One of our most valuable discoveries is often made elsewhere, but is not sufficiently acknowledged and acted upon. We find, after a trial of many methods, that we learn to endure and achieve less by direct effort than by putting ourselves under influences favourable to the state of mind we seek. We have discovered the same thing before, in regard to mending our faults. We have found that childhood and youth were the seasons of resolution, and that, perhaps, we have not since cured ourselves of a single fault by direct effort. I am persuaded that instances are extremely rare of rectification by such means. I have myself amended only one bad habit—and that a very trifling one—by express effort, since I was twenty; and I could point out only two or three, of all my acquaintance, that I know to be capable of self-improvement in that direct manner; and I cannot but honour them in proportion to my sense of the difficulty and rarity of this exercise of moral power. Yet, how people go on expecting reformation in sinners from a mere conviction of the reason actuating the will, as they suppose, infallibly! the consequence of which foolish expectation is, that the true appliances are neglected. Wordsworth has it—
“‘Resolve!’ the haughty moralist would say:
‘This single act is all that we demand.’
Alas! such wisdom bids a creature fly,
Whose very sorrow is that Time hath shorn
His natural wings!”
Instead of losing time, and practically invoking despair, by exhorting to impossible flights, wise guardians will rather remove the sufferer into an element of new enterprise, or one which may gradually exhaust and destroy his parasitical foes of habit. We sufferers experimentally ascertain this very soon. We find how little reason we have to trust to efforts of resolution under circumstances which tend to enfeeble resolution. We might be capable, as so many others are, of any amount of effort on a single emergency; but when we have to deal with a permanent infliction—to make the best of a difficult mode of life—we find that we must put our trust in abiding influences, and not in a succession of efforts. We therefore lay aside defiance; we submit ourselves—not to our troubles—but to every kind of natural preventive, remedy, and solace. We arrange our personal habits so as to husband our ease, and to conceal our pain; and we place our minds under such influences, intellectual and spiritual, as may best nourish our higher powers, and occupy our energies, to the alleviation, if it may not be to the exclusion, of the suffering, whose challenge we will neither entertain nor defy.
Among other merits of this method, may be reckoned this—that it helps to introduce us to a privilege which may be disregarded by many, but which to us is inestimable—that of causing pleasure, rather than pain, to those connected with us. It is the prerogative of the healthy and happy to give pleasure wherever they go; it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering. To the far-seeing invalid, who is aware not only of this immediate effect, but of its remote consequences, this is the most afflicting feature of his condition. If we can, by any management, evade this liability, we have cause to be grateful indeed. If, by submitting ourselves to all softening and ennobling influences, we can so nourish and educe the immortal part of ourselves as to subdue our own conflicts, and present our active and enjoying aspect to those who visit us, we are absolved from the worst penalties of our state. If, as years pass on, we find ourselves sought from the impulse of inclination, as well as from the stringency of duty—if we are permitted to see faces light up from ours, and hear the music of mirth succeed to the low serious tones of sympathetic greeting—we may let our hearts bound with the assurance that all is well with us. When we cannot refuse to see that children come to us eagerly, and that our riper companions stay late by our sofa, and come again and again, till nothing short of duty calls them away, any one might envy us the feelings with which we lie down again in our solitude. We are not proud, like the young beauty with her conquest over hearts, or like the political or literary hero with his sway over the passions or the reason; but we are elate—and not without cause—elate in our privilege of annihilating the constraint and distaste inspired by our condition, and of finding ourselves restored to something like an equality of intercourse with the healthy in soul. The best and highest must ever be selected from among the healthy and the happy—from among those whose conditions of being are the most perfectly fulfilled; but, without aspiring to their consummate privileges, we feel ourselves abundantly blessed in such a partial emancipation as permits us, on occasion, and without shame, to join their “glorious company.”
THE END.
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