Considering death as a certainty—The wisdom learned from suffering—Employment of happier intervals—The teaching of the diseased not to be rejected—Their double experience—Ignorance of Nature’s spoiled children—Benefit of disinterested thought—Reasons for pursuing intellectual labors to the last—Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
When Alexandre Bixio lay on his death-bed, his friend Labrousse visited him, and exclaimed on entering the room, “How well you are looking to-day!” To this, Bixio, who was clearly aware of his condition, answered in these words:—“Voyons, mon pauvre Labrousse; tu viens voir un homme qui n’a plus qu’un quart d’heure a vivre, et tu veux lui faire croire qu’il a bonne mine; allons, une poignée de main, cela vaut mieux pour un homme que tous ces petits mensonges-lá.”
I will vex you with none of these well-meant but wearisome little falsehoods. We both of us know your state; we both know that your malady, though it may be alleviated, can never be cured; and that the fatal termination of it, though delayed by all the artifices of science, will certainly arrive at last. The cheerful courage which enables you to look this certainty in the face has also enabled you to extract from years of suffering that profoundest wisdom which (as one of the wisest of living Englishmen has told us) can be learned from suffering alone. The admirable elasticity of your intellectual and moral nature has enabled you, in the intervals of physical uneasiness or pain, to cast aside every morbid thought, to enter quite fully and heartily into the healthy life of others, and to enjoy the magnificent spectacle of the universe with contented submission to its laws—those beneficent yet relentless laws which to you bring debility and death. You have continued to write notwithstanding the progress of your malady; and yet, since it has so pitilessly held you, there is no other change in the spirit of your compositions than the deepening of a graver beauty, the addition of a sweeter seriousness. Not one sentence that you have written betrays either the injustice of the invalid, or his irritability. Your mind is not clouded by any mist from the fever marshes, but its sympathies are far more active than they were. Your pain has taught you a tender pity for all the pain that is outside of you, and a patient gentleness which was wanting to your nature in its days of barbarian health.
Surely it would be a lamentable error if mankind were to carry out the recommendation of certain ruthless philosophers, and reject the help and teaching of the diseased. Without undervaluing the robust performance of healthy natures, and without encouraging literature that is morbid, that is fevered, impatient, and perverse, we may still prize the noble teaching which is the testament of sufferers to the world. The diseased have a peculiar and mysterious experience; they have known the sensations of health, and then, in addition to this knowledge, they have gained another knowledge which enables them to think more accurately even of health itself. A life without suffering would be like a picture without shade. The pets of Nature, who do not know what suffering is, and cannot realize it, have always a certain rawness, like foolish landsmen who laugh at the terrors of the ocean, because they have neither experience enough to know what those terrors are, nor brains enough to imagine them.
You who are borne along, slowly but irresistibly, to that Niagara which plunges into the gulf of death,—you who, with perfect self-possession and heroic cheerfulness, are counting the last miles of the voyage,—find leisure to study and think as the boat glides onwards silently to the inevitable end. It is one of the happiest privileges of the high intellectual life that it can elevate us—at least in the intervals of relief from complete prostration or acute pain—to regions of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten. To feel that he is still able, even in days of physical weakness and decline, to add something to the world’s inheritance of knowledge, or to bequeath to it some new and noble thought in the pearl of complete expression, is a profound satisfaction to the active mind that is lodged in a perishing body. Many diseases fortunately permit this activity to the last; and I do not hesitate to affirm, that the work done in the time of physical decline has in not a few instances been the most perfect and the most permanently valuable. It is not accurately true that the mind and the body invariably fail together. Physicians who know how prevalent chronic diseases are, and how many eminent men are physically inconvenienced by them, know also that minds of great spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving themselves whilst the body steadily deteriorates. Nor is there anything irrational in this persistent improvement of the mind, even to the extremest limit of material decay; for the mind of every intellectual human being is part and parcel of the great permanent mind of humanity; and even if its influence soon ceases to be traceable—if the spoken words are forgotten—if the written volume is not reprinted or even quoted, it has not worked in vain. The intellectual light of Europe in this century is not only due to great luminaries whom every one can name, but to millions of thoughtful persons, now utterly forgotten, who in their time loved the light, and guarded it, and increased it, and carried it into many lands, and bequeathed it as a sacred trust. He who labors only for his personal pleasure may well be discouraged by the shortness and uncertainty of life, and cease from his selfish toil on the first approaches of disease; but whoever has fully realized the grand continuity of intellectual tradition, and taken his own place in it between the future and the past, will work till he can work no more, and then gaze hopefully on the world’s great future, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, when his blind eyes beheld the future of zoology.
LETTER VII.
TO A YOUNG MAN OF BRILLIANT ABILITY, WHO HAD JUST TAKEN HIS DEGREE.
A domestic picture—Thoughts suggested by it—Importance of the senses in intellectual pursuits—Importance of hearing to Madame de Stael—Importance of seeing to Mr. Buskin—Mr. Prescott, the historian—How blindness retarded his work—Value of all the five senses—Self-government indispensable to their perfection—Great value of longevity to the intellectual life.
It is always a great pleasure to me to pass an evening at your father’s house; but on the last occasion that pleasure was very much enhanced because you were once more with us. I watched your mother’s eyes as she sat in her place in the drawing-room. They followed you almost without ceasing, and there was the sweetest, happiest expression on her dear face, that betrayed her tender maternal love for you and her legitimate maternal pride. Your father was equally happy in his own way; he was much more gay and talkative than I have seen him for two or three anxious years; he told amusing stories; he entered playfully into the jests of others; he had pleasant projects for the future, and spoke of them with facetious exaggeration. I sat quietly in my corner, slyly observing my old friends, and amusing myself by discovering (it did not need much perspicacity for that) the hidden sources of the happiness that was so clearly visible. They were gladdened by the first successes of your manhood; by the evidence of your strength; by the realization of hopes long cherished.