One of the greatest advantages of invalidism is that it frees us from petty obligations, unworthy pleasures, and meaningless conventions. The blessed freedom of ill-health is something few people appreciate; neither have they learned to make full use of its unearned leisure. Yet we are always clamoring for time; in America, apparently, it can be found only in the sick-room.
How many people do we not know, who are so busy making, what they are pleased to call a living, that they never find time to live! As a matter of fact, only the small minority of the inefficient are obliged to sacrifice all possibility of leisure to the exigency of obtaining a livelihood; the majority, which include men and women of every class and of every vocation—plumbers and captains of industry, stenographers as well as débutantes—are occupied in accumulating superfluities. By superfluities I do not mean everything which is not normally necessary for the existence of the body, but everything that is not essential to the perfect expansion of separate individuality.
The tendency of the day is to pour all mankind into the same mould; to fetter great and small to the one ideal of obvious achievement. We have degraded success by popularizing it; we are suppressing individuality instead of fostering it; and unless a change comes before long, and the individual is again able to liberate himself and to germinate, we shall perish as other civilizations have perished without leaving more than a scratch on the page of history. For nations are ultimately judged, not by their numbers, their riches or their power, but solely by the glory of the individuals they have produced. Think of the empires which have so completely vanished that but for a few broken stones we could not even guess the sites of their vast cities, and compare these nations either to the Jews or Greeks who during their flowering gave birth to men who have conferred immortality on their respective races.
Suffering quickens individuality by removing the pressure of circumstance, custom and occupation. Moreover, in the sick-room the intellect as well as the soul has not only the liberty but the time to mature.
It always surprises me to hear people complain of insomnia. Why should they consider it a misfortune to live precious hours instead of spending them in unconsciousness? By sleeping even as much as five hours instead of nine, we gain twenty-one hours a week. Think of it! Almost three working days!
The reason the average person is so exhausted by lying awake a few hours longer that he is accustomed to do, is because he turns and twists in his bed bemoaning his sad fate, until he has worked himself into a fever. Stay awake; enjoy the night,—it is quite as wonderful as the day. Taste the charm of the silence as it steals by degrees over your weary spirit. Be grateful for these hours; they are a gift from fate. Read, write, think, meditate, and when morning comes you will wake more refreshed after two hours’ sleep than you used to after nine. Napoleon and other great men never slept more.
XI
ARTISTS
The great painters and sculptors seem to have been strangely healthy and normal. I say that they seem to have been so, because of the extreme difficulty of getting any accurate information on the subject. It sounds incredible, but I read a long life of Petrarch in which everything was mentioned but his health and only discovered quite accidentally that he had been an epileptic.
I am, therefore, convinced that there are many examples I might cite if I could only unearth the truth, yet even so, I have been able to ferret out four artists who were physically handicapped. Navarette, called the Spanish Titian and celebrated under the name of “El Mudo,” was dumb. They say that Guercino squinted so badly that he could focus only one eye.
Antoine Watteau suffered all his life from tuberculosis, which no doubt accounts for a certain “wistful gaiety” which characterizes his work. Watteau’s position in French art is of unique importance. He became the founder—as the culmination—of a new school which marked a revolt against the pompous classicism of the preceding period. “The vitality of his art was due to the rare combination of a poet’s imagination with a power of seizing reality. In his treatment of landscape background and the atmospheric conditions surrounding his figures we find the germ of Impressionism.” From the middle of the Eighteenth Century until about 1875 Watteau’s work fell into disrepute. It was chiefly owing to the efforts of the brothers de Goncourt that a reaction set in which has slowly carried Watteau to the summit of fame. He died in his thirty-seventh year.