The Press. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1895. INTEMPERANCE IN PITY.

Press, Volume LII, Issue 9281, 5 December 1895, Page 4

The Press. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1895. INTEMPERANCE IN PITY.

We are accustomed tojtook upon pity as the purest and noblest of human emotions. It is that which transmutes the greatest evil to the greatest good; tragedy, we have it on very ancient authority, " purifies the emotions through the channel of pity." And even Bacon, who differed from Aristotle in many things, agreed with him in this; for he makes his ideal wise man in his " New Atlantij " wear *• a look as if he jutied men." But in the " degenerate" of to-day even pity seem to have run to seed and become a sterile maudlin sentimentalism, instead of being a healthy emotion, fruitful in good. The present age dissipates in idle tears the emotions that should find expression in active work of sympathy. Our Socialism, for instance, is simply a phase of this pity run mad. It proceeds from a morbid sensitiveness to the sufferings of the ■•disinherited" poor; the cultivated lounger with a thousand a year contemplates the lot of the son of toil, working his eight hour 9 a day in a gravel pit and maintaining his family on thirty shillings" a week; the cultivated lounger- naturally cannot conceive any being happy tinder such conditions, so he is * filled with lachrymose pity, and becomes a dilettante Socialist. He forgets that the hornyhanded in the' gravel pit is probably infinitely healthier and happier than he with his morbid introspection and his well-fed ennui. .He has never tried the experiment of .the gravel-pit himself, or he would probably find that even with his cultivated tastes and refined perceptions, there was a certain virile contentment to be found in manual .toil. As a matter of. fact our sensibilities and our circumstances are nicely balanced and adjusted ; most of us adapt ourselves tolerably well to the conditions in which we find ourselves; and have ;just enough resources .to enjoy the living fate has decreed us, just enough taste to appreciate the good that comes in our way and just enough of the joie de vivre to enjoy the amusements we can afford. "More of one or the other would in nine cases out of ten produce a surfeit and affect us with nausea. We speak of course of normal types, of the men who—as is the case with the vast majority—attain a normal level of success in the sphere of-life they have drifted into. To attempt to equalise circumstances and conditions as the Socialist would have us do would produce only infinite misery. The cultivated lounger and the gravelpit navvy would be equally unhappy if either changed places with the other. All these Utopian schemes for Parlia-ment-made equality, liberty and fraternity proceed from the ignorant and misplaced emotion of insane pity. We have passed through the same morbid phase before; the sentimentalism of Rousseau was only a forerunner of the sentimentalism of the Yellow Book. In the last century the emotion, when it had spent itself ultimately found expression in the guillotine ; now it finds vent in feeble Acts of Parliament. Well, that, so far, is an advance in method.

All the unhealthy features of the literature of the day are simply, we believe, the outcome of this pity run mad. In a few days' time Christchurch playgoers may be shedding copious tears over the fate of Mrs. Tanqujsbay. She would have been impossible on the stage twenty or thirty years ago. Our virile predecessor*- of last genera-

tion would simply have told her curtly that she was a baggage, and no better than she ought to be; that ifc was no use trying to reform by living a lie, and that, having made her bed she must just be content to lie on it, and find salvation through suffering. We make a heroine of her; weep over her wrongs, her misdirected opportunity, and feel quite angry with the sensible people in the play who refuse to drench tho stage in* tears, and tear their hair over her hard fate. And yet all the pity in the world—of that sort—cannot restoro her self-respect or her peace of mind ; that can only be found by bearing her burden in humility and suffering. Maudlin pity for such a case only enervates us, without in the slightest degree strengthening the subject of it. Just recently, too, the good people of Sydney made a lamentable exhibition "of themselves from this same insane pitifulness. A very common-place scoundrel, without even a touch of romance in his story to soften tbe barren outlines of his record of crime, became the subject of one of these waves of popular pity. The people lost all respect for law, all confidence in the traditional methods of justice, all belief in the honesty and capacity of their Judges in one absorbing insane gush of pity for Dean. It was simply a midsummer madness, but while it lasted it carried all before it. They have now time to dry their tears and look ashamed of themselves. Dean will have a very much greater chance of finding salvation through fourteen years v hard," than he would have had as the lying hero of a false popular sentiment, but the incident has struck a blow at confidence in public law and order,' under which justice will long stagger, and though the people are how heartily ashamed of their mad emotionalism, tho fit has left them enervated and exhaustad. Whatever the explanation of this unhealthy phenomenon; however we diagnose and explain it and attribute it to this or that, whether we call it degeneration or fm (h> siecltiism or som.9 other ism—it is certainly a very real and present disease of the age. We badly want a tonic, a -■ pick-me-up " of some sort to pull us together and restore us to a healthier condition. For at present the age is obviously suffering from relaxation of the lachrymal glands.