True, a few terrible disasters must be expected, but they are generally so much like surgical operations that, unless they are fatal, the character recovers with some of its evil elements removed. And most strange to say, outside of character, and merely in relations to the external world—to wealth, opportunity, friendship,—the very worst disasters are often blessings in disguise. It pays as well to seek for the bright side of our miseries, as it does to count our mercies. “Count yo’ mahcies, Honey, count yo’ mahcies!” recommended the old colored auntie. You will remember it in that shape.
I have heard one of my ink-diffusing friends confess that having had an infirmity that interfered with his sleep, he long grieved over it as lessening his production. But at last he realized that the sleeplessness had enforced economy of time, in which, before the infirmity, he had been sadly lacking, and that his waking hours, in the undisturbed night, had bred the best of the thoughts which have contributed to his share of fame and fortune, and to the philosophy which secures his happiness.
But the realization of hidden blessings in misfortunes to ourselves generally requires a long experience: so let us take a case concerning everybody. It is not long since the civilized world experienced from the earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria, a thrill of moral stimulus probably the most intense it ever knew.
At first, on reading of such widespread and merciless destruction—maiming, killing, starving, roasting of children to death before the eyes of pinioned mothers, mothers pinioned before strong sons also pinioned from helping; large communities destroyed, and the survivors driven mad; horror piled on horror until the mere reader suffers, the imagination shrinks back miserable and incapable, and the mind loses faith in a beneficent cause and control of the universe. But after the first intense revolt of feeling has spent itself, and the reason attempts calmly to estimate the evil and what there may be of resultant good, the preponderance of the good, even in such an extreme case, may not seem impossible. The disaster evoked a universal burst of charity that turned fleets of battleships into engines of mercy. The moral advantage to humanity was colossal—nothing less than a distinct injection of kindness into all the relations of men.
It involved the death of but one in hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of the civilized world. Most of the survivors received distinct moral benefits, not to speak of the advantage to future generations from the effect on the moral quality of the race.
Moreover, the case cannot be justly put without noting that the sufferers were of a people notoriously lawless (the Northern Italians are reported to have said: “After all, they’re nothing but Calabrians and Sicilians”), and that the survivors received a powerful call to righteousness.
But reason on them as we may, and get from them what moral good we can, great tragedies tend to breed a terrible uncertainty regarding the stability and goodness of life—and indeed of the universe and the moral law. Yet though much uncertainty is very apt to start from great troubles, it is by no means sure to wait for them. This skepticism is the bottom horror. I have wondered if Sill was thinking of it when, in his poem “Truth at Last” about the Alpine guide hurled down by the snow slide, he asks:
Did he for just one heart-throb—did he indeed
Know with certainty, as they swept onward,
There was the end....