DRAMATIC CALAMITIES.
PERHAPS the most extraordinary moral situation in which any man has stood in this century, for the purpose at least of witnessing and sharing an immense variety of conflicting emo- tions, without any possibility of action of any sort, was that of the man who for an hour and a quarter stood on an insulated bit of ice in the Regent's Park water last Tuesday evening, seeing the wholesale destruction around him, the waving hands of children already beneath the water, the agony of parents and wives from the shore, the struggles of the strong, the despair of the weak, the numbing influence of the cold on those who had only ice to cling to while the futile efforts for their rescue were being matured, the gradual dropping away of one after another exhausted survivor into the water, the gratitude of those who were saved, the cheers of the bystanders, and the long slow progress of the boats through the impeding ice to the more and more distant survivors, till at last, and not till nearly the very last, he himself was relieved from that perilous watch. On shore there may have been some equally able to take in the horror of the spectacle, but generally they were no doubt haunted by the hope of doing something to aid the drowning or restore the rescued, nor could any of the mere spectators have had the immediate fear of his own death mingling in the horror of the scene. Those who struggled in the water,—even the self- possessed gentleman who continued to smoke his pipe for some considerable time, with his body in the water, and chest and head resting on a floe, and at last, when he thought his turn fairly come, flung away his pipe and called for help,—must have had their own peril and the pain and danger of numb- ing cold too much in the foreground of their sensations to take in the whole scene. But the man who was kept prisoner for an hour and a quarter on an ice island of his own at one of the points most distant from help, and in an upright position, from which he could see all that the fading light would show, and without that growing paralysis caused by freezing water, must during. that terrible time have been compelled to take in all the features of the scene more completely than any bystander. The blinding agita- tion of the first great peril could not have lasted many minutes. For an hour at least the whole tragedy, his own part in it included, must have been spread before his mind like a panorama, centring perhaps round himself, but not concentrated in himself. Of course, the floe beneath him might have broken up, any incautious move- ment might have plunged him in at a part too distant from the shore for any considerable chance of rescue. Still that consideration could scarcely have blinded him after the first minutes to the wild and terrible sufferings around him, but only added to the in- tensity of his sympathy. It was a situation in which few, indeed, can ever stand. The soldiers in the .Birkenhead, who waited, with the sharks swarming round the ship, to die in the surf, while they shipped off the women and children in the boats, must have had too little of hope, too distinct a certainty of a terrible death just awaiting them, to take in the scene of horror as this solitary skater, with at least a fair prospect of rescue, but a long time to wait for it, must have taken it in. He had a fair chance for life, which depended on complete quiet; he could do nothing to help any one ; he could do nothing whatever for himself ; he could only gaze and wait ; and surely no man was ever better stationed for at once contemplating from outside, and entering into from within, a tragedy on a fearful scale. Even those who were spectators from the shore say, one and all, that they can never again forget that horrible spectacle. But the horror they felt was probably too much a hurry of pas- sionate hopes and fears to be painted adequately on their memory. The hero of that strange vigil on the lump of ice had probably his passionate sense of pity so far quieted by sharing the danger, that he could receive distinct impressions of the whole scene.
Yet it is carious to reflect that what so excessively excites us in the catastrophe of Tuesday is really only the dramatic combina- tion of dangers and sufferings which, if they had been scattered over thirty or forty ponds in different parts of England, and the spectators scattered with them, would barely have had even a special comment. On the night of every great storm there must be as many ships, as there were in this case individuals, in danger of the same fate, within an area of not many square miles. Indeed the Regent's Park calamity was but the reproduction on a very small scale indeed, —a scale small enough to bring it within the range of a single eye,—of what must be happening to the whalers in the Arctic Seas on the break-up of every great mass of winter pack ice, only that in this case the ships anchor them- selves to single floes instead of individual men, and ships' crews instead of men go down in the fissures between floe and floe. Distribute a great calamity so far over space that it is seen piecemeal—one bit of it by one spectator, and one by another, and its impressiveness for "such creatures as we are in such a world as the present" is entirely destroyed. It is the appalling concentration of a number of painful emotions in the mind of each of a number of spectators which is necessary to produce an overwhelming sense of calamity and pity. Every day, if all the terrible events of this great city were to take place within the area of the Regent's Park water, and to be seen by the same numbers of witnesses, there would be probably tragic interest at least as fearful, if not of the same uniform character, as the break-up of the.ice on Tuesday. It is on the distribution of anguish and suspense, rather than on its absolute quantity, that the inten- sity of the effect depends.
When one considers this, one can hardly help asking oneself how far intensity of emotion is or is not simply a sign of that limitation of nature, which in the ordinary way prevents many different trains of passion coming to a focus in the same mind. Of course any mind so supernaturally endowed as to be able to command every day or every hour the same number of sympa- thetic and selfish pangs as must have visited the man who was imprisoned during that horrible hour of night-fall on the Regent's Park clump of ice, would not feel exactly as he, to whom it would be the single event of a life-time, felt. If such Dantesque scenes,—hands waved in agonizing entreaty above those closing waters, unavailing appeals from glazing eyes, shrieks for aid, screams of despair from those who could give no aid, —were fre- quently visible to the mind of any one observer, he would, we do not say, feel less altogether, but feel very much less of that special anguish which belongs to surprise and terror. A physician feels none of the horror at a dreadful disease which is felt by those to whom it is quite new ; but his sympathy is perhaps not the less, even the greater, for his knowledge. He feels individually more, for those equally near to him, than those who do not understand the true nature of the disease would feel in his place, but he does not combine with the pain he feels the additional pain of dramatic effect,-Lfor in such cases it is an additional pain ; his sym-
nitely higher and deeper in Gel. And this is true if we shut out Her Majesty's subjects. A case which so strangely links to-day with from emotion all that belongs to mere perturbation and gustiness the remote past alike of Asia and of Europe deserves more than of feeling. But if we include in emotion that artificial enhance- a passing comment, and we will try to make it intelligible as a meat of feeling caused by the suddenness and abruptness of the narrative. In so doing, however, we must premise that we accept -changes in our limited horizon, of course nothing can be falser. Sir Joseph Arnould's carefully considered statement of facts as All the catastrophes not only of one place, or one country, or one substantially accurate, though many of them are open doubtless planet, or one universe, but of all the universes, must be pre- to historic criticism.
sent, with their distinct contributions of pathos or passion, in In the year 1090, then, twenty-four years after the Norman the Omniscient mind, and to it therefore there is no such thing Conquest, Hassan bin Saba, a Persian Sheeah, who had imbibed as an effect produced by the special concentration or distri- at Cairo the Ismailee tenets popular under the Fatimite Caliphs, bution of human pangs. Thirty-five persons drowning with settled himself at Alamut, or the Vulture's Nest, a commanding leagues between each of them, and thirty-five persons drown- crag of the Elburz Mountains, and thence for thirty-five years
ing within sight and call of each other, are most different events organized a sect which, after eight hundred years of warfare with to us men,—not different in themselves, but excessively dif- surrounding mankind, is still alive, still proselytizes, still threatens
ferent in the moral effect they produce ; just as thirty-five differ- the security of the Persian throne. Mohammedan so far as belief
eat notes of music played in the same instant to the same ear are in Mohammed was concerned, the sect of the Assassins held the not different in themselves, but excessively different in their results doctrine that the heirs of Ali, through Ismail, his seventh descend-
to the same notes played so that they shall not be heard in ant, are by hereditary right Imams or supreme Pontiffs of all true immediate succession. The remarkable thing in such a cats- believers, with spiritual powers almost, if not quite, divine, and strophe as Tuesday's is not its absolute addition to human as a necessary deluction, that obedience to their commands is raisery,—which, sufficiently scattered, would not have been the first law of morals, or indeed, as their enemies assert, is the only
perceived at all,—but the fact that it is calculated to produce an moral law. The practice of the sect upon that point has pro- effect so powerful on our imagination,—in other words, the bably varied according to the external circumstances in which it
fact that it expresses something to us which we are capable has been placed, but it is certain that whether obedience be the of feeling only by means of such artificial grouping, as it only moral law or not, the order of an Imam removes any moral were, which the suddenness and abruptness of the catastrophe obstacle, and that the Imam is held to have ordered any act which produce. If there never were dramatic effects like these, nothing it is clearly to the interest of his sect to do. The founder enforced effectual would ever be done to prevent the single misfortunes which obedience so strongly as to declare assassination, if ordered by do not impress us individually,—just as, if a street band played himself, a virtue, entitling the murderer to instant beatification, only one note one day and one note the next under our windows, and thus made the name of his sect a European equivalent for a we should never be annoyed by the tune. Dramatic calamities secret murderer. It is also clear from this judgment that the have a language,—which no other calamities have. All others are Assassins still hold their lives and goods at the disposal of their mere letters spelled out so slowly that no one takes the pains to put Imam, and that they regard human life very differently from other the sentence together. But concentrate them in a single telegram of men. The fourth in descent from Hassan, either by adoption or horror, as it were, and they are the plainest of all appeals for birth—Sir Joseph Arnould inclining to the former view, which is, remedy. This calamity especially says, as forty or fifty similardeaths we think, erroneous—was " Zakaresalam," fourth "Hereditary scattered over England could never say,—first that it is mere Grand Master of the Order of the Assassins of Alamut," folly and rashness to make such ornamental waters, meant for and ancestor of Aga Khan, defendant before the Bombay skaters in winter, deep enough to drown any man, since greater tribunal. This fourth Imam carried the theory of his sect advantages of every kind could be gained by making them out to its last logical consequences, authorizing, it is certain, the shallower ;—and next, and this is, perhaps, what we shall be most eating of swine's flesh, and the drinking of wine to excess, and, likely not to attend to, —that the misery which does not shock us it is alleged, much more objectionable practices ; and so great was out of our composure is infinitely greater in bulk than that which the horror with which the sect began to be regarded, that the does,—so great, in fact, that we could not endure to know it at Caliphs threatened its members with death, and at last Alamut, all,—whence the merciful plan of visiting us occasionally with a which Hassan had turned into a sensual paradise, was destroyed dramatic calamity—a calamity with a voice,—to remind us of the in 1258 by Holagou, grandson of Jenghiz Khan, the first great vast amount of dumb undramatic calamities of which only the Tartar conqueror. The sect, persecuted almost to ruin, resolved sufferers hear. upon a mode of concealment practised, Mr. Disraeli says, by the
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