The Bed-Book of Happiness | Page 2

self-comforter we are disposed to
summon to our aid. "My soul is weary of my life," cried Job; "I will
leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my
soul."
Now, there is not a wise doctor in the world, nor any man who truly
knows himself, but will acknowledge and confess the enormous
importance to physical recovery of mental well-being. The thing has
become platitudinous, but remains as difficult as ever. If Christian
Science on its physiological side had been an easy matter it would long
ago have converted the world. The trouble is that obvious things are not
always easy. It is obvious to the victim of alcoholic or nicotine
poisoning that he would be infinitely better in health could he abjure
alcohol or tobacco; he does not need to be philosophised or theologised
into this conviction; he knows it better than his teachers. His necessity
is a superadded force to the will within his soul which has lost the
power of action. And so with the will of the sick person, who knows
very well that if he could rid himself of dejection and heaviness his
health would come back to him on swallows' wings. Obvious, palpable,
more certain than to-morrow's sun; but how difficult, how hard, nay,
sometimes how impossible! An honest man like Father Tyrrell
confesses that in certain bouts with the flesh faith may desert us, even
the religious faith of a life-time may fall in ruins round our naked soul.
I was once speaking on this subject to Sir Jesse Boot, telling him how
hard I had found it to amuse and distract the mind of one of my
children in the extreme weakness which fell upon her after an operation.
I told him that I had searched my book-shelves for stories, histories,
anthologies, and journeyings; that I had carried to the bedside piles of
books which I thought the most suitable; and that I had read from these
books day after day, succeeding for some few minutes at a time to
interest the sick child, but ending almost in every case with failure and
defeat. I found that humour could bore, that narrative could irritate, that
essays could worry and perplex, that poetry could depress, and that wit
could tease with its cleverness. Moreover, I found that one could not go
straight to any anthology in existence without coming unexpectedly,
and before one was aware of it, upon some passage so mournful or sad
or pathetic that it undid at a sentence all the good which had been done
by luckier reading. My friend, who is himself a great reader, and who

has borne for some years a heavy burden of infirmity, agreed that
cheerful reading is of immense help in sickness and also confessed that
it is difficult to find any one book which ministers to a mind weakened
by illness or tortured by insomnia.
The present volume is the outcome of that conversation. I determined
to compile a book which from the first page to the last should be a
happy book, a book which would come to be a friend of all those who
share in any way the sickness of the world, a book to which everybody
could go with the sure knowledge that they would find there nothing to
depress, nothing to exacerbate irritable nerves, nothing to confirm the
mind in dejection. And on its positive side I said that this book should
be diverse and changeful in its happiness. I planned that while
cheerfulness should be its soul, the expression of that cheerfulness
should avoid monotony with as great an energy as the book itself
avoided depression. My theory was a book whose pages should
resemble rather an olla podrida of variety than a tautological joint of
monotonous nutriment. And I sought to fill my wallet rather from the
crumbs let fall by the happy feasters than from the too familiar table of
the great masters.
"To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful
occupation." But one must go from conception to execution, crossing
the gulf that separates "these two hemispheres of Art." "The man," says
Balzac, "who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is
regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty.
But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it
to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning
with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean,
dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly
destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this
headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture
speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect,