The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Sensitive People

lmost with their earliest breath the tortures of the sensitive begin; in the very dawn of their existence, the first foreboding signs of shrinking and of suffering are apparent. The bright eye of infancy will suddenly fill with tears, the rosy lip curl and quiver, the soft cheek flush through wounded feeling. A chiding word, a mocking laugh, has pierced the tender soul; it recoils instinctively from blame or ridicule, ay, even before the child knows the meaning of the words. Who can note these touching indications of acute sensibility, without a sigh at the thought of the rude blasts, the beating rain, the pinching frosts, that must blow about, and prostrate, and wither that delicate shoot of humanity, in its upward struggle through life?

Now and then these sensitive natures are dulled and hardened by contact with the world; now and then, through severe self-discipline, they learn to resist the cruel blow; or to draw, with resolute hands, the veil of seeming indifference over the bleeding wound, and hide the throes of anguish ​from the most penetrating gaze. But more frequently their sensitiveness increases, until it becomes a daily, hourly instrument of torment. It is usually coupled with an imaginative temperament, and more than half the hurts it receives are fancied, or not dealt with intention. Sensitive people are always ready to be wounded, always expecting to be wounded, always attracting casual shots their way, and often draw down unpremeditated smiting by their evident anticipation of the stroke.

Though the possessors of these highly sensitive organizations may excite our tenderest sympathy, though they may win our love, and must move our pity, yet they are not pleasant companions. Their constant distress disturbs the general serenity; their imaginary wrongs destroy all harmony, and the effort to guard them from random arrows prevents all freedom of communion. If a humorous anecdote is related, satirizing peculiarities of character which they chance to consider their own, they are certain the raconteur meant to be personal; if they perceive a knot of friends conversing in a low tone, they are sure the conversation is about them; if they are not treated with distinguishing attention, they fancy themselves slighted; if they receive particular consideration, they imagine that they are pitied and patronized; if an opinion of theirs is combated, they color with mortification; if they are brought forward in any conspicuous manner, they are pale with alarm; in ​short, they can never agreeably make one of a social circle, and contribute to the general enjoyment by that ease and self-forgetfulness which is the charm of refined intercourse.

And yet, though their companionship is so unsatisfactory, these sensitive spirits are almost always rich in lovable attributes; their sympathies are quick, so quick, alas! that they are often wasted; their affections are ardent, so ardent that they are too readily excited and too easily betrayed; they are delicate instruments, Æolian harps, from which even a passing wind can draw forth strains of tender or mournful melody. But this lamentable sensitiveness is not the evidence of weak minds, nor of dwarfed intellects. Full-statured souls, lavishly dowered, have ever been the most vulnerable to petty arrows—arrows which, though hurled by despicable hands, have fallen with the violence of thunder-bolts upon these finely moulded and receptive natures. Sensitiveness is often the handmaiden of Genius, and gives sweetness to the world's approval, even as it imparts poison to the dispraise of fools; lending to both a fictitious value and an undue power.

It is fabled that when the bosom of the nightingale is pressed against a thorn she sings most melodiously; and often it is the poet's susceptibility to suffering, his very crisis of pain, that becomes his inspiration; his most glorious songs gush forth with the crucifixion groan; his brightest flowers ​of thought are tinged with heart's blood. Even his most charming sports of fancy have been produced under the writhing of such mental agony as only sensitive spirits are capable of experiencing. We all know that Hood, the prince of humorists, convulsed the world with laughter when he was tortured by the deepest melancholy, and that Cowper's mirth-provoking John Gilpin was produced under a state of dejection that bordered on insanity. He, himself, compares the entrance of that poem into his brain, to a harlequin intruding himself into the gloomy chamber occupied by a corpse.

One sensitiveness of great minds has always been inexplicable to us: the sensitiveness to censure. Censure which pierced the heart of the philosophic Newton; which slew Racine and Keats; which drove the Italian Tasso and the English Collins mad. Alas! how could they have forgotten that only insignificance escapes condemnation; that he who outstrips others in ascending the hill of Fame, becomes the most tempting target to be shot at by every puny archer beneath.

And in these days, as in those of Keats and Collins, noble minds groan and writhe under the lash of rebuke, often lifted by unworthy hands, by Malice, by Envy, by Revenge. And the more apparent the sensitiveness of the great, the more frequently and violently they are assailed. Better far to cover Sensibility with the armor of Tact, and conquer Censure as Julius Cæsar did of old. ​When Catullus satirized him, the hero disarmed the satirist by cordially inviting him to supper, as if in recognition of an act of friendship.

Possibly the pains which spring from a high degree of sensitiveness, are the meet alloy to the intense pleasures that emanate from the possession of glorious gifts, and thus Sensitiveness may be the fitting attendant of Greatness; but to lesser minds we dare venture to say, struggle against a morbid sensibility until your claims to Genius entitle you to pardon for the weaknesses of Genius.