RECOGNISED FELLOWSHIP IN SUFFERING. T. PETER would have those to whom he wrote his first that, so far from being singular in suffering, the same afflictions were being undergone by. their brethren elsewhere, if not everywhere. St. Paul assures his Corinthian brethren that no temptation, or trial (πepaσμòs), had taken them, but such as is common to man (ei μǹ åv◊pάivos). Recognised fellowship in suffering is, on double apostolical authority, a signal solace to the suffering. A clerical poet ventures to doubt the efficacy, speaking for himself, of this kind of consolation, and deprecates the principle of it, as well as demurs to its practical worth: "There are who try to comfort you By saying, others suffer too; And bidding you compare your state And but one joy from pain I strike, That with mankind I share alike." But to the mass of men it is always a consolatory assurance, that our amount of unhappiness is not greater than that of most other people, and that what we to our cost are feeling, others have felt, and others are to feel. Milton's Satan, however, may be cited as an authority the other way, when he scouts the charge of being prompted by envy to ruin the happy, and thus to gain companions of his misery and woe. At first it might have been so, he admits : "" but, long since with woe ‘COMMUNE NAUFRAGIUM, CONSOLATIO? 419 Keats, in the Hyperion, remarks how - with us mortal men, the laden heart Is persecuted more, and fever'd more, When it is nighing to the mournful house Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise,” without being greatly stayed or soothed by that fellowship in suffering. Yet does the adage hold good, as an adage, Commune naufragium omnibus est consolatio. There is an absolute use of St. Peter's expression, "as though some strange thing had happened unto you," in Cicero's reminder that, when overtaken by inevitable misfortunes, we can at least fortify ourselves by remembrance of parallel cases, and so, eventis aliorum memoriâ repetendis, NIHIL NOVI accidisse nobis cogitemus, Mr. Disraeli calls it agreeable to see others falling into the same traps which have broken our own shins; and that, shipwrecked on the island of our hopes, one likes to mark a vessel go down in full sight.* ""Tis demonstration that we are not branded as Cains among the favoured race of man.” According to Wordsworth, "The mind condemned, without reprieve, to go Where beasts and men together o'er the plain Move on a mighty caravan of pain: Hope, strength, and courage social suffering brings, The picture, if unpleasant, is yet pleasanter than Mr. Procter's, of "A ghastly brotherhood who hung together, Knit firm by misery or some common wrong." To have partners in misfortune is some comfort, says Dio Chrysostom: Пapaμvbíav Pépeι τὸ κοινωνοὺς εἶναι τῶν συμφορῶν; or, as the Latin proverb words * "That old Frenchman was right," mutters another author's Captain Bulstrode, thinking of La Rochefoucauld's maxim; "there is a great satisfaction in the misfortune of others. If I go to my dentist, I like to find another wretch in the waiting-room; and I like to have my tooth extracted first, and to see him glare enviously at me as I come out of the torture chamber, knowing that my troubles are over, while his are to come. Of the ducal philosopher's maxim, more anon. it, Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris. It has been recognised as beyond doubt inherent in human misery, the desire of seeing others wretched when we are wretched ourselves. If the affliction we grieve under be very heavy, we shall find some consolation, says Addison, in the fellowship of as great sufferers as ourselves, especially if our companions be men of virtue and merit; if, on the other hand, our afflictions are light, we shall be comforted by contrasting them with what others endure. Dr. Thomas Brown has a word of praise for him who, in suffering the common ills of our nature, has suffered them as common ills, not repining at affliction, nor proud of enduring it without a murmur, but feeling only that it is part of a great system which is good, and that his lot is the common lot. Foremost among the multitude of reflections suggested by a bitter experience to the King of Tartary, in the Arabian Nights, is this one: "How little reason had I to think that no one was so unfortunate as myself!" Quite early in the encounters and misadventures of Don Quixote, that poor belaboured knight has to console himself, bruised and battered as he is, in looking upon this as a misfortune common to knights-errant. Anon he fortifies himself by calling to memory the many stories that are so applicable to what has befallen him, one especially from the Diana of George of Montemayor. Sancho has a proverb pat to the purpose, in his colloquy with the squire of the wood: "If the common saying is true, that there is some comfort in having partners in grief, I may comfort myself with you, who serve as crackbrained a master as my own." How apt are we to recollect, or to try to recollect, exclaims Richardson's Honourable Miss Byron, when we are apprehensive that a case may possibly be our own, all those circumstances of which, while another's (however dear that other might be to us), we had not any clear or adequate idea! Henry Mackenzie tells, in the Introduction to one of his fictions, how often he has wandered away from his own woe, in tracing the tale of another's dejection: "At this moment, every sentence I write, I am but escaping a little further from the presence of sorrow." THE STRANGER THE SADDER. 421 So Churchill, in his epistle to Robert Lloyd, with whom he often stole an hour from grief, and in his social converse found relief; for, "The mind, of solitude impatient grown, Loves any sorrows rather than her own." One of Lesage's Cheminées de Madrid, in the entretiens so entitled, is of the opinion that "c'est une foible consolation pour les malheureux, que d'avoir des compagnons de leur misère." But this is voted a crotchet, due to a crooked constitution. If Charles Surface is undone, he'll find half his acquaintance ruined too, quoth Mrs. Candour, "and that, you know, is a consolation." "Doubtless, ma'am," Joseph Surface assents, 66 a very great one." When Dr. Fothergill proved the identity of the putrid sore throat (a form of disease then, 1748, newly imported into England) with the Garrotillo, or "gallows disease," of the Spaniards, and the morbus strangulatorius of the Italian writers, it was a real comfort to those who were alarmed by the appearance of a new disease, to learn that the same malady had visited and quitted other countries in other times; for, as one of his biographers remarks, it adds to the despondency of sickness and the terror of death itself, when the pain and peril seem strange. Mr. Dickens, in the uttermost dejection of sea-sickness* during his first voyage to America, was inexpressibly comforted on hearing that a fellow passenger whom he had pictured to himself insultingly free from that complaint, was prostrate with it too. "I don't think I ever felt such perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard from the ship's doctor that he had been obliged to put a large mustard poultice on this very gentleman's * Undoubtedly, as the writer of an essay on the Misfortunes of our Friends has remarked, nobody can witness certain real though minor misfortunes of life, without a strong propensity to laugh; everybody, for example, considers sea-sickness from an absurd point of view, though it would be hard to say why extreme suffering should be ludicrous because it is not dangerous or protracted. Perhaps the grotesqueness of the surrounding circumstances overpowers our sympathies; but the fact that they are so completely vanquished is accounted by this writer scarcely an amiable trait in human nature. stomach. I date my recovery from the receipt of that intelligence." There is real and substantial mitigation of all human ills and mortifications, as the moralist contends, in the sight of others as badly off: to fall on the ice along with twenty others, is no great matter, unless indeed the physical suffering be severe; to be guillotined as one of fifty, is not nearly so bad as to go all alone; and "to be beaten in a competition along with half a dozen very clever fellows, mitigates your mortification." If, as the same authority suggests, you were the only bald man in the world, or the only lame man, or the only man who had lost several teeth, you would find it much harder to resign your mind to your condition. Butler, in Hudibras, commends such reflections as "No mean nor trivial solaces To partners in extreme distress; The more he took his turn among." One assigned reason for the popularity of proverbs is, that we comfort ourselves under a state of things which shames or annoys us by remembering that others have found themselves in exactly the same plight before; and, the shape of a proverb being that of a universal proposition, it seems that, if we can recollect an appropriate proverb, we have the testimony of all mankind that what is happening to us is unavoidable. Nec rara videmus quæ pateris, as Juvenal has it: Casus multis hic cognitus, ac jam Tritus; which has been freely Englished, Your ill's but one of Fortune's common store; it happens every day to thousands more. And as Cowper felt and said of misery, it delights to trace its semblance in another's case. The woeworn Duchess of Malfi knew what she was asking, when she asked Cariola to discourse to her some dismal tragedy. “Oh, 'twill increase your melancholy," objected the other. "Thou art deceived," the Duchess replied: "to hear of greater grief |