Invalids and Their Friends

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

INVALIDS, as invalids, are seldom rightly appreciated. In their common human individuality they may be coddled, even loved; but as a class they are anathema on every tongue. Practical uplifters of the world condemn them as a social burden; fastidious pleasure-seekers despise them as lacking ‘vivacity’; and — worst fate of all — tender-hearted sentimentalists pity them because they ‘cannot enjoy life.’ Yet, in truth, though the given invalid is too often a vicious, uninteresting, or pitiable specimen, the type is something that the world could ill afford to lose. The essence of invalidism is not pain, or poultices, or poverty, or peevishness — though any of these except the last may profitably be among its incidentals. Like most of God’s gifts to man, it may fulfill itself in various ways. But its necessary character is nothing more than an enforced limiting of the field of life’s activities. Life being, at best, an affair of but a few score years, with a faculty of eating up its moments much more rapidly than it can exhaust their possibilities, it matters little where we set the limits of the field. A very small corner will absorb a vast amount of cultivation. In an unlimited field a man runs about feverishly, snatching at the complement of painful excitement which is the means of realizing his existence. The invalid, on the contrary, may rest serenely while his existence realizes itself.

This serene, quiescent receptivity of the invalid, grateful as it may be subjectively, is undoubtedly an obstacle in the path of the social uplifter. Invalids, like the idle rich, are abhorrent to the social conscience. They are not of the producing classes. They toil not, neither do they spin. Their mouths are perpetually agape for unmerited miraculous loaves and fishes. They gather where they do not sow. Without possessing recognized authority they say to this man, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; to another, ‘Come,’ and he cometh; and to every man, their servant, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it. The practical uplifter, with the narrow range of view so often characteristic of both practicality and uplift, may be pardoned if he finds these things objectionable. But his war against them is estopped because they are inevitable. No invalid boasts that he is ‘not as other men.’ If he did so — if he were an invalid by choice, and not by divine right — he might well be condemned as self-indulgent. But because his distinction is forced upon him he goes down to his house justified. He achieves the consecration and the glamour of martyrdom, not by having his body racked, but by having his will violated. Now the will, as the Hegelians teach us, is elastic; and violations, with the eternal rebound by which the will rises triumphant over them, constitute its very existence. The invalid, therefore, though a burden to the community, is such a burden as the poet, the philosopher, and the saint. He serves as they also who only stand and wait, setting before the world in his own person an example of how slight the exertion, and how few the external points of stimulus, required to keep burning in man’s life that constant gemlike flame of pure sensation which is its fullness and, when rightly used, may be its joy.

Justified or not justified in his economic standing, the invalid is too often an uninteresting companion. Usually the individual, rather than the type, is at fault. Most invalids become peevish from mere convention, and in their peevishness they build an evil convention ever higher. But aside from this, the very advantages of the invalid’s lot unfit him for fellowship with the pleasure-seeker. His pleasures are selfish pleasures, but justifiably selfish, because incommunicable. When he enjoys himself he seldom knows it, and he never can admit it. The very possibility seems an affront to his sympathetic neighbors. He rejoices, as pious Isaak Walton makes the Cynic say, ‘Lord! How many things there are in this world of which Diogenes hath no need”; and this is hardly a sentiment to share with persons whose glory is in needing and seeking many things.

That which is at rest cannot impart momentum. Therefore the invalid is repulsive to those unquiet souls so characteristic of our own age, and yet so common to all ages that Montaigne could say three hundred years ago, ‘Occupation is with certain minds a mark of understanding and dignity: they seek repose in agitation as babes are rocked to sleep in cradles.’ For such the invalid can have but a negative value: viewing his condition they may thank God devoutedly for what they have escaped, and may cultivate at his expense the sentiment of compassion, which is really a valuable possession for a busy man. A certain amount of idealization is necessary for fellowship with invalids; but lasting friendships must in any case rest upon some such foundation, for our friends, being human, can be fairly known to us only through charity, and our friendships are none the less real and precious when we have admitted that ‘the best in this kind are but shadows’ — unless imagination mend them.

But, after all, the practical uplifter and the fastidious pleasure-seeker must not be taken too seriously. It is the good-hearted, sensible, plodding sentimentalists who people and preserve the world; and the greatest danger of the invalid is that these should overwhelm him with their pity as the Sabines did Tarpeia with their shields. The sympathy, like the gratitude, of men will often leave him mourning. He will try in vain to escape the ministrations of those who are charitably determined to ‘take him out of himself,’ ‘make him forget himself,’ ‘kill time for him,’ and ‘give him something to do,’ — forgetting, in their zeal, that the wretchedness of a resourceful man consists in having too little time and a great deal too much to do.

Young people in particular — insolent young animals whom the thumping red blood of the brute whips constantly into purposeless activity — cannot understand how any one can live without action and without amusement. ‘He owned that he enjoyed life very much, and that he had a great desire to live longer,’ writes young Thomas Babington Macaulay, on the death of his father’s friend, Wilberforce. ‘Strange in a man who had, I should have said, so little to attach him to this world, and so firm a belief in another; in a man with an impaired fortune, a weak spine, and a worn-out stomach.’ The aged Wilberforce might have retorted that in age he had, for the first time, an opportunity to look about and enjoy himself. To him it must have seemed that young Macaulay, with the weight of an Indian empire on him, a Whig revolution to glorify, his father’s family to support, and all the wearisome duties of a London dandy to perform, was the man to be weary of living.

For, after every pain and deprivation, the invalid possesses three advantages for which the able worker strives in vain. He has command of leisure, a quiet conscience, and a chance to see the best of other men. The able worker is tormented by a thousand labors he intends to perform, a thousand books he intends to read, and a thousand thoughts he intends to pursue to their finer implications. The invalid, on the contrary, can reasonably intend to do nothing; each new experience is to him an undiscounted miracle. The able worker has his own necessities to supply; a refractory world to keep in order; and, at lowest, he must work, as Diogenes beat his tub about the marketplace, because he is ashamed to be idle. But the invalid’s work, being ineffectual, may be withheld with a clear conscience; his condition being recognized as miserable, he is not under the harrowing necessity of enjoying himself; his doctor being responsible, he is not even obliged to try to keep himself alive.

Lastly, the able worker is constantly exposing the ugly and vicious traits that flaw the nature of his fellows. But the invalid comes in contact with his fellows mostly when they are sanely at rest, or when they are in action only to do him good. Boast as he may, he touches here the wide, pervading charity which shows humanity to be greater than any of its parts. The love which the world hides from her abler children is unveiled to make him humble. Before the strong, gentle, tender, patient friends who bear with him, he stands in silence — perhaps the more abashed because he knows they are not strong, gentle, tender, and patient by necessity, or in their freer dealings with the rougher world. He feels that it would be good to be one of them, or — this being impossible — that it is good to be the object of their ministrations, and to be able to clasp hands with them, if only as an invalid.