And Who Knows But That Other Men (For The Scenes Of
This World, And Its Good And Evil, Are Very Much Alike), May Be
Suffering As I Did, And May Therefore Be Influenced By My Rude
Scribbling, As I Might Have Been By Some Of Theirs?
"There was a time, and not a very distant one either, when I was
utterly ignorant of two things - first, the existence, in my particular
case, of the thing called the human stomach; and secondly, the reality
of those mysterious telegraphic wires - yclept NERVES.
Often nave I
sneered at 'bilious subjects,' 'dyspepsia,' and that long string of
woes which one hears of, in such luxuriance of description, usually
over breakfast, at Clifton, Tonbridge, or Harrogate. Like the old
Duchess of Marlborough, too, I used 'to thank God I was born before
nerves came into fashion.'
"But 'live and learn.' I have lived; and I have learnt the utter misery
which a deranged digestion and jarring nerves, acting and reacting upon
each other, can inflict upon their victims. To be laid up in bed for a
month with a violent disease is nothing. You are killed or cured; made
better, and your illness forgotten even by yourself; or quietly laid
under the dust of your mother earth, to lie there in oblivion, the busy
world moving on, unheeding, over your cold remains, till the great day
of judgment. But to have, as it were, your whole 'mind, body, soul, and
strength' turned, with a resistless fascination, into the frightened
study of your own dreadful anatomy. To find your courage quail, not
before real danger, but at phantoms and shadows - nay, actually at your
own horrid self - to feel every act of life and every moment of business
a task, an effort, a trial, and a pain. Sometimes to be unable to sleep
for a week - sometimes to sleep, but, at the dead of night, to wake,
your bed shaking under you from the violent palpitation of your heart,
and your pillow drenched with cold sweat pouring from you in streams.
But, worst of all, if you are of a stubborn, dogged, temper, and are
blessed with a strong desire to 'get on' - to feel yourself unable to
make some efforts at all, to find yourself breaking down before all the
world in others, and to learn, at last, in consequence, almost to hate
the half-dead and failing carcase tied to your still living will. This,
not for months only, but for YEARS. Years, too, in what ought to be
your prime of manhood. Ah! old age and incapacity at thirty is a
bitter, bitter punishment. Better be dead than suffer it; for you must
suffer it alone and in silence - you may not hope for sympathy - you dare
not desire it - you see no prospect of relief - you wage a double
warfare, with the world and with yourself. I do not, I dare not,
exaggerate. Indeed, a lady of a certain age could hardly feel more
abashed at the sudden production of her baptismal certificate than I - a
man, a matter-of-fact man, a plain, hard-headed, unimaginative man of
business - do, at this confession.
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