caution given, or a warning conveyed in social or moral matters, who
has the courage to do these things? Is it a woman or a man?
XVIII.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SYMPATHY AND PITY.
The most precious thing in the world is sympathy.
That sentence looks well, does it not? And, furthermore, it is just one
of those “glittering generalities” that we all accept just as we do
silver certificates, with a polite pretense of crediting them at their
face valuation and believing them to be “as good as gold.”
I am afraid it is rather a fad of mine to war against these solemn
hypocrites of popular sayings. To tell the truth, I never can see
anything or anybody, which or who poses as being better and wiser than
its surroundings, that I am not impelled to probe it to the center,
to rub off its paint, to chip off its veneer, and expose the “true
inwardness” of its being.
I have no objection to Tartars in the abstract, but when they prance
forth decked in all the ultra civilization of young Russia, I am
impelled to abrade the surface just enough to let all the world
recognize the Tartar underneath.
So, now, is Sympathy, with its pretentious great S, the most precious
balm for a wounded heart?
Yes and no.
Far be it from me to deny that there are forms and measures of sympathy
that are indeed healing and sweet, but how seldom are they found! It
must be unobtrusive, to begin with. Like violets or lilies of the
valley, it is to be known more by the subtle fragrance of its shy
presence than, like the sunflower, by its breadth and insistency of
form and color.
I have had friends, and I thank God for them, even though they stand in
His presence and not in mine, whose very silence was the sweetest of
sympathy; friends whose light touch never hurt the wound they healed;
who never, by word or even look, suggested that there was a wound
until I threw off the covering with which we all instinctively cloak
our hurts from the common gaze.
A friend like this, a friend who is content to prove sympathy by
silence until the sufferer invites speech, is far more likely to be
admitted to the innermost chambers of the heart than the one who loudly
knocks at the outer door, clamoring:
“Open, open! I have come to sympathize with you!”
For such a one there is in most outer doors one of those little well
grated wickets one sees in old convent portals, where, in answered to
the clamorous summons, a pale face appears for a moment, and a chill,
repressed voice replies:
“Go in peace! The doors are locked, and none may pass them.”
There are so many classes of these mistaken sympathizers!
First, the loud and aggressive class--the women who swoop down upon
you from the door of your own drawing room and fold you close in a
smothering embrace of fur and cloth and beads and chains and ribbons (I
give you my word I have come out of such an embrace gasping for breath,
and with a bleeding scratch upon my cheek), exclaiming the while:
“Oh, my darling! My poor, dear child! You sweet dear, how I pity you!
My heart fairly aches for you!”
Issuing from this embrace breathless, wounded, half stifled with the
heavy perfume this kind of sympathizer generally uses, one longs to cry
aloud with the first possible breath:
“At least, don’t pity me! I can bear suffocation and scratches and
musk, but not pity!”
Of course one doesn’t say it, but we know what the parrot did instead
of speaking.
To be pitied openly and avowedly and to hear it sweetly is probably
the last test of a saint ripe for canonization, but I for one have no
idea of how such a being may feel. It is not my _métier_, and I fully
believe in at least one old and vulgar adage, “Cobbler, stick to your
last!” So, not claiming saintship, present or prospective, I am free
to confess that to be pitied in the style just specified arouses the
most murderous qualities of my nature, and although the fetters of
civilization may chain both my tongue and my hands the pityist would be
very much alarmed if she could see my heart.
I say “she” advisedly, for I do not think men are prone to make this
sort of blunder. At any rate, they do not wrap one in a voluminous and
odorous embrace, and any movement in that direction is so promptly
checked that it is of small moment. The manner in which the male
sympathizer most often offends is in imitating the bear in Æsop’s
fable, who, being very fond of the gardener, watched beside him while
he slept. A mosquito buzzing about the sleeper’s head threatened to
disturb his slumber, whereupon the brute of a friend, watching his
opportunity, brought down a weighty paw with deadly force upon--the
mosquito certainly, but also upon the head of the beloved gardener, who
never found words to thank his sympathizing friend, owing to the loss
of his brains.
This seems to me one of the anecdotes to which “_hæc fabula docet_”
may be very profitably added. Did you never experience this kind of
sympathy?
Well, it is much after this manner:
“You don’t know how sorry I’ve been for you even since I heard of
that fellow having run off with your money” (or whatever the special
affliction may be, for I am literally supposing a case and never have
experienced exactly this calamity). “How in the world came you to trust
him so much? You see you are too credulous and too apt to believe every
plausible lie that’s told you. You ought to have asked some man to look
into the thing and advise you. How did it happen? Come, tell me all
about it, and I will show you where the weak point was, so you will
know better another time, you poor little woman!”
That phrase, “Tell me all about it!” is one that the acceptable
sympathizer never uses. It is as fatal to the desired end as it is to
throw open a window and hurl a handful of grain at a bird which you
wish to lure to a cage it has deserted. The true way is to softly open
the window, strew the grain inside where it is quite obvious, but may
be taken or left, as the victim may choose, and then yourself retire
out of sight. It is pretty sure that by this stratagem you will finally
have your bird just where you want him, and in process of time he will
warble out all the secrets of his heart to you. But rushing at him and
shouting, “Now, tell me all about it!” is the very last way to win his
confidence.
Another kind of sympathizer and a very offensive one is the person who
essays to “keep up your spirits” for you in some season of bereavement
and affliction. I once saw a friend of mine (not myself) driven nearly
mad by this sort of Job’s comforter. She came to the house of mourning
for a stay of some days, and apparently had laid in a stock of funny
stories, society gossip and all sorts of conundrums, epigrams and
frivolities generally. We never sat down at the table but this flood
was loosed upon us, until one day my friend burst into tears and left
the table, very greatly to the surprise of Mme. Malaprop, who inquired
of everybody:
“Why, what is the matter? Did anybody say anything to remind her? And I
was trying so hard to keep up her spirits and all!”
I had not the courage to reply, but some one else had, and said in so
many words:
“I think it was just that. She couldn’t stand having her spirits kept
up any longer.”
“Poor thing! It’s too bad!” replied the sympathizer complacently. “But
she’ll be all right when she’s had her cry out, and I’ll tell her the
rest of that story when she comes down. There’s nothing so bad for a
person as to dwell upon their troubles, and I made up my mind when I
came to do everything I could to distract poor Mary, and I think I’ve
done it.”
“I think you have,” replied the other dryly. “She seemed nearly
distracted when she left the table.”
A kindred spirit to this, but not so objectionable because she is not
so funny, is the officious sympathizer, the person who insists upon
distracting the mind of the sufferer by forcing all sorts of ordinary
details upon it. If it is bereavement and the comforter is a woman,
she insists upon discussing the mourning clothes and offering to run
out and bring patterns, or send in some bonnets, or tell about the
present mode of wearing a widow’s veil. She discusses sleeves, and has
an opinion upon the new skirts, and absolutely drags out assents or
dissents from the pale lips of the sufferer, who plaintively but quite
uselessly declares:
“Oh, I don’t care in the least! Have everything that is proper and use
your own judgment.”
“Now, darling, that isn’t right, you know,” persists the comforter.
“You really ought to rouse yourself and take an interest. You will care
about all this in a little while, and it is so much better to have
everything right to begin with.”
“Not but that I could do it all myself perfectly well,” explains the
complacent comforter to some one else presently, “but it is so much
better that she should be roused, poor dear!”
So she goes on tormenting her.
Perhaps it is another kind of sorrow. It might be a woman whose husband
has eloped with another woman. In this case the officious sympathizer
is full of good advice and offers of help in the way of sending
telegrams, seeing detectives, interviewing reporters and the like,
all very useful and perhaps essential modes of service, but with this
species of sympathizer all made very obvious and obtruded continually
with the avowed object of distracting the mind of the sufferer. One
case of this kind that I remember was that of a dear child whom a
fortune hunter had deliberately jilted when her father lost his
money. The mother came to me full of indignation to complain of the
“impertinent interference,” as I grieve to say she called it, of a
sympathizer, who visited her and her daughter with the avowed intention
of “doing something about it” herself, and brought the copy of a letter
she had already written and sent to the delinquent. She called, as
she said, to comfort the poor girl with the knowledge that she had at
least one sympathizing friend who was ready and anxious to do all that
she could for her, even to going to see the young man and publicly
upbraiding him in the midst of his family and friends.
“And what did you say?” inquired I, when my friend had poured forth
this remarkable story, for I felt that I best showed my sympathy with
her mortification by giving her a chance to narrate her successes. Nor
was I mistaken, for she held her head very high, and her eyes were very
bright as she replied:
“I said that if she really wished to oblige us she would do so best by
remaining perfectly silent and quiet about affairs that certainly did
not in the least concern her. Now she’ll go around and say all sorts
of hateful things about us, but I’d rather she’d do that than try to
sympathize.”
“Defend me from my friends, and I’ll take care of my enemies,” quoted
I, and she who had come to me drowned in grief went away with smiling
lips.
There is nothing in the world that so soon and so surely brings comfort
to the human soul as to be placed upon good terms with itself.
One more class of mistaken sympathizers is that of lugubrious ones.
They not only mingle their tears with yours, but the torrents of their
grief sweep the fountains of yours quite dry and barren. They not only
listen to your lamentations, but go beyond them with such jeremiads of
woe that you leave off trying to keep up and end by feeling that you
had not half appreciated your own misfortunes and listen to the new and
enlarged version of them with a certain mournful pride and an access of
self-pity which sweeps away all the healing work time may have begun to
put in. “Such blows as this come but once in a lifetime. I can’t wonder
that you feel all hope of happiness is over, but you must remember that
resignation is a duty.”
You had not quite looked at the matter in this light before, and in the
depths of your mind are guiltily conscious of a certain dismay at the
idea of all happiness being over, but it would not be decent to say
so, and you feel that sentence has gone forth against you, and your
only course is to submit, so you murmur a mournful assent, and your
comforter tearfully goes her way, leaving you a good deal worse off
than she found you.
I spoke but now of the healing work of time, but I take it back. Time
is not a healer. He is a destroyer. Time is the most heartless of
sympathizers or comforters, for he brings no thought of comfort or
self-justification. In fact, the harsh and bitter and cruel points of
a great sorrow are those that time preserves and insists upon to the
very last. Some kinds--nay, I will allow all kinds--of grief grow less
poignant after awhile, but it is not because time has healed the wound,
but because he has destroyed the sensibility, and the memory, and the
environment of the sorrow. He is only kind because he is so ruthless.
The best of all the sympathizers this world has ever produced was that
Eastern sage who, being required by his king to produce a motto suited
to every state of mind possible to humanity, enunciated, “This, too,
will pass.”
XX.
FOOLISH PROVERBS.
There are a great many things which have been said so often and so
positively that they have at last taken a sort of brevet rank as facts,
but which are nevertheless absurdly false and often very stupid. It is
one of the funny fashions of this very funny world to enunciate these
maxims with the air of having just originated some especially smart
new maxim, the brilliant result of our own superior wisdom. I do not
know anything more comically provoking than this air unless it is the
earsplitting cackle of a hen over a new-laid egg. The egg is no better
and no different from that which Eve’s favorite pullet laid in paradise
and that pullet’s daughters have been laying ever since. But to hear
the cackle one would imagine that special hen had invented eggs and
wished to call the attention of the world to the fact.
For instance, if a young man shows a tendency to go away from home and
see something of the world, become “a globe trotter” to a greater or
less extent, he is warned that “a rolling stone gathers no moss”--that
is to say, the moving man will not acquire money and position. Now, we
all know that this is a prodigious falsehood. It is the moving man, the
pusher, the hustler, the rustler, or whatever else he may be called,
who succeeds and makes for himself position, money and influence. The
human bowlder gathers moss indeed, but it is the moss of decay and the
rust of inaction.
But opposed to this is another proverb equally false, “Homely youth
have ever homely wits,” a statement perhaps true in Shakespeare’s time,
but not at all true now, for it is in quiet and seclusion, at home,
or college, or in some sort of retirement, that “wits,” if wits mean
intellect and mental processes, go on the best, and the scientist, the
chemist, the philosopher, the lecturer or the preacher, would come to
great grief if he had not some sort of “home” to shut himself into.
But the popular saying which just now annoys me the most is one that
your friends always present to you in times of trouble and perplexity,
generally offering it with a sort of benevolent and perfunctory air, as
if it were a piece of religious consolation or a well-proved recipe for
happiness, a sort of panacea for every ill of spirit mind or body. It
is sometimes expressed in one form, sometimes another; but the idea is,
“All things come round to him who will but wait.”
Now I appeal to you, my dear reader, to say if that promise has
fulfilled itself in your life. It certainly has not in mine. We, all of
us, I suppose, start in life with some far-off ideal of happiness or
at least pleasure glittering like a star in our future, either remote
or close at hand. It is like the golden cup which we were told in our
childhood is to be found hanging on the end of the rainbow. Probably
most of us have once or twice set off full of hope to find that cup,
but I have yet to hear of any one who has achieved it. And do we
generally gain these early ideals? Have you? Think a bit of what you
wanted most at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, and so on. Have you
ever really and fully obtained it? Probably you have changed that ideal
many times, you have set the goal where you were to rest, satisfied
farther and farther away, but have you ever reached it? In one word,
have you found in your own experience that “all things come round to
him who will wait?”
Doubtless we have often derived comfort from the phrase, for most
people are very ready to take words for things. Some older person has
said it to us with that assured and benevolent manner of which I spoke
but now--some parent or friend or clergyman to whom we have applied for
counsel and comfort--and we have received it as a sort of prophetic
promise, and gone away with the feeling that all is now going to be
set right, and we have only to wait a bit to have our heart’s desire
fulfilled in the completest manner.
And does it?
It is about as rational a belief as that we attach to the words of
a fortune teller to whom we have furtively applied in some terrible
muddle of our affairs. She has “prophesied smooth things” in a very
impressive manner, and even while jeering at our own credulity we go
away with a sort of shamefaced faith that perhaps, after all, she is
right, and at any rate we feel a little encouraged.
And how common sense insists upon reminding us of the failure of
various other similar ventures!
The young girl fixes her affections or perhaps only her fancy upon some
man, who in turn has fixed his upon some other woman, or, as is more
likely, upon himself and his own interests. “All things come round to
him who will but wait,” whispers the poor child to herself, and she
modestly and silently waits until the man either marries the other
girl or drifts out of her horizon altogether.
Perhaps the “waiting” lover is the man--one of those men who pride
themselves upon their tenacity of purpose and power of controlling
fate. He pays court to the woman of his choice, and she, having like
a bee just lighted upon the proffered blossom and sipped the quality
of its honey, declines to take any more of it, be she wooed never so
importunately. So he, too, fixes his faith upon Time and waits for that
official to bring round his heart’s desire. And does he?
Well, I am bound to confess that here and there is a case where the
woman, tired out with her lover’s persistency, marries him to get rid
of him--but does she do it? And does he find that Time has brought
him the spirit of what he desired, or only tantalized him with the
empty letter? More often, however, the girl only encourages him enough
to keep him along and uses him as a butt and foil for her other
flirtations, a _bête de souffrance_ to be finally dropped with a
scornful laugh or a pettish disclaimer when the man she loves finally
makes his definite offer.
But outside of sentiment or love-making there are plenty of people
who, trusting to this delusive promise, prove for themselves its
falsity--the young man, for instance, who intends to be rich. He is
told of the millionaires who have begun life with two or three pence
in their pockets, and the traditional “bundle under their arms,” and
somebody with that exasperating air of giving an invaluable formula of
success adds, “All things come round to him who will but wait.”
So he goes to work at five dollars per month, and after awhile is
raised to ten dollars and twenty dollars, and so on, and keeps
“waiting,” with the most generous reliance upon that charming
promise--waiting through boyhood and youth and young manhood, until
some fine day he suddenly perceives that he is a gray haired,
middle-aged man, with a few most painfully saved thousands in the bank,
and a salary which just enables him to live comfortably and to put by
a little every year. And those are all the things that have come round
to reward _his_ waiting.
Perhaps he has no ambition to be a Vanderbilt; perhaps he only desires
to have a house of his own, a horse and trap, a comfortable home for
the girl he means to marry; perhaps he is a good young fellow, and
wants to take care of his widowed mother and little sisters as well as
the wife. He goes bravely about his task, knowing that he cannot nearly
reach the mark just yet, but then, you know, “All things come round,”
etc.
He finds hundreds--yes, thousands--of other Richards in the field; he
finds the labor market glutted; he finds trained skill demanded where
he has only willing service to render. He is not one of the exceptional
few who hit upon the royal road to success through some invention or
some system as yet unheard of. He is only capable of routine work
performed in a plodding sort of fashion, and although he is never out
of employment, he never makes any great success or receives any great
emolument until, at last, when the mother is dead, and the sisters
married, or earning their own living as school-teachers or typists, and
the wife worn and fretted with hope too long deferred, he sees that he
might have a horse and trap, perhaps, but after all, he doesn’t care
for driving, and the boys will need the money, or the girls must have
it, and so it goes.
Yet another class of patient waiters upon this _ignis fatuus_ of a
promise are the brethren of my own craft--the writers.
A man, or, for that matter, it is in these days more often a woman, who
feels within herself the _cacœthes scribendi_, immediately stakes out
her homestead on Parnassus and selects her niche in the temple of fame.
Shakespeare, Milton, Bulwer, George Eliot, Dickens and the rest are her
brothers and sisters. They had to make a beginning, and so will she.
They have made glorious endings, and so will she. Their names are known
all over the world, and hers is not known at all, but then “all things
come round to him who will but wait,” and she doesn’t mind waiting for
a year or perhaps, two.
So the poor thing begins, and if my tone is playfully scoffing, my
heart is full of the tenderest sympathy and pity, for I have seen and
known it all so often, tried to warn some of these gallant adventurers
of the perils of their voyage, and to point out the fact that amid such
crowded fleets as daily put to sea upon the inky ocean comparatively
few of the brave little crafts reach the harbor of success, while the
rest are stranded on Charybdis, or swallowed up in Scylla, or swamped
by collision with their rivals, or lost and wrecked from any one of a
hundred causes impossible to foresee.
“But I am brave and patient,” the aspirant will answer, with a smile.
“I can wait for months, or even a year or two, and ‘all things come
round to him who will but wait.’”
So the victim starts out, writes her poem or her essay or her serial
story, for these hopeful people never think of doing less than the
heroic, and never descend to the level of the short, pithy story, which
is the only salable kind of manuscript, and she or he sends it first to
the leading magazines, with perhaps, a line suggesting that the author
knows that Longfellow received five hundred dollars for a similar work,
but she is content to begin with one hundred dollars. The editor smiles
compassionately, and sends back the MS. Then it sifts down through the
lower channels of literature, until it finally reaches home for the
last time, and sleeps in the grave of “rejected addresses.”
Now, not wishing to be misanthropic or discouraging to any brave
endeavor, I appeal to all literary experts to decide out of their own
experience and observation the truth to such a one as this author
of the proverb which has buoyed him or her up. _Does_ anything of
consequence “come round” after long waiting? Is it not rather the
rule that the author who fails to gain some measure of success and
recognition in the first two or three years of mature effort, never
will succeed? If relying upon his false maxim he persists in offering
his wares here, there and everywhere, and accepting the lowest prices
and poorest places, he will doubtless earn some money and have the
pleasure of seeing himself in print, but alas for the dreams that
promised to become golden realities!
But Nemesis, or Fate, or whatever we call the “destiny that shapes
men’s ends,” is fond of her little joke, and is constantly amusing
herself by fulfilling the letter of her agreement while breaking the
spirit of it all to pieces.