" B Y professional sufferer I mean any person who has
great self-knowledge, a consummate gift for its expression in language, and an abnormal talent for feeling discomfort and discovering the ugly." This little portrait of a most malefident type of character occurs in a charming essay by Mrs. Craigie entitled "The Science of Life" (London: Burns and Oates, ls. net). The professional sufferers are, we fear, becoming a very large army, and there is no doubt that their presence interferes very largely with the practice of the art of life. They make it very hard to be happy, for the man who would make the most of life must start from the hypo- thesis that much can be made, and that, given average con- ditions, it is possible to find more beauty than ugliness in it, more to praise than to condemn, more to enjoy than to revile. The object of the professional sufferers is to destroy this hypothesis. Their chief weapon is the pen, their influence is everywhere. They number among their com- manders a good many men of genius ; but from their rank- and-file are not excluded the weak possessors of a single gift, —the gift of expressing pain. On the Continent their name is legion ; even hero they number their recruits by thousands. Their doctrines are spreading, and bid fair seriously to disturb the common serenity.
Of course, these satellites of a particular manifestation of genius have their good points, otherwise their influence could not be so great. They often feel a deal of pity, and they understand the sad side of sympathy without knowing anything of that other side; the side which has so much to do with the art of life,—we mean sympathy with happiness. It does not belong to the art of life to put aside a small trouble in order to enter into a larger one ; that belongs simply to a good heart; but it'does belong to the art of life to put aside a small trouble in order to enter into some one else's small pleasure, and it belongs not only to a good will but to a strong one. Deliberately to subordinate some worry which has taken bold of the mind to a lighter and more cheerful train of thought, in order not to spread the wild-fire contagion of mental discomfort, requires no small amount of mental force. It is certainly a sign of weakness that so many of the serious are so sad, and their attitude renders them in part responsible for the noisy frivolity which comes of reaction. English critics of foreign fiction incessantly deplore the
hopeless melancholy of its tone, but we find the same sadness and the same disillusionment in our own writers. Rudyard Kipling, of course, stands out as a brilliant exception ; but, speaking generally, the world depicted in novels is a different and a far less happy one than that in which • the heroes and heroines of fifty years ago disported them- selves. Judging by books, and by a great deal of the cultivated conversation of the hour, we should imagine that life was far less worth having than it used to be. Yet in so far as the world has changed at all it has certainly changed for the better. Every advance in civilisation increases the possibilities of happiness. We know, of course, that all pro- fessional sufferers will deny this ; but do they ever try to imagine themselves living before the great ameliorations of
• the last seventy years ? Do they realise what dulness the means of locomotion have dispersed, what agonies the discovery of chloroform has lulled, how much cruelty legislation has curbed, how much kinder the people have become, and what the strict carrying out' of the law has counted for in the development of the public conscience ? Do they consider the increased opportunities which now reach to the very bottom, of society, and mean the spread of hope, or would they deny the joys of successful struggle? Most of the reforms con- ceived a hundred years ago have been carried out,- and, carried out more thoroughly than those who dreamed of them could have hoped. Suppose that a doctor devoted to his profession who lived a hundred years ago could come to life again and be taken over any of the hospitals in the great capitals of Europe ; suppose be were told that operations too complicated to have been dreamed of in his day were now successfully performed without causing the patient a single pang, and that all the skill and care and luxury he saw before him was at the disposal of the sick poor, —he could but feel that the misery of life had been in an immense degree mitigated. Again, what a delightful sight the much-abused Board-school, with its airy rooms, orderly children, and pleasant-mannered teachers, would be to the educational theorist of seventy years ago who dreamed of righteous Factory Acts and of a time when every child would be able to read. All the multitudinous luxuries and con- veniences of science are new. All the absorbing daily interests supplied by the electric telegraph are new. All the ladders which reach from the lowest stratum of society to the highest are new. Life is in every way pleasanter and more interesting than it was. Yet as real suffering has decreased professional suffering has become more common. Great and small philosophers preach pessimism ; it is insinuated in difficult treatises, in flippant conversations, and in novels with or without a purpose. Serious young people pause in the midst of their occupations to confide in their elders that they would just as soon never have been born; and indeed we believe, if a new general Thanksgiving were to be written, there would be letters in the papers demanding that the Creation clause should be left out.
. How is the art of life, which is the art of happiness, to be carried on in the midst of this sombre propaganda, whose adherents not only distress the world, but, with a humorous shamelessness, demand its gratitude into the bargain. To them, they declare, the ordinary man owes his glimpse of reality ; and the ordinary man seldom seems to make the obvious retort that he has been familiar with reality some long time before the professional sufferer was born. If only the genial commonplace crowd could get some cheerful genius to lead them, they might start a counter-agitation and crush the professional sufferers out of existence. Their first task—and it would be a difficult one—would be to convince the thinking world that it has fallen under the tyranny of a new obscurantism, and *that the so-called realists are not realists at all. The professional sufferers have on their side the strong argument that a great deal of what they say can be proved. They deceive the world, not because the world cannot distinguish between the true and the false, but because it cannot distinguish between the true and the typical. They tell us of all sorts of horrors, for which they can give chapter and verse, and they leave out of count _altogether the immense sum of happiness which outweighs it all. They manage—such is their unfortunate skill—to interest their hearers so intensely in the details of their own moral and mental symptoms that we all begin to believe that we have got the same complaint. The old obscurantism at least kept in view some kind of ideal, and directed men's eyes to what was strengthening and elevating. The new obscurantism bids fair to be worse than the old. Freedom to inquire, if it leads to generalisation from exceptions, may conduct the ordinary man farther from the truth than he had' strayed when he accepted without comment so much of knowledge as it pleased the. learned to give him. A picture of life which showed only its pleasanter side, as the early Victorian novelists showed it, would not, no doubt, be a perfectly true 'picture, but it would-be a thousand times nearer to the facts than that drawn by the professional sufferer, whether be have the genius of despair or merely the gift of grumbling. Of course the wicked, the diseased, and the criminal exist; but it is no true realism which stands them in a circle round the reader so that he can see nothing else. For as the ill are to the well, as the few to the many, and as the abnormal to the normal, so are the reprobate to the respectable and the utterly wretched to the reasonably contented. An asylum for the sane would cover almost the whole world ; and who could conceive the dimensions of a hospital for the healthy, a prison for the innocent, or a haven for the happy P
It is time we laid our heads together and sought a leader to guide us away from this fools' inferno into which the professional sufferer would allure us. We do not want to create for ourselves an imaginary paradise, but to realise more truly the workaday world, in which we all hope to live and enjoy ourselves for as long as may be.
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