Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1666/Getting Over It
GETTING OVER IT.
"You will get over it." Of all the styptics applied to a bleeding heart, a wounded soul, this sounds the most cruel, but is, in fact, the most wholesome. The reparative power of nature — that vis medicatrix of which schoolmen talked such marvellous nonsense in the days when ideas stood where facts stand now — is as true of the human mind as it is of the body; and shattered joy repairs itself, happiness is restored after mutilation, wounded affection is healed, and scars take the place of sores, all the same in the life of man as in the life of the world — in souls as in plants. It is wonderful, when we think of it, what we do get over; some of us, certainly, with more trouble, and taking a longer time about it than others; but we all, with few exceptions, get over everything in time, and after the due amount of despair has been undergone, the due number of tears have been shed. ...
It is easy to understand the passionate desperation of inexperienced youth when things go wrong, and disappointment comes to shatter the fairy shrine that hope and fancy had busied themselves in building up out of mist-wreaths and rainbows. The boy's fever-fit of despair when cruel parents interpose with their vile prosaic calculations of how much for house-rent, and how much for the butcher and baker, with the maddening deficit against the artist's income that is to provide food and a home for the beloved, and consequent denial of the daughter's hand, and interruption of all intercourse for the good of both — well, he thinks that he shall never get over it! It has broken his heart, destroyed his life, ruined his happiness forever, and there is nothing worth living for now, since Araminta is impossible. On her side, Araminta holds that it would be very nice to die and have done with the trouble of dressing for balls when Bertie is not there to see her — where, if he is there, he is not to dance with her, make sweet love in the conservatory, on the stairs, over the ices, the champagne. She thinks that, Bertie denied, her womanhood will have no more sweetness, bring her no more hope; she will never get over it — never, she says weeping to her confidante; but next year she is the radiant wife of a well-to-do stockbroker, and Bertie's artistry and love-making are no more substantial than her childish dreams of dolls and dolls's houses. Bertie too laughs at his former self, when he is a prosperous R. A., painting for guineas where formerly he was not paid in pence, and meets with Araminta at the private view — she a British matron with her quiver full and her brown hair grey; he also the father of a family, who has done with dreams even in his art, and who paints what will sell rather than what he thinks to be the best. Ah! the Berties and Aramintas of life get over their romances with humiliating celerity; and that vis medicatrix is sometimes quicker and more thorough in its operation than is quite satisfactory to the self-love of either. Submission to the inevitable is all very well in its way; but nobody likes that submission to be too entire when it involves the loss of himself.
The man's deeper disappointment — the woman's lifelong sorrow — even these are got over in a way, if the scars never heal quite so kindly as with Bertie and Araminta. The older one grows, the deeper the wounds and the more pain they cause; though also, all of us, if wise, know that these wounds will be got over in time, that this pain will case to ache. Nevertheless, for the time being, it is bad to bear, and the healing process is slower. Loss of fortune, of friends, of the dearest twin of your life — that second self, without whom it seems to you now that you cannot exist at all — the child from the mother's breast, the boy from the father's side, the prop of your old age, the companion of your soul and the joy of your eyes — all these go from you and fling you into the abyss of despair; but you get over it. A few years of troubled health may be, of tears starting readily to your eyes on small occasions, of the constant presence of gloom, and the daily thought of death — and then by degrees the clouds lift gradually, bit by bit, step by step, till you drift under the serene blue sky again, where, if all things are not as they were before the storm came which broke your flowers and beat down your temple, they are at the least beautiful to look at and good to live with. We grant it — great sorrows leave traces that are ineffaceable, and life is never entirely the same after them as it was before; but for all that, we get over even the deepest of these sorrows, and go on in the old grooves, with here and there sad places as reminders, but substantially everything the same as heretofore.
We get over even that loss of health and strength which leaves the citadel sound if the outworks are sapped and taken. The strong man and mighty hunter learns to live as a cripple — as a living death, paralyzed and bound to his chair for the remainder of his time. When it was first told him that he was maimed and ruined, he felt that he could not get over it — that he should die of the anguish which only strong men know. But the blessed vis medicatrix, which could do nothing for his body, does all for his mind, and he wears down into his sorrowful place, and gets over it in the best way he can. He finds consolation — "compensation," as Emerson says — and, like a vine pruned to the quick, puts forth fresh tendrils, new leaves, and even bears good fruit to the end. It is a daily amazement to his friends, who knew him in the days of his powerful manhood and lusty strength, to see how well he has got over it; but the power which is good for one thing is for the most part good for another, and the resignation of a strong man to the inevitable is as brave as used to be his courage in the presence of danger, as vital as was his energy against obstacles and difficulties. Men get over, too, even the discovery of hidden passages in their lives which they believed when first disclosed would ruin them forever — that slip some twenty years ago, when the books of the private little society of which he was the treasurer and secretary were found to have been tampered with, and moneys that had been paid in were never able to be drawn out by those to whom they belonged. Well! when that small lapse from the gentleman's code of honour and the vulgar rules of common honesty was made known, the delinquent thought for sure he should never get over it; but he did. He lived it down; success, based on fraud, grew as the old legends say Naples grew on the foundation of the magic egg laid there by "Virgilius." Let the egg break, and the goodly city would sink into the sea; let the fraud come full to the light, and the whole superstructure of opulence and respectability would fall to the ground. But it does not; and for the whispered revelations made in past time — he gets over them. So of the woman. She stands on the pinnacle of feminine honour. Her hair is grey, and her cheek has lost its roundness. She thought she should never have got over it, when years ago her letters were shown in the club, and her poor little secret was blown by gossip and scandal to all four corners of the earth. But she did in time, and now walks as smoothly as if no such misfortune had happened to her youth — as if she had never known what it was to be looked at askance, and spoken of with bated breath and small respect. She got over it; and now — who would suspect that she has ever had to ford so deep a river, to skirt by so terrible a precipice?