Part 10 (2/2)
All affection for individuals probably starts in this immediate instinctive liking. ”The first note that gives sociability a personal quality and raises the comrade into an incipient friend is doubtless sensuous affinity. Whatever reaction we may eventually make on an impression, after it has had time to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectual habit, its first a.s.sault is always on the senses; and no sense is an indifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial rate of vibration, and gives its stimuli a varying welcome.
Little as we may attend to these instinctive hospitalities of sense, they betray themselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons and things, in the _je ne sais quai_ that makes instinctive sympathy.”[2] From this immediate instinctive liking it may rise to deep personal attachments, strikingly manifested in friends.h.i.+p and love between the s.e.xes, both immemorially celebrated by poets and novelists.
Love is aroused chiefly by persons, and among persons, especially in the case of s.e.xual love, most frequently by more or less physical beauty and attractiveness. But affection may be aroused and is certainly sustained by other than merely physical qualities.
[Footnote 2: Santayana: _Reason in Society_, p. 151.]
It is provoked by what we call personal or social charm, a genuine kindliness of manner, an open-handed sincerity and frankness, considerateness, gentleness, whimsicality. Which particular social graces will win our affections depends of course on our own interests, equipment, and fund of instinctive and acquired sympathies. Popular psychology has in various proverbs. .h.i.t at and not entirely missed some of the obvious and contradictory elements: ”Opposites attract,”
”Birds of a feather flock together,” and so on. Intellectual qualities, in persons of marked intellectual interests, will also sustain friends.h.i.+p and deepen an instinctive liking. Friends.h.i.+ps thus begin in accident and are continued through community of interest. It is to be questioned whether merely striking intellectual qualities initiate a friends.h.i.+p. They may command admiration and respect, but liking, friends.h.i.+p, and love have a more emotional and personal basis.
This same warm affectionate appreciation that nearly all people have for other persons, fewer people--great poets, philosophers, and enthusiastic leaders of men--have for causes, inst.i.tutions, and ideas. One feels in the works of great thinkers the same warmth and loyalty to ideas and causes that ordinary people display toward their friends. Plato has given for all time the progress of love from attachment to a single individual through to inst.i.tutions, ideas, and what he called mystically the idea of beauty itself.
For he who would proceed rightly in this matter should begin in youth to turn to beautiful forms; and first, if his instructor guide him rightly, he should learn to love one such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts, and soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form is truly related to the beauty of another, and then if beauty in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same!
And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; this will lead him on to consider that the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him... until his beloved is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of inst.i.tutions and laws, and understand that all is of one kindred; and that personal beauty is only a trifle; and after laws and inst.i.tutions, he will lead him on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty... until at length he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science which is the science of beauty everywhere.[l]
[Footnote 1: Plato: _Symposium_ (Jowett translation), p. 502.]
There have been again great scientists who have had the same warm affectionate devotion for their subject-matter that most men display toward persons. There are scholars almost literally in love with their subjects. There have been a greater number whose capacity for affection has extended to include the whole human race, and, indeed, all animate creation.
Such a type of character is beautifully exemplified in Saint Francis of a.s.sisi:
In Francis all living creatures may truly be said to have found a friend and benefactor; his great heart embraced all the men and women who sought his sympathy and advice, and his pity for the dumb helplessness of suffering animals was deep and true. He would lift the worm from his path lest a careless foot should crush it, and would encourage his ”little sister gra.s.shopper” to perch upon his hand, and chirp her song to his gentle ear. He tamed the fierce wolf of Gubbio, and fed the robins with crumbs from his table.[1]
[Footnote 1: Goff and Kerr-Lawson: _a.s.sisi of Saint Francis_, p. 121.]
And Christ stands, of course, in the Christian world, as the supreme symbol of love for mankind.
In ordinary men it is this generalized affection which is at the basis of any sustained interest in philanthropic or altruistic enterprises. No less than a large and generous affection for humanity is required to enable men to endure for long the dreariness and disillusion so often incident to philanthropic work, the conflicts and disappointments of public administration.
Certainly this is true of the first rank of statesmen; no characterization of Lincoln fails to emphasize his essential humanity and tenderness.
Disinterested love for humanity is normally most intense in the adolescent.[2] The pressure of private concerns, of one's narrowing interest in one's own career, one's own family, and small circle of friends, the restriction of one's sympathies by fixed habits and circ.u.mscribed experience, all tend to dampen by middle age the ardor of the man who as an undergraduate at eighteen set out to make the world ”a better place to live in.” But more effective in dampening enthusiasm is the disillusion and weariness that set in after a period of exuberant and romantic benevolence to mankind in general. ”We call pessimists,” writes a contemporary French philosopher, ”those who are in reality only disillusioned optimists.”[1] So the cynic may be fairly described as a disheartened lover of men. It is only an unusual gift of affectionate good-will that enables mature men, after rough and disillusioning experiences in public life, to maintain without sentimentality a genuine and persistent interest in the welfare of others. Those in whom the fund of human kindness is slender will, and easily do, become cynical and hard.
[Footnote 2: Simeon Strunsky has somewhere remarked: ”At eighteen a man is interested in causes; at twenty-eight in commutation tickets.”]
[Footnote 1: Georges Sorel: _Reflection on Violence_ (English translation), p. 9.]
The att.i.tude of affection for others is profoundly influential in stimulating our interest in specific individuals, and modifying our att.i.tudes toward them. We cannot help being more interested in those for whom we entertain affection than in those to whom we are indifferent. In the same way our judgments of our own friends, families, and children are qualified by our affection for them. Parents and lovers are notoriously partial, and a fair judgment of the work of our friends demands unusual clarity, determination, and poise.
In a larger way the generally friendly att.i.tude towards others, genial expansive receptivity, is at the basis of what is called ”charity for human weakness.” The gentle cynic can see and tolerate other men's weaknesses:
”He knows how much of what men paint themselves Would blister in the light of what they are; He sees how much of what was great now shares An eminence transformed and ordinary; He knows too much of what the world has hushed In others, to be loud now for himself.”[2]
[Footnote 2: Edwin Arlington Robinson: ”Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford,” in his _Man Against the Sky_.]
The devoutly religious have displayed keen psychological insight when they made man's salvation dependent on G.o.d's charity, and identified, as did Dante, charity with love.[3]
[Footnote 3: ”Love and the gentle heart are one and the same thing.”
_The New Life_. XX (son XI) _Amore e cor gentile son una cosa._ To Dante the spontaneous impulse to love is the basis of all altruism.
To feel and to follow this impulse is to be truly n.o.ble, to have a ”_cor gentile_,” a gentle heart.]
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