This religious respect we experience in the face of grief gives its
meaning and beauty to the feeling of sympathy.
We do not wish to admit that a great grief can live side by side with
us without demanding that we should share it. As a man of lowly station
wistfully approaches the table of princes, so we revolve about the
grief of others in the hope of being invited to partake of it.
It is an overmastering impulsion that rises from the depths of our
natures. The eagerness we are able to bring to the sharing of others’
joys is but lukewarm beside the insurmountable urge that makes us
share in their sorrow.
This is because our taste for joy is stamped with a keen quality of
reserve, an irreducible delicacy. The joy even of those who are nearest
to us can easily become repugnant to us. We are too proud to seem eager
for it. True grief, on the contrary, attracts us, fascinates us. It
disarms our critical sense and leaves us only an obscure feeling of
envy.
Sympathy stirs us gently without overwhelming us; it is for this reason
too that we find it so full of savor.
Although we recoil from the terrors of the leading part, sympathy
permits us to play passionately the rôle of supernumeraries.
It is not we who are struck down and yet we can taste the mystic horror
of the wound. The chosen victim bestows alms upon us and we accept
them without shame. We have the perfume of the Host on our lips and it
is not our blood that has paid the sacrifice. We are the guests at a
sumptuous and tragic feast. We bear the reflected light of the great
funeral pyre, without undergoing the flames and the destruction.
That explains our leaning toward those works of art that find their
strength and their subjects in human grief. It is for this reason,
surely, that we love so dearly to shed tears at the theater. The great
artists have drawn from grief their most beautiful inspirations. We vow
eternal gratitude to those who can revive in us a faithful image of
our torments and call them back to our forgetful souls, to those who
know so well how to give us a foretaste of the delights that future
suffering has in store for us.