Part 18 (1/2)
Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism.
Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that the other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]
SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA
India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa antic.i.p.ates a modern idea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that ”Among persons who are very fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved.” India, too, is famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compa.s.sionate to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would get such power that even the G.o.ds would dread them; and the Sanscrit dramas are full of ill.u.s.trations of the detestably selfish use they made of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poor girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of these ”saints,” for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his personal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ ill.u.s.trates the diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in general is merely a matter of superst.i.tion and not an outcome of sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings.
How far he was from realizing Christ's ”blessed are the merciful,” may be inferred from what the Abbe Dubois says:
”The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road, or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste; and will not stir to help him to a drop of water, though it were to save his life.”
”To kill a cow,” says the same writer (I., 176), ”is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death;” and these same Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout att.i.tude toward some animals.
Superst.i.tion is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.
In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.
What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superst.i.tions:
”The enraged mult.i.tude did not wait for the slow process of law, but put the offender to death with their own hands.” At the same time some animals ”which were deemed divinities in one home, were treated as nuisances and destroyed in others.” (Kendrick, II., I-21.)
EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY
If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins, not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the circle of sympathy and to make known its ravis.h.i.+ng delights. The doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation.
If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that ”Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death”--we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one more ill.u.s.tration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.
AMOROUS SYMPATHY
In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did not exaggerate when he said that ”it is in a man really in love as if his personality were eliminated.” Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: ”How can I make her happy and save her from grief” at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous sympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of personalities:
My true love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given.
--_Sidney_.
It is the secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart to heart, and mind to mind, In body and in soul can bind.
--_Scott_.
To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than beauty. The author of _Love Affairs of Some Famous Men_ has wittily remarked that ”Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants is a man who can love her when he sees her every day.” That, he might have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and sorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a cold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl who is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is perhaps a degree less offensive, because compet.i.tion and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no love without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolute test, of romantic love.
IX. ADORATION
Silvius, in _As You Like It_, says that love is ”all adoration,” and in _Twelfth Night_, when Olivia asks: ”How does he love me?” Viola answers: ”With adorations.” Romeo asks: ”What shall I swear by?” and Juliet replies:
Do not swear at all; Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the G.o.d of my idolatry, And I'll believe thee.
DEIFICATION OF PERSONS
Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the ”deification of persons,” and that women adore as well as men. Helena, in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:
Thus, Indian-like Religious in mine error, I adore The sun that looks upon his wors.h.i.+pper, But knows of him no more.
”Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine.” (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and carves a G.o.ddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living G.o.ddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, however fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that ”it is marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic when he thinks of it,” as Charles Dudley Warner puts it.