TONIC PAIN.
MRS. OLIPHANT, in her touching and graphic account* of the Hospital for Incurables on West Hill, Putney Heath,—formerly a grand mansion belonging to the Duke of Sutherland, and now containing 217 sufferers from some in- curable disease, besides allowing £20 a year to 564 out- pensioners,—makes the striking remark that "it would almost seem as if the withdrawal of all hope tended, in. the beneficent ways of Providence, to quiet afflicted nature, and to bring A House of Peace. By Mrs. Oliphaqt. London Frintnl at the Office of the Art Journal, City Bowl. 1890. about a composure and calm of soul, which is proof against many keen temptations." We qaite believe the remark to be true, though the phrase used as to the "withdrawal, of all hope" seems a little misleading ; for there are few classes of
persons who are more genuinely hopeful than sufferers whose only hope is for a new life beyond the grave. Probably for one pessimist amongst these 217 incurable patients, we should find ten in the same number of persons of the same age taken from what is generally supposed to be the world of pleasure. Indeed, to any one who reads .Mrs. Oliphant's account of the noble institution first founded by
Dr. Andrew Reed, and which has since grown quite beyond his recognition, it will seem very doubtful whether, for con- siderable periods at least, a life organised on a ground-plan of habitual suffering, only varied by intervals of ease and com- parative pleasure, does not issue in better results than a life organised on a ground-plan of happiness, only varied by rare intervals of misery and comparative pain. Let us hear
how Mrs. Oliphant describes her personal impression of the Hospital of Incurables :—
"A. writer, who has before set forth the claims of this great work to the attention of the public, has described the house in which it carries on one part, of its merciful ministry as a Palace of Pain. I do not doubt the truth of this title. One has but to see the inmates of that house in their pathetic social aseemblies—,one, bound in the chair which he has not quitted for more than twenty years, another laid flat upon the couch from which she cannot move, the majority helpless in their wheeled seats, in which alone they can be taken from one room to another : or in the mere private chambers, where so many lie incapable of even the solace of that movement, their twisted limbs huddled up under their coverings, their poor distorted hands painfully attempting some bit of trifling work to relieve the long, long tedium of suffering days—to be sure of the justice of the description. But, there, is something else there, which will strike the visitor as well as the pain. And I prefer to call this home of the incurables a House of Peace. I have gone through the greater part of those rooms, filled with indescribable aches and sufferings that are without hope, and I have found nothing but a patient quietness, a great tranquillity, a peace which fills the careless spectator—coming in out of the fresh air, out of the sunshiny world, where everything is rejoicing in life and strength and the radiance of the morning--with awe, and respectful reverence. Some of these poor people are never free from pain ; some are subject to periodical paroxysms of anguish, one scarce over before another begins ;--many are helpless, and cannot move at all, even by the nurse's aid And yet there is Peace breathing all around us. Not only no complaint, but a composed and mild endurance, often accompanied with smiles, scarcely ever with a countenance of gloom. An atmo- sphere of cheerfulness fills, like the sunshine, the quiet chambers. What struggles there may be in lonely hearts or tortured bodies, it is not ours to inquire. Such struggles there must be, or the sufferers would be more than human. But we can see nothing but patience and peace. This is more wonderful than the pain, and far less comprehensible. Our hearts cry out for them as we pass from one bed of anguish to another, but from these beds there rise no cries. All is tranquillity, patience, a great quietness —the Palace of Pain is also the House of Peace."
That is striking evidence ; but striking as it must be to those
who do not know, as comparatively few people do know, what a life organised on the basis of endurance, with glimpses of something brighter, is, as contrasted with our ordinary lifer in which the exceptional part is the suffering and the exhaustion, and the main substance is a compoutta of glad energy, and perhaps even gladder rest, we believe that it is evidence fully confirmed by all those who have special experience of maimed lives and frequently recurrent spasms of nervous suffering. The gratitude of those whose life .is substantially one .'of healthful activity interspersed with pain and disappointment at comparatively rare intervals, is nothing to the gratitude of
those whose life is substantially one of weakness and pain interspersed with pleasure and ease at comparatively rare intervals. We should find a much larger per-centage of despair amongst the former, a much larger per-centage of peace amongst the latter.
If that be true, as we think it is, it will partly explain why the periods of life in which men have suffered most, seenyin the retrospect so much more significant, and in some sense even of so much more worth, than the level periods of steady and satisfying work. Of course life organised on the basis of suffering is much worse to live through than it looks.
Mrs. Oliphant saw what chronic sufferers learn at last,to show to the world,—that willingness to be distracted from ,the consciousness, the memory, or the expectation of sufferlsg, which is the true gauge of the depth to which chronic sufferipg has gone. It is only the new victims, the impatient sufferers, who insist on their sufferings, and are unwilling to let,the world ignore their pain. Those to whom suffering has become the chronic state, the basis of their life, are only too glad to get a peep through one of the little windows that open out of that dark state into a freer and brighter existence, and to avail themselves of all the chances they can fairly get of alleviation and brief forgetfulness. You can see, if you watch, the difference between the face that lights up for a brief interval, only to fall back into the condition of chronic endurance, and the face over which a deep shadow flits at intervals, only to leave behind the expression of prevailing energy and interest. But the "incurables," whether they be bodily or mental sufferers, look a great deal calmer to the outside world than they really are. What men are almost always bearing does not leave the same vivid traces which new pangs engrave upon the countenance. As health and happi- ness are less consciously expressed when they are permanent, so illness and misery are less consciously expressed when they are permanent ; and what the bystander sees most clearly is the momentary change of expression, and not the fixed attitude of feeling from which that change is a departure. Mrs. Oliphant doubtless saw more gleams of interest in the pallid faces than they usually wore, and fewer signs of weariness and anguish. The power of endurance grows with use, and the higher it grows, the less clearly does it register in the visible expression the maximum points to which it rises. You can see in the worn expression that the habit of bearing pain is there, but not how great the effort often is. Habitual suf- ferers, we believe, avail themselves much more promptly and cheerfully of the intervals of. alleviation, than those to whom suffering is new, and, to their minds, intolerable ; and the con- sequence is that, though you may easily distinguish the practised sufferer from the unpractised, you find less and less trace of the height to which suffering often rises, the more the power of endurance has been cultivated and perfected. It is of the disciplined sufferers,—those in whom the power of endurance is almost perfected,—that it is said, "Behold, we count them happy which endure ; " and, indeed, it is true in a double sense, for they really are far happier and more grateful for their intervals of relief, than those whose ordinary condition is one of ease, and only the exceptional condition one of pain, are for their customary health. When the former are happy, they are happy with a more grateful heart, and their happiness is more visible to others. But, of course, the sense in which they are " counted " happy is a different one. They are counted happy not because they are more obviously happy, but because they have gained something deeper and better than happiness by the long-continued habit of fortitude ; they have gained something which they themselves learn to appreciate so far as this, that though, of course, they would willingly be released from the pain they are bearing, they would not wil- lingly be released from the memory of the pain they have borne ; they would not willingly find themselves once more without the courage to look it steadily in the face, without the confidence that their experience involves something more and better than weariness and dread. The explorer who has traversed deserts with parched mouth and blistered feet, desires nothing less than to forget the pain he paid for his discoveries ; and it is the same with the explorer even of more melancholy and less stimulating perils. He is grateful for every moment of ease, but he would not willingly be deprived of the stored experience he has gained. Pain in the past manfully borne is transmuted to a sort of treasure of memory, though it may not be easy for the sufferer to explain, even to himself, in what the treasure consists.
We imagine that it consists chiefly in a sense of strength and purification,—in other words, of the very thing that Roman Catholics teach as the conseTtence of purgatorial suffering in the world beyond the grave,—of increased recoil from so-called pleasures that are not pure, of increased reality of appreciation of the distinction between the pain that kills and the pain that vivifies, between the pain the memory of which we would blot out if we could, and the pain the memory of which we would always retain if we could, between the pain that has no guilt in it and the pain which has. Pain of pure origin willingly borne is certainly one of the highest astringents of which human nature is capable, and it is precisely this experience which seems to restore the power of believing in a final victory to be gained over the more ignoble elements of our nature. There is no tonic for the weakness and misery of self-reproach like the habit of steadily and trustfully encoun- tering any pain which involves no element of self-reproach.
But in order that it may have this effect, experience shows that it must be borne under the conditions under which it is least likely to harden or petrify human nature,—that is, it must be borne under the influence of lively sympathy, human or divine. This is what constitutes the vast importance of such great institutions as the Hospital for Incurables,—not that they alleviate pain and confer pleasure, though of course they must do so in order to exert the far more important influence of which we speak, but that, by bringing the influence of human sympathy and tenderness to bear, they render the pain which must be borne so much more elevating, so much more purifying, so much more stimu- lating. And this, too, is the reason why pain borne under the influence of deep religious trust, —trust that he who inflicts it enters into the anguish he causes, and in some mysterious sense shares it with us,—is so far more purifying and stimulating than pain simply endured because it must be endured. It is the willing endurance of pain inflicted by goodness that really purifies and strengthens, and it is just because it is so much easier to believe that the pangs which God inflicts pro- ceed from his goodness, when we observe that good men suffer keenly from the mere spectacle of our pangs, and do all they can to alleviate them, that such noble institutions as Dr. Andrew Reed's hospital confer so immense a boon upon mankind. That they alleviate exquisite pain is much ; that they transmute the pain which must be borne and is borne into a healing and beneficial agency, is much more. In some sense or other, all human beings are in this life "incurables." We all suffer from incurable mental or moral, if not from any incurable physical disease. We all suffer from some deep-seated irritability, or impatience, or craving for what is illegitimate and unlawful, which will never be com- pletely extirpated in this life, and will need for its ex- tirpation those entirely new conditions to which the incurables of Putney Heath look forward after death. And therefore we can all profit by the lesson which their experience gives us, that there is a wonderful curative and stimulating power in pain borne under the beneficial influence of tender sympathy ; and we may all expect that, even if we have never had to bear much pain in this life, it may yet prove to be the purifying and stimulating agency which will cure our hitherto " incurable " diseases in the next.
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