From The Spectator. INVALIDS. MISS MARTINEAU'S low estimate of better, if they tried. It is only fair, however, to say that the players are not really enjoying themselves either. They are playing badly, and they know it. The her "Life in the Sick-room" strikes us as men want to take off their coats, and the a curious (though in this case quite expligirls are evidently hampered by their un cable) example of the inability of authors Business-like dresses, and afraid of slip- to judge the relative value of their own ping on the wet grass. The closely-shaven productions. It is the one of her writings lawn is unpleasantly like a damp sponge, we should place highest. The fresh, and the forty who are standing on it, and pure sense of nature's homely grace, exgetting very chilly, feel it a distinct aggra-pressed as it is in so many pictures which vation of their misery that the four who owe their charm wholly to the painter, or are actively exerting themselves should be at least in the originals of which a comvery much too hot. Presently the neces- mon eye would find no attraction; comsity for exercise sends the lookers-on to bined with an appreciation, which is wander once more, perhaps to find their indeed seldom separated from this taste way into the kitchen-garden. But they for nature, of the pathos of ordinary will not stay there long, for cabbages are human life, with its undistinguished joys hideously depressing on a dreary day, and and sorrows, give the book a refreshing a time comes when every possibility of influence which it is curious to find in any amusement is exhausted. It is terrible to volume with such a title. It is, indeed, realize this, and to know that the carriages an eminently healthy book. After saying have been sent to the village a mile and a this, we need hardly add that we cannot half away, and that yours will not come for accept it as a picture of average life in the another hour or more. Then it is that you sick-room. Though full of shrewd and feel that you are certainly catching cold, thoughtful observation, or perhaps because and that you hate your shivering fellow of this wealth, it fails to represent the creatures, though you hate those most who usual experience of the invalid who, shiver least. You do not wonder that under certain circumstances people take to drinking. You begin to think that they are far from inexcusable, if the circumstances are at all like yours. You would take to it yourself, only, fortunately for your reputation and your future career, you can find nothing to drink but claret-cup with gnats in it, and there is not much to be got out of that except the gnats. So you resign yourself to your fate, and gloomily resolve that you will go to no more garden-parties, unless, indeed, one should be given in the grounds of the Palace of Truth. It would be worth while to go to that; for there would never be another. Some such experience as this is only too common in the months of August and September, and yet there are people who cherish a dream, made up of poetry such as we quoted, and of memories of sunshine in sweet, old-fashioned gardens. To such we can only say, If you care for your beautiful vision, deal tenderly with it. Call it up by the fireside on winter evenings, when the ground is like iron with the blackest of frosts, and the bleak wind tyrannizes over leafless trees. But think of it as little as may be when the long days come round once more, and never, if you prize it, take it with you to one of the garden-parties of the present day. gazing round this little room, Must whisper, "This shall be thy doom. Here must thou struggle, here alone Repress tired nature's rising moan." Miss Martineau's experience was, indeed, modified by too many exceptional influences to allow her to feel this trial as it weighs on hundreds and thousands, and perhaps hardly any one who feels it could describe it. However, she was far too clever a woman to write on any subject she understood without giving many sensible hints about it, and although other parts of the book seem to us more valuable, these suggestions, based on experience, and bearing on one of the most difficult problems of life, form no despicable portion of this particular invalid's legacy to her kind. It would be a very valuable book which should teach the sick to understand the healthy, and the healthy to understand the sick. No two classes so urgently need this mutual understanding, and perhaps no two classes find it equally difficult. It is very desirable that the rich should be just to the poor, and the poor to the rich, but it is a great alleviation of mutual misunderstanding in this case that the rich and the poor live apart. The sick and the well, on the other hand, are separated not by a dividing line crossing society, but by a thousand small centres of divergence | try are a standing protest against this kind sprinkled all over it. This difficulty divides of reasoning, and it would be well for families and separates friends; it intro- every logician to be forced to study them. duces sources of hopeless misapprehension between those who have been intimate from childhood, and who are still, and must continue, in direct outward contact. Moreover, it is not only more necessary for sick and well to understand each other than for rich and poor, it is also more difficult. How misleading are the external suggestions of illness! Who can approach some one lying on a couch, in an atmosphere of stillness and careful order, and not find his imagination filled with the idea of repose? And yet nothing is so unlike any sensation of lifelong illness as repose is. Hurry, and overdriven weariness, and distracting annoyances, and all the disasters of an overbusy life, give one far more insight into the condition of an invalid than that which is suggested to us by everything about him. We cannot always remember this paradox, but it does not cease to be true when we forget it. The great hindrance to an understanding of lifelong illness is that every one knows a little of illness, and most people fancy that transitory experience enables them to judge of a permanent condition. No mistake is more natural, but we believe none to be more entire. We can judge about as well of the hardships of poverty from remembering some Alpine journey in which dinner was not to be had when it was much wanted, as we can, by recalling some attack of sharp fever, or the confinement of a sprained ankle, imagine what it is to exchange the interests, pains, and pleasures of this busy world for those of the sick-room. There are two main reasons for this misleading effect of what is transitory. The most important, perhaps, is our inability to represent to ourselves adequately the effect of difference of degree. We are apt to reason about cause and effect as if we could by multiplying a small result arrive at a large result. And yet the every-day lessons of nature are full of warnings against this kind of reasoning. Imagine a logical thinker for the first time learning that a certain degree of cold made water solid; any attempt on his part, short of success, to verify the statement would make it seem more improbable. "It is true," he might say, "we cannot get the thermometer quite so low as what you call the freezing-point, but you see we have come very near it, without detecting the slightest tendency to this startling change from fluid to solid." The laws of chemis People are constantly arguing about moral questions in the style of our supposed disbeliever in ice, and we believe nobody can quite shake off the influence of this fallacy in judging of illness. It is wonderfully difficult to realize that the effect of some condition may be different, according as it is permanent or transitory, not only in degree, but in kind. Yet it is undeniable. A short taste of some privations might prove a positive enjoyment; a day of painless blindness, for instance, might prove to a busy worker a delightful rest. Such a person would, after such an experience, be further from knowing what it is to be blind always, than one who had never been blind at all. A short trial of illness, therefore, or indeed of any misfortune, is not only an imperfect means of forming any judgment as to its permanent effect, it is very often the means of forming a wrong judgment. It resembles, in this respect, a slight knowledge of a foreign language. A foreigner, speaking English, once said of Beethoven, whom he had personally known,-"He was very brutal." The information thus conveyed to an English ear by a veracious and wellinformed witness was as correct as much opinion that is founded on a short experi ence. But in the case of illness, we fear, the reality is "brutal" in English, and not in French. But in the second place, it is very important, and not very easy, to remember that the actual circumstances of anything permanent are altogether different from the circumstances of anything transitory. There would be abundant sympathy for the ills of life, if they would last only a short time. Many invalids will say that they do not want sympathy, but this is hardly ever entirely true, and it is never true that they do not want what sympathy brings. Eager and devoted attention may sometimes actually lessen suffering, and if this is often not the case, it is undeniable that an atmosphere of tender, absorbing anxiety does make bearable all but the worst and rarest physical ills. Many who can recall some short attack of dangerous illness, preceded and followed by health, will say that no memory is more precious to them. When death and estrangement have done their work, the recollection of hours of feverish pain, in which the patient's acceptance of food or drink caused more gratitude than all the beneficence of his subsequent career, shines through the vista of cold, loveless years with a radi- undying grief does not prevent faint gleams ance that is only partly delusive. That of pleasure when sleep comes on after experience did really belong to the strug- fatigue, or hunger and thirst are relieved. gle between life and death, but it is utterly But there is no converse to the picture. unlike the experience of the very same An unintermittent pain of body, when physical condition when death and life very severe, leaves room for nothing but have alike receded, and that awful, potent, itself. all-healing fear of separation is as remote as the hope and stir that belong to the ordinary course of things in the world. Is it no trial to watch relaxed devotion, and feel it the result simply of the heaviness of the misfortune which first called forth devotion? Let no one plead in answer that the sufferer gets used to pain. His nearest and dearest get used to the thought of his suffering-it is a law of nature, to which they can but submit - but never let us suppose that the pain of another grows less because we think less about it. It is possible to get used to privation, and to some kinds of minor discomfort. Any one who says it is possible to get used to pain has forgotten what pain is. It is wonderfully easy to forget pain. We have often thought there was a sort of witness to immortality in the strange fact that while emotion remembered, is, to some extent, emotion experienced, sensation is never really remembered at all. Whatever belongs to the body seems to bear the stamp of mortality, it passes at once into the region of oblivion when we are delivered from its pressure. How diffierent is the relation of memory to the maladies of the soul! Place the unkindness of long years ago side by side in your recollection with the toothache of last week, and you feel at once you are comparing a living thing and a dead thing. The unkindness, whether remembered by him who felt or inflicted it, is a living reality, potent to reopen and envenom the wound it had made. The toothache is gone, as if it had never been. To this fact, we are convinced, must be traced the common assumption that any degree of bodily suffering would be chosen rather than severe pain of mind. What people mean in saying this is, no doubt, that they would rather remember physical than mental pain, and of course a short experience of the pain which leaves no trace is to be preferred to an equally short experience of the pain which leaves a profound trace. But we are considering the case of one who knows that this fierce companion will not quit his side till the clay which gives it its power is laid in the grave, and no sufferer, we think, is to be set by his side. The deadliest mental anguish allows some respite, when the body claims its due; an The effort at understanding a state very different from their own, like every other effort, cannot be urged on the sick as it can on the sound. Yet we are far from thinking that it ought not to be urged on the sick at all. Lifelong illness would be, we are certain, more tolerable, if the invalid could realize the difficulties it imposes on the surrounders. Doubtless there is pain in the recognition, and a sort of pain to which there is nothing parallel in the corresponding effort on the part of the sound. But it would save far more pain than it inflicts, in all circumstances, to recognize the cost at which every one puts himself in the place of another. Those who are bustling about in the world must take their neighbors as they find them. They at any moment can change their atmosphere, and they do not carry about a moral thermometer, to see whether it is exactly suited to their taste and temperament, or if they do, they are taught their mistake. The invalid, on the other hand, has a right to demand that you should bring no jarring ideas to an atmosphere he cannot change at will; but he seldom sees that this, like every other peculiar demand, must release some form of energy to compensate for that which it absorbs. The principle of the conservation of force is the greatest help to mutual toleration that the intellectual world can supply, and translated into the language of common life, this scientific expression means no more than the homely adage that you cannot eat your cake and have it. We are always experiencing the truth of this saying, and always forgetting it. It is a constant temptation to believe that any one who behaved rightly would be able to spend great moral energy in one direction, without having less to spend in another. Certainly a man's moral energy is not limited in the way that his purse is. Practically, however, it is limited. Every ex ceptional claim implies some surrender. The invalid whose nerves must be sheltered, who must have intercourse adjusted to suit him, cannot be looked up to as a source of influence. He must not expect to be at once deferred to as a capable person and sheltered as a weak one. But one of the great difficulties of the sick-room is the absence of those circum What, we may be asked, in conclusion, is our remedy for all these disadvantages? Or what is the use of dwelling on disadvantages for which there is no remedy? Is it not better to forget incurable ills, till they are forced on the mind by the pressure of experience? stances which help self-appreciation. Most hard. -we believe almost impossible - for people overrate themselves in certain a solitary being to attain humility. directions, but in the jostling of the world, most of us are taught our place. The atmosphere of the sick-room, on the other hand, quite shuts out the possibility of the small checks which make us feel that we have thought too much of ourselves. It is quite evident that Miss Martineau suffered in this way, though perhaps her No, emphatically no. The ordinary misdeafness had as much to do with the result fortunes of the world would lose much of as her ill-health. At any rate, she is a their pain if they were distinctly recogmemorable example of the disadvantages nized. And although it is true that we do of being cut off from the discipline which not remove misunderstanding in accountteaches modesty. No doubt a great deal ing for it that we cannot make it otherof the deference which fed her vanity was wise than painful yet the difference both deserved and sincere, but probably between a pain which we trace to unkindnot quite all. And with ordinary inva-ness or selfishness and that which we trace lids, there is and cannot but be much to inevitable mistake, is as great as the illusion as to the interest they inspire, for difference between the pain of a sprained nothing is so like deference as well-bred ankle when we try to stand on it, and compassion. But indeed it has been a when we let it rest on a cushion. The truth insufficiently considered, although mind loses the bitterness of its sufferings its causes are obvious, that all influences in discerning their necessity, and is somewhich isolate the soul tend to give it an times surprised in this acquiescence to undue idea of its own importance. It is find them almost disappear. THE treaty between Japan and Corea of February 26, 1876, gave the Japanese the right to settle and trade on certain points of the Corean coasts. The first of these settlements was formed in Fusan, not far from Torai, and a correspondent thence to the Japanese journal Sakigake Shinbun says: It was very cold in January at Fusan: the thermometer stood between -2° and -22° F. (-19° and -30° C.). Our settlement numbers about a hundred houses, with about eight hundred Japanese inhabitants of both sexes. A school for teaching the Corean language was lately opened in the newly-built temple of Honganji. The populous city of Torai, which is about three ri (seven miles) from our settlement, is frequently infested by tigers, and on that account every door is closed early in the evening, after which no one ventures into the streets. An animal called "tonpi" by the Coreans, and which resembles a cat, attacks the tiger, which seems to fear it greatly. Noticing this, the Coreans, when they go into the hills, put on a cap of tonpi-skin. Very few of the lower class of Coreans sleep in beds; most of them have only a sheet of Corean paper for a couch, and keep up a fire beside them for warmth. The articles of import are chiefly muslin, silk, dyes, tin, copper, and various small wares. The Coreans, on the other hand, bring golden and other valuable manufactured goods for export. No customs are paid in trading. It New Guinea traveller and missionary, has THE Rev. W. G. Lawes, the well-known resources which are as yet undeveloped. |