attend all human science, and the science of medicine in particular, envelops this mysterious disease, and thousands of us are left to suffer and wonder what the matter is.

But all of these pains, gouty, neuralgic, and otherwise, have yet their sweet uses, and like the vile reptile Shakespeare tells us of, are adorned with a precious jewel. The old Roman emperors in the hour of triumph used to have a slave stand behind them to whisper in their ear, from time to time, the unwelcome but salutary truth that they were but mortal men. Even now, on the occasion of the enthronement of a Pope, a lighted candle is applied to a bunch of flax fixed upon a staff, and as the smoke dissipates itself into thin air before the newly-crowned Pontiff, surrounded as he is by all the emblems of religion and all the insignia and pomp of worldly power, the same great truth of the perishableness of all mortal things is impressed upon his mind by the chanting of the simple but eloquent phrase, Sic transit gloria mundi. But we neuralgic and gouty wretches need no whispering slave nor smoking flax to remind us of our frailty and the transientness of our happiness and glory. We carry with us a monitor who checks our swelling pride, and teaches us effectually the brevity of human joys. We are very apt, in our impatience and short-sightedness, to think that if we had the management of the world and the dispensation of pleasure and suffering, every thing could be conducted in a much more satisfactory manner. If it were so, we should undoubtedly carry things on in the style of a French restaurant, so that we could have pain à discretion. But on the whole, I am inclined to think that we had better leave these matters to the management of that infinite Power which gives us day by day our daily pain, and from which we receive in the long run about what is meet for us. I hope that I shall not be thought ill-bred or profane in using such expressions as these. At my time of life it is too late to begin to murmur. A few twinges more or less are nothing when the hair grows gray and the eye is dimmed with the mists of age. The man who knows nothing of the novitiate of patience – who has passed through life without the chastening discipline of bodily pain – has missed one of the best parts of existence. To suffer is one of the noblest prerogatives of human nature. Without suffering, life would be robbed of half its zest, and the thought of death would drive us to despair.

When I was a young man, and gave little thought to the gout and the other ills that vex me at present, I saw a wonderful exhibition of patience, which I now daily recall to mind, and wish I could imitate. I was sojourning in Florence, that lovely city, whose every association is one of calm and satisfactory pleasure undisturbed by any thing like bodily suffering. I enjoyed the friendship of a young American amateur artist of unquestioned talent, but whose artistic efforts were interfered with by the frequent attacks of a serious and excruciating disorder. It was considerable time after I made his acquaintance before I knew that he was an invalid. I noticed his lameness, but whenever we met he wore a smiling face, and had a cheerful word for every body. One evening I called in at his quiet lodgings near the Lung' Arno, and found a party of some six or eight Americans talking over their recollections of home. He was entertaining them with the explanation of an imaginary panorama of New England, and a musical friend threw in illustrative passages from the piano in the intervals. The parlour resounded with our laughter at his irresistible fun; but in the midst of it all, he asked us to excuse him for a moment, and went into his bedroom. After a little while, another engagement calling me away, I went into his chamber to speak with him before leaving. I found him lying upon his bed, writhing like Laocoön, while great drops stood upon his brow and agony was depicted on his patient face. He resisted all my attempts to do any thing for him; the attack had lasted all day, but was at some times severer than at others; he should feel better soon, and would go back to his friends; I had better not stop with him, as it might attract their attention in the parlour, &c. So I took my leave. The next morning I met one of his friends, who told me that he returned to his company a few minutes after my departure, and entertained them for an hour or more with an exhibition of his powers of wit and humour, which eclipsed all his previous efforts. Poor S. C.! His weary but uncomplaining spirit laid down that crippled body, which never gave aught but pain to its possessor, three or four years ago, and passed, let us hope, into a happier state of existence, which flesh and blood, with their countless maladies and dolours, may not inherit.

The traveller in the south of Europe frequently encounters, in his perambulations through the streets and squares of cities, a group of people gathered around a monk, who is discoursing to them of those sublime truths which men are prone to lose sight of in their walks abroad. The style of the sermon is not, it is true, what we should look for from Newman, or Ravignan, or Ventura, but it has in it those fundamental principles of true eloquence, simplicity and earnestness; and the coarse brown habit, the knotted cord, and the pale, serene, devout face of the preacher, harmonize wondrously with the self-denying doctrine he teaches, and give a double force to all his words. His instructions frequently concern the simple moral duties of life and the exercise of the cardinal virtues, which he enforces by illustrations drawn from the lives of canonized saints, who won their heavenly crown and their earthly fame of blessedness by the practice of those virtues. Allow me to close my sermon on suffering in the manner of the preaching friars, though I may not draw my illustrations from the ancient martyrologies; for I apprehend that it will be more in keeping with the serious character of this essay to take them from another source. We have all laughed at Dickens's characters of Mark Tapley and Mr. Toots. The former was celebrated for "keeping jolly under disadvantageous circumstances," and seemed to mourn over those dispensations of good fortune which detracted from his credit in being jolly. The latter was never known to indulge in any complaint, but met every mishap and disappointment with a manly resignation and the simple remark, "It's of no consequence." Even when he was completely ingulfed in misfortunes, when Pelion seemed to have been heaped upon Ossa, and both upon him, he did not give way to despair. He only gave utterance more fervently to his favourite maxim, "It's of no consequence. Nothing is of any consequence whatever!" Now, laugh at it as we may, this is a great truth. It is the foundation of all true philosophy – of all practical religion. A few years more, and what will it avail us to have bargained successfully, to have lived in splendour, to have left in history a name that shall be the synonyme of power! A few years, and what shall we care for all our present sufferings and the light afflictions which are but for a moment! May we not say with Solomon, that "All is vanity," and with poor Toots, that "Nothing is of any consequence whatever"? Now, if there are any people who are likely to arrive at this satisfactory conclusion, and who need the consolation imparted by the reception and full appreciation of the deep truth it contains, it is the gouty, and rheumatic, and neuralgic wretches whom I have had in mind while writing this paper. Let me, in conclusion, as one who has had some experience, and is not merely theorizing, exhort all such persons to meditate upon the lives of the two great patterns of patience whom I have brought forward as examples; and to bear in mind that it is only through the resignation of Toots, that they can attain to the jollity of Tapley. Likewise let me counsel those who may be passing through life unharmed by serious misfortune and untrammelled by bodily pain, never to lose sight of that striking admonition of old Sir Thomas Browne's, "Measure not thyself by thy morning shadow, but by the extent of thy grave; and reckon thyself above the earth, by the line thou must be contented with under it."