THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY.
propounds in das vtheerythneosterywotrhtshty thereagaree omf Cwohnc,, though without sympathy for the individual—indeed, without heart, if not exactly heartless—are still capable of deep feeling for masses of mankind. He says :—" To a man in his position, there might yet seem one unfailing source of felicity and joy ; independent of creed, independent of country, independent even of character. He might have discovered that perpetual spring of happiness in the sensibility of the heart. But this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organisation there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency. He was a man without affections. It would be harsh to say that he had no heart, for he was suscep- tible of deep emotions, but not for individuals. He was capable of rebuilding a town that was burned down ; of restoring a colony that had been destroyed by some awful visitation of Nature ; of redeeming to liberty a horde of captives ; and of doing these great acts in secret ; for void of all self-love, public approbation was worthless to him ; but the individual never touched him. Woman was to him a toy, man a machine." We wonder if that conception has any foundation in real life, or is the mere dream of a man amusing himself with the creation of impossible characters? Sidonia has always been supposed to be the expression of Mr. Disraeli's ideal of himself as modified by circumstances, but Lord Beaconsfield has shown conclusively in Bulgaria that he has utterly lost, if he ever possessed, the capacity of emotional sym- pathy for suffering on an extended scale which he ascribes to his hero. Such a man may exist, however, and if he does, and has the capacity of analysing his own emotions, he might give the world some information on a very puzzling, or rather, at present inexplicable, point. What are the causes of the breaks, or hiatuses, or failures in the human capacity of sympathy ? There is un- doubtedly such a failure, for instance, as regards the disaster recently reported from Bengal, and described in Tuesday's Times by the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Richard Temple. There has been no catastrophe so vast in our day, no such destruction of human life in the catastrophic manner, even in battle, or through earth- quake or fire. There is no element of uncertainty in the accounts such as very often checks sympathy, for the flood has its sacer rates in a great official who, long ago described as "the brightest pen in India," undoubtedly possesses unusual pictorial power, and who has exerted it this time in a restrained, cool, official way, which makes of his memorandum a model which all intending special correspondents might study with great profit. There is none of that haziness about the locale which very often inter- rupts compassion. The word "Africa," for instance, intercepts it. People are interested about negroes, and many can feel for the individual negro with sufficient acuteness—though interest sometimes takes the form of an acute and irrational dis- like —but if a telegram announced to-morrow that Africa had been submerged, the first thought of half the cultivated in London would be, "What has become of the Pyramids ?" The people destroyed in the islands facing the Megna are British subjects, of the same race as those whose prospect of hunger recently so moved England ; their territory is perfectly well known, in commerce at all events, and they are specially interest- ing to the influential section of people known as " the Missionary world." Yet it is undeniable_that the record of their terrible fate does not move Englishmen in anything like an adequate degree. They are sorry, and they regret, and if there were any- thing to be done they would do it; but they are not moved half as much as they are by the frightful accident in Ohio, which did not destroy one-tenth per cent. of the lives involved in the calamity in the Bay of Bengal. They read that a county was devastated, that nearly a quarter of a million of people were drowned, that a million of lives were endangered, that probably half-a-million of people were saved by being hurled on the spiky branches of thorny trees, and they feel about it all as if it were very well-written history. That little detail about the madar trees with their thorny spikes has almost escaped comment. Sir R. Temple expressly says that the spikes saved the people, that as each man was flung on the tree the spikes caught him. This process repeated over thousands upon thousands of minute hamlets, each surrounded with these trees, alone saved, in his belief, the bulk of the population, and nobody as he reads the account doubts the Lieutenant-Governor's accuracy. His words are,—"There may have been variations of detail. But there is an extraordinary sameness in the general manner in which people were saved or lost. In most cases they would show us the particular tree on which they stuck, and generally the sur- vivors pointed to the severe scratches they received from the prickly branches of the media trees ; in reality, these thorns and prickles held them tight, as if with natural grappling-hooks, and prevented them from being borne away." Yet we venture to say that history and fiction might be ransacked in vain for an incident so utterly marvellous, or prima facie incredible and grotesquely grim. A population four times that of Suffolk saved by being dashed at midnight naked upon its prickly hedge-trees ! It is as if Jules Verne should tell us how a million of humming-birds in a Brazilian valley were all saved from asphyxia by being slightly spiked each upon a separate rose-thorn. There never was such an incident, we believe, since the world began, yet neither its mar- vellous separateness, nor the magnitude of the destruction—four times the loss in the earthquake of Lisbon—nor the nearness of the people to us in many relations, rouses the emotion often ex- cited by a much smaller disaster. The present writer heard a story told two days ago which hundreds of living people must recollect, though he did not, of a man who a generation since was raking in the Thames mud, and caught his foot in an immense chain moored for some purpose in the river. His foot swelled and could not be withdrawn, the tide rose and rose, and though crowds came to his aid, and every effort was made to re- lease him except cutting off his leg, the water caught him before he was extricated, and he was drowned with men's arms still round him. The emotion of the audience at the story, the in- stinctive pain and horror, were definitely greater than Sir Richard Temple had aroused in the same minds by his better-told story of the grand catastrophe. Why ?
The old explanation, that we sympathise only when we dread, is certainly not sufficient, for the chance of anybody being drowned like that is indefinitely less than the chance of being caught in a flood, a catastrophe which, if we understand the position of one or two of our water-reser- voirs, is not so impossible to all Londoners as it looks. There is nothing in the method of the huge catastrophe to deaden feeling, for the similar though minute incident at Sheffield a few years ago called out a storm of sympathy ; and it has several times since been employed by novelists, notably once by Charles Reade, as one specially calculated to move the hearts and imaginations of their readers. In fact, most men have at some time or other in their lives been so near drowning, that the drowning of men in masses excites usually a lively horror, con- stantly visible in the painful impression made by accounts of shipwreck, and the deep and permanent reverence excited by devotion like that of the soldiers on the Birkenhead.' Yet there are very few who, if they tell the truth, will not acknowledge that they understand why Sir R. Temple, doing his duty on the spot, and doing it most effectively, is obviously less moved than he was by the sight of the starving villagers in North-Eastern Behar, and pronounces without expressions of regret, what is no doubt. true, that no satisfactory precaution against such catastrophes can be taken. Nothing but dyking would do, and dyking over such an immense extent with such an endless system of locks, —for the water must be let through in ordinary times for the sake of the rice,— would cost more than the purchase and abandonment of the islands. We suppose the truth to be that the narrative of calamities so vast, so distant, so far beyond human control, and so entirely devoid of details, excites in the minds of those who read of them only a historic interest, the main constituent of which is a desire to know the facts accurately, so as to perceive clearly the extent of risk to which that particular region is exposed. Historic facts often interest men, but they rarely move them. Many men would study ardently a graphic account, if such existed, of the submergence of the Runn of Cut,ch, when, as many believe, a province with all its cities was engulfed ; but very few of them would think of it as a scene involving the extremest forms of human suffering, and the majority would be chiefly interested in the geologic phenomena involved. As we are not greatly moved by the truth that all the human beings who have lived before us have died, most of them in pain, so we are not greatly moved by catastrophic destructions which we can neither avert nor remedy. It is necessary to think of in- dividuals before we can be greatly affected by sympathetic pains. That at least we believe to be the main explanation, though even that leaves the essence of the question still unexplained, and almost inexplicable.
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