The privilege of pain

Horace was a man of feeble health; Milton was blind; Pope deformed. George Herbert, to whom we owe so many of our most beautiful hymns and anthems, was consumptive. John Donne had an enormous influence on English literature, although, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, his influence was mostly malign. He was praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then completely forgotten for a century. His versification is often harsh, but “behind that fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, and imagination that harbors fire within its cloudy folds and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden, daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them.” Izaak Walton was his admiring friend and first biographer. Donne was constantly ill during the years of his greatest creative activity, yet this is what he once said, speaking of his illnesses: “The advantage you and my other friends have by my frequent fevers is that I am so much the oftener at the gate of heaven; and, by the solitude and close imprisonment they reduce me to, I am so much the oftener at my prayers, in which you and my other dear friends are not forgotten.”

It was owing to ill-health that Coleridge first took opium under the guise of a patent medicine.

William Cowper early showed a tendency to melancholia, but it was not until he was almost thirty that the prospects of having to appear at the bar of the House of Lords, preliminary to taking up the position of clerk—a mere formality—drove him completely insane. He attempted suicide and was sent to an asylum where he spent eighteen months. At the age of forty-two he had another attack from which it took him almost three years to recover completely. Nevertheless we find him three years later making his first appearance as an author with “Olney Hymns,” written in conjunction with a friend. This was followed by a collection of poems, which was badly received, one critic declaring that “Mr. Cowper was certainly a good, pious man, but without one spark of poetic fire.” It was not until 1785 when he was already fifty-four years old and had been twice declared insane that he published the book that was to make him famous. It is entitled: “The Task, Tircinium or a Review of Schools, and the History of John Gilpin.” Cowper is among the poets who are epoch-makers. “He brought a new spirit into English verse. With him begins the ‘enthusiasm for humanity,’ that was afterwards to become so marked in the poetry of Burns, Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron.”

Keats suffered from consumption and it is interesting to note that the progress of his disease coincided with the expansion of his genius.

Chatterton is the most astounding and precocious figure in the whole history of letters. He was only seventeen years and nine months old when starvation drove him to commit suicide, “but the best of his numerous productions, both in prose and verse, require no allowance to be made for the immaturity of their author.” Chatterton’s audience has never been a large one for the reason that with a few exceptions all his poems are written in Fifteenth Century English. Among the discriminating, however, he holds a very high place. His genius and tragic death are commemorated by Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence,” by Coleridge in “A Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” by D. G. Rossetti in “Five English Poets,” and Keats dedicated “Endymion” to his memory.

I have hesitated as to whether I had a right to include Chatterton among my examples, because I can find no record of his having suffered from actual disease. On the other hand he was so abnormal that I feel that I have no right to ignore him. From his earliest years he was subject to fits of abstraction during which he would sit for hours in seeming stupor from which it was almost impossible to wake him. For a time he was even considered deficient in intellect.

Thomas Hood was a chronic invalid; his most famous poem, “The Bridge of Sighs,” was written on his death-bed. Byron and Swinburne were also physically handicapped.

W. E. Henley was not only a poet but a trenchant critic and a successful editor. A physical infirmity forced him at the age of twenty-five to become an inmate of an Edinburgh hospital. While there he wrote a number of poems in irregular rhythm describing, with poignant force, his experiences as a patient. Sent to the Cornhill Magazine, they at once aroused the interest of Leslie Stephen, the editor, and induced him to visit the young poet and to take Robert Louis Stevenson with him. This meeting in the hospital and the friendship which ensued between Stevenson and Henley were famous in the literary gossip of the last century. Henley’s reputation will rest on his poetry, and the best of his poems will retain a permanent place in English literature. As a literary editor he displayed a gift for discovering men of promise, and “Views and Reviews” is a “volume of notable criticism.”

Sidney Lanier, one of the most original and talented of American poets, was consumptive, and Francis Thompson, author of “The Hound of Heaven,” wrote his flaming verse under acute pain.

The Sixteenth Century was the heyday of poets. Princes regarded them as the chief ornament of their courts and disputed among themselves the honor of their company. Ronsard’s life, therefore, was exceptionally fortunate. He enjoyed the favor of the three sons of Catherine de’ Medici, more especially of Charles IX, after whose premature death the poet retired from Paris. Ronsard is celebrated as the chief glory of an association of poets who called themselves the “Pléiade.” His own generation bestowed upon him the title of “Prince of Poets.” Ronsard became deaf at eighteen and so he became a man of letters instead of a diplomatist. His infirmity is probably responsible for a “certain premature agedness, a tranquil, temperate sweetness” which characterizes the school of poetry he founded.

Joachim du Bellay was destined for the army and his poetry would most probably have been lost to the world if he had not been attacked by a serious illness which seemed likely to prove fatal. It was during the idle days of his convalescence that he first read the Greek and Latin poets. He was also a member of the “Pléiade” and some of his isolated pieces excel those of Ronsard in “airy lightness of touch.”

Molière is the greatest name in French literature. The facts as to his youth and early manhood are so wrapped in uncertainty, that it is impossible to say when the frailty of his health first became manifest. When he emerges from obscurity we find him already subject to attacks of illness and forced to limit himself to a milk diet. His best work, however, was still undone. “Tartuffe” was not written until 1664 when Molière was already forty-two years old, and “Le Misanthrope” was performed a year later. Although it had probably long been latent, he first showed unmistakable symptoms of consumption in 1667. In spite of the ravages of disease, and the continual strain of an impossible domestic situation, he produced “Le Bourgois Gentilhomme” three years later, followed by “Les Fourberies de Scapin.” “Le Malade Imaginaire” was written shortly before his death, and it was while acting the title rôle that he ruptured a blood vessel. He died a few hours afterwards, alone, except for the casual presence of two Sisters of Charity.

Scarron, poet, dramatist and novelist, lived twenty years in a state of miserable deformity and pain. His head and body were twisted; his legs useless. He bore his sufferings with invincible courage. Scarron was a prominent figure in the literary and fashionable society of his day. His work, however, is very unequal. That the “Roman Burlesque” is a novel of real merit, no competent critic can deny. It was republished during the nineteenth century, not only in the original French but in an English translation. Scarron is also of interest as the first husband of the lady who as Mme. de Maintenon became the wife of Louis XIV.

Boileau was the youngest of fifteen children. He is said to have had but one passion, the hatred of stupid books. He was the first critic to demonstrate the poetical possibilities of the French language. His two masterpieces are “L’Art Poétique” and “Lutrin.” “After much depreciation Boileau’s critical work has been rehabilitated and his judgments have been substantially adopted by his successors.” He suffered all his life from constitutional debility.

Schiller was a leading spirit of his age, yet from his thirty-second year “every one of his nerves was an avenue of pain.” Nevinson, however, considered “it possible the disease served in some way to increase Schiller’s eager activity and fan his intellect into keener flame.” Carlyle also writes of the poet that “in the midst of his infirmities he persevered with unabated zeal in the great business of his life. His frame might be impaired, but his spirit retained its fire unextinguished.” Schiller wrote some of his noblest and greatest plays during the periods of his most acute suffering. When he died it was found that all his vital organs were deranged.

Heinrich Heine, another immortal, spent eight years of his agitated struggling life on what he called “a mattress-grave.” “These years of suffering seem to have effected what might be called a spiritual purification of Heine’s nature, and to have brought out all the good side of his character, whereas adversity in earlier days had only emphasized his cynicism.” Though crippled and racked with constant pain, his intellectual and creative powers were no whit dimmed. His greatest poems were written during these years of suffering from which he found relief only in death.

Petrarch suffered from epilepsy, and Alfieri, one of the greatest of the Italian tragic poets, was a martyr to pain. So likewise was Leopardi, author of some immortal odes; the latter was, furthermore, deformed. It was said of him that “Pain and Love are the two-fold poetry of his existence.”

Camoens, the greatest of Portuguese poets, lost his right eye attempting to board an enemy ship. After a life of incredible hardship, he died in a public almshouse worn out by disease.

There are hardly any women poets, which is rather curious, as it is almost the only career that requires neither training nor paraphernalia, yet among this handful we find four, three of them being of real importance, namely: Mrs. Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. Mrs. Browning was a chronic invalid and wrote her greatest poems, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” while actually on her back. Mr. Edmund Gosse says of Christina Rossetti, “All we really know about her, save that she was a great saint, was that she was a great poet.” She was also a great sufferer.

The most curious event of American literary history was the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame. This strange woman, who shunned publicity with a morbid terror and never left her “father’s house for any house or town,” nevertheless bequeathed to the world poems which for life and fire are unexcelled. She was an invalid. In 1863 she writes: “I was ill since September, and since April in Boston for a physician’s care. He does not let me go, yet I work in my prison, and make guests for myself. Carlo (her dog) did not come, because he would die in jail and the mountains I could not hold now, so I brought but the gods!”

Frances Ridley Havergal wrote some of her most beautiful hymns on a sick bed.