INVALIDS.

MLSS MARTINEAU'S low estimate of her "Life in the Sick-room" strikes us as a curious (though in this case quite explicable) example of the inability of authors to judge the relative value of their own productions. It is the one of her

writings we should place highest. The fresh, pure sense of Nature's homely grace, expressed as it is in so many pictures which owe their charm wholly to the painter, or at least in the originals of which a common eye would find no attraction ; combined with an appreciation, which is indeed seldom separated from this taste for Nature, of the pathos of ordinary human life, with its undis- tinguished joys and sorrows, give the book a refreshing influence which it is curious to find in any volume with such a title. It is, indeed, an eminently healthy book. After saying this, we need hardly add that we cannot accept it as a picture of average life in the sick-room. Though full of shrewd and thoughtful observa- tion, or perhaps because of this wealth, it fails to represent the usual experience of the invalid who,—

" Gazing round this little room, Must whisper, 'This shall be thy doom. Here must thou struggle, here alone Repress tired Nature's rising moan."

Miss Martineau's experience was, indeed, modified by too many ex- ceptional influences to allow her to feel this trial as it weighs on hun- dreds and thousands, and perhaps hardly any one who feels it could describe it. However, she was far too clever a woman to write on any subject she understood without giving many sensible hints about it, and although other parts of the book seem to us more valuable, these suggestions, based on experience, and bearing on one of the most difficult problems of life, form no despicable portion of this particular Invalid's legacy to her kind.

It would be a very valuable book which should teach the sick to understand the healthy, and the healthy to understand the sick. No two classes so urgently need this mutual understand- ing, and perhaps no two classes find it equally difficult. It is very desirable that the rich should be just to the poor, and the poor to the rich, but it is a great alleviation of mutual misunderstanding in this case that the rich and the poor live apart. The sick and the well, on the other hand, are separated not by a dividing-line crossing society, but by a thousand small centres of divergence sprinkled all over it. This difficulty divides families and sepa- rates friends ; it introduces sources of hopeless misapprehension between those who have been intimate from childhood, and who are still, and must continue, in direct outward contact. More- over, it is not only more necessary for sick and well to under- stand each other than for rich and poor, it is also more difficult. How misleading are the external suggestions of illness ! Who can approach some one lying on a couch, in an atmosphere of stillness and careful order, and not find his imagination filled with the idea of repose ? And yet nothing is so unlike any sensation of life-long illness as repose is. Hurry, and over-driven weariness, and distracting annoyances, and all the disasters of an over-busy life, give one far more insight into the condition of an invalid than that which is suggested to us by everything about him. We cannot always remember this paradox, but it does not cease to be true when we forget it.

The great hindrance to an understanding of life-long illness is that every one knows a little of illness, and most people fancy that transitory experience enables them to judge of a permanent con- dition. No mistake is more natural, but we believe none to be

more entire. We can judge about as well of the hardships of poverty from remembering some Alpine journey in which dinner was not to be had when it was much wanted, as we can, by recall- ing some attack of sharp fever, or the confinement of a sprained ancle, imagine what it is to exchange the interests, pains, and pleasures of this busy world for those of the sick-room. There are two main reasons for this misleading effect of what is transitory. The most important, perhaps, is our inability to represent to our- selves adequately the effect of difference of degree. We are apt to reason about cause and effect as if we could by multiplying a small result arrive at a large result. And yet the every-day lessons of nature are full of warnings against this kind of reasoning. Imagine a logical thinker for the first time learning that a certain degree of cold made water solid; any attempt on his part, short of success, to verify the statement would make it seem more impro- bable. "It is true," he might say, "we cannot get the thermo- meter quite so low as what you call the freezing-point, but you see we have come very near it, without detecting the slightest tendency to this startling change from fluid to solid." The laws of chemistry are a standing protest against this kind of reasoning, and it would be well for every logician to be forced to study them. People are constantly arguing about moral ques- tions in the style of our supposed disbeliever in ice, and we believe nobody can quite shake off the influence of this fallacy in judging of illness. It is wonderfully difficult to realise that the effect of some condition may be different, according as it is per- manent or transitory, not only in degree, but in kind. Yet it is undeniable. A short taste of some privations might prove a positive enjoyment ; a day of painless blindness, for instance, might prove to a busy worker a delightful rest. Such a person would, after such an experience, be further from knowing what it is to be blind always, than one who had never been blind at all. A short trial of illness, therefore, or indeed of any misfortune, is not only an imperfect means of forming any judgment as to its permanent effect, it is very often the means of forming a wrong judgment. It resembles, in this respect, a slight knowledge of a foreign language. A foreigner, speaking English, once said of Beethoven, whom he had personally known,—" He was very brutal." The information thus conveyed to an English ear by a veracious and well-informed witness was as correct as much opinion that is founded on a short experience. But in the case of illness, we fear, the reality is " brutal " in English, and not in French.

But in the second place, it is very important, and not very easy, to remember that the actual circumstances of anything permanent are altogether different from the circumstances of anything transi- tory. There would be abundant sympathy for the ills of life, if they would last only a short time. Many invalids will say that they do not want sympathy, but this is hardly ever entirely true, and it is never true that they do not want what sympathy brings. Eager and devoted attention may sometimes actually lessen suffering, and if this is often not the case, it is undeniable that an atmosphere of tender, absorbing anxiety does make bearable all but the worst and rarest physical ills. Many who can recall souse short attack of dangerous illness, preceded and followed by health, will say that no memory is more precious to them. "When death and estrangement have done their work, the recol- lection of hours of feverish pain, in which the patient's accept- ance of food or drink caused more gratitude than all the benefi- cence of his subsequent career, shines through the vista of cold, loveless years with a radiance that is only partly delusive. That experience did really belong to the struggle between life and death, but it is utterly unlike the experience of the very Same physical condition when death and life have alike receded, and that awful, potent, all-healing fear of separation is as remote as

the hope and stir that belong to the ordinary course of things in the world. Is it no trial to watch relaxed devotion, and feel it the result simply of the heaviness of the misfortune

which first called forth devotion ? Let no one plead in, answer that the sufferer gets used to pain. His nearest and dearest get used to the thought of his suffering—it is a law of Nature, to which they can but submit—but never let us suppose that the pain of another grows less because we think less about it. It is possible to get used to privation, and to some kinds of minor discomfort. Any one who says it is possible to get used to pain has forgotten what pain is.

It is wonderfully easy to forget pain. We have often thought there was a sort of witness to immortality in the strange fact that while emotion remembered is, to some extent, emotion ex- perienced, sensation is never really remembered at all. Whatever belongs to the body seems to bear the stamp of mortality,--it

passes at once into the region of oblivion when we are delivered from its pressure. How different is the relation of memory to the maladies of the soul! Place the unkindness of long years ago side by side in your recollection with the toothache of last week, and you feel at once you are comparing a living thing and a dead thing. The unkindness, whether remembered by him who

felt or inflicted it, is a living reality, potent to reopen and envenom the wound it had made. The toothache is gone, as if it had never been. To this fact, we are convinced, must be traced the common assumption that any degree of bodily suffer- ing would be chosen rather than severe pain of mind. What people mean in saying this is, no doubt, that they would rather remember physical than mental pain, and of course a short experi- ence of the pain which leaves no trace is to be preferred to an equally short experience of the pain which leaves a profound trace. But we are considering the case of one who knows that this fierce companion will not quit his side till the clay which gives it its power is laid in the grave,—and no sufferer, we think, is to be set by his side. The deadliest mental anguish allows some respite, when the body claims its due ; an undying grief does not prevent faint gleams of pleasure when sleep comes on after fatigue, or hunger and thirst are relieved. But there is no converse to the picture. An uniutermittent pain of body, when very severe, leaves room for nothing but itself.

The effort at understanding a state very different from their own, like every other effort, cannot be urged on the sick as it can on the sound. Yet we are far from thinking that it ought not to be urged on the sick at all. Life-long illness would be, we are certain, more tolerable, if the invalid could realise the difficulties it imposes on the surrounders. Doubtless there is pain in the recognition, and a sort of pain to which there is nothing parallel in the corresponding effort on the part of the sound. But it would save far more pain than it inflicts, in all circumstances, to recognise the cost at which every one puts himself in the place of another. Those who are bustling about in the world must take their neighbours as they find them. They at any moment can change their atmosphere, and they do not carry about a moral ther- mometer, to see whether it is exactly suited to their taste and temperament, or if they do, they are taught their mistake. The invalid, on the other band, has a right to demand that you should bring no jarring ideas to an atmosphere he cannot change at will ; but be seldom sees that this, like every other peculiar demand, must release some form of energy to compensate for that which it absorbs. The principle of the conservation of force is the greatest help to mutual toleration that the intellectual world can supply, and translated into the language of common life, this scientific expression means no more than the homely adage that you cannot eat your cake and have it. We are always experiencing the truth of this saying, and always forgetting it. It is a constant temptation to believe that any one who behaved rightly would be able to spend great moral energy in one direc- tion, without having less to spend in another. Certainly a man's moral energy is not limited in the way that his purse is. Practi- cally, however, it is limited. Every exceptional claim implies some surrender. The invalid whose nerves must be sheltered, who must have intercourse adjusted to suit him, cannot be looked up to as a source of influence. He must not expect to be at once deferred to as a capable person and sheltered as a weak one.

But one of the great difficulties of the sick-room is the absence of those circumstances which help self-appreciation. Most people over-rate themselves in certain directions, but in the jostling of the world, most of us are taught our place. The atmosphere of the sick-room, on the other hand, quite shuts out the possibility of the small checks which make us feel that we have thought too much of ourselves. It is quite evident that Miss Martineau suffered in this way, though perhaps her deafness had as much to do with the result as her ill-health. At any rate, she is a memorable example of the disadvantages of being cut off from the discipline which teaches modesty. No doubt a great deal of the deference which fed her vanity was both deserved and sin- cere, but probably not quite all. And with ordinary invalids, there is and cannot but be much illusion as to the interest they inspire, for nothing is so like deference as well-bred compassion. But indeed it has been a truth insufficiently considered, although its causes are obvious, that all influences which isolate the soul tend to give it an undue idea of its own importance. It s hard —we believe almost impossible—for a solitary being to attain humility.

What, we may be asked, in conclusion, is our remedy for all these disadvantages ? Or what is the use of dwelling on disad- vantages for which there is no remedy ? Is it not better to forget

incurable ills, till they are forced on the mind by the pressure of experience ?

No, emphatically no. The ordinary misfortunes of the world would lose much of their pain if they were distinctly recognised. And although it is true that we do not remove misunderstanding in accounting for it—that we cannot make it otherwise than painful—yet the difference between a pain which we trace to unkindness or selfishness and that which we trace to inevitable mistake, is as great as the difference between the pain of a sprained ancle when we try to stand on it, and when we let it rest on a cushion. The mind loses the bitterness of its safferings in discerning their necessity, and is sometimes surprised in this acquiescence to find them almost disappear.