ANOTHER VOICE

Pity he was wrong about the existence of God, because Jesus was so right about compassion

MATTHEW PARRIS

CC Iweep for you," the Walrus said, "I deeply sympathise." With sobs and tears he sorted out those of the largest size.' You can recognise a cruel man, observed Gra- ham Greene: he cries in the cinema.

I thought of Greene's remark, and Car- roll's, over the New Year, reading a report from the Times's correspondent in Moscow, Richard Beeston. It seems that after 60 years' employment the Kremlin's longest- serving cleaning lady, Polina Malanlcina, has finally broken her silence.

. . . the wiry 80-year-old has concluded that, by and large, the Kremlin's leaders 'are not a bad bunch' and that Stalin was one of her favourite bosses. 'He was so small and kind. I used to weed the flower beds. He would come out and sit on the steps to smoke a pipe. The security people would try to shoo me away. But Stalin would say, "Do not both- er Polina. Let her get on with her weeding."

He looked at me in such a kind way. Some- times there were tears in his eyes. He cared about the common people. When I hear gos- sip about the repressions, all I can say is that I did not see anything, and that is the truth,' she said. Mrs Malankina said her only disap- pointment with the Soviet dictator was his desecration of cathedrals.

A pity about the desecration of the cathedrals. Still, such a nice man.

It is, I suppose, cardinal among our pre- sumptions about human behaviour that, off guard and off parade, we see the real man. The smaller the scale and the closer the quarter of our observation, the more 'true' it is. The little intimacies of personal life act as telltales to an individual's true nature. In vignette we have a key to the wider canvas, the broader sweep of a public career. What is Mrs Thatcher really like? Ask her driver — George — one would reply. He knows the 'real' Mrs T. 'She was always so kind,' George used to say. 'If only every voter could meet her.'

Or ask me — I worked as a clerk in her office in the years before she became prime minister. She was always immensely kind. She took trouble to remember the little things. When my father had a heart attack she insisted I took a holiday, and often questioned me later about his health. She looked at me in such a kind way.

Sometimes there were tears in her eyes. There were, I remember, when her son Mark became temporarily lost in the Sahara. The real Mrs Thatcher, then, was a bit of a softie underneath?

Was she, heck! Thank heavens she was not or she would never have achieved what she did. But in a career marked in all the large decisions by a notable unsqueamishness Margaret Thatcher found time for sentiment in the little things. She hated sacking people. If, opening her post, I showed her sad letters from lonely people, she would sit up late, penning kind replies in her own hand. That was at a time when her postbag exceeded a thousand letters a week.

What does this reveal about the real Mar- garet Thatcher? What do Polina Malankina's reminiscences reveal about the real Joseph Stalin? What light do the Walrus's tears shed on his real attitude to the Oysters? What does it tell us about Graham Greene's cine- ma-goer, after the lights go up, that he cried when the lights were down?

If it says anything at all, it is the opposite of what may appear. To indulge ourselves in those sudden rushes of sympathy for what is close and present to our senses is a retreat, a disclaimer, a sucking of the thumb. It is to bury oneself in the immedi- ate and possessable. It is the mark of a man who has found no way to love the world.

Far from being the springboard for a wider beneficence, a sentimental embrace of the familiar serves to block out the unfamiliar. Grabbing the teddy bear from the nursery cupboard and munching on chocolate, we snuggle into what we own. The hug for a favourite grandchild, the lump in the throat, the adored pet, the treasured daughter, the private tear, are not the signs of a virtuous man; they are the means by which a callous man excludes the outside world from his mercy and his justice. He will exercise his sympathies within domestic boundaries. Charity, beginning at home, ends there.

Sentiment of this kind becomes a kind of ceremony, and a selfish one. Something is chosen, something manageable, something weak, as a token for our sympathy. A small child or a furry animal — real or toy — makes an ideal choice. The predilection of the British for fluffy toys is a chilling indica- tor of the heartlessness of the nation.

Is the biting motion with which affection-

'Bless you.'

ately we sink mouth and face into a favourite cat, or baby, not a disturbing mime of the blooding of a prey? Lovers may be chosen as sentiment-objects, but lovers are dangerous and can only conveniently be clasped to the bosom by reconstructing them in the imagination, then adoring an image we have made, as we adore Mary in a shrine.

How Jesus would have hated that! I wish Jesus had not been mistaken about the existence of a deity, for I could happily believe in Jesus. One of the things which draws me most toward the man is the abso- lute impossibility of imagining him saying `coochy-coo' or `diddums' to anyone or any- thing. Can you picture Jesus munching a chocolate or cuddling a pussy-cat? Can you see him going doe-eyed about a blonde tod- dler with ringlets? The compassion I visu- alise in Jesus's gaze is difficult to describe, now that we have so devalued the word compassion. There is nothing misty or wet- eyed in Jesus's compassion: it is cool, fierce, hard, gentle. It stands back. It is just. It is equal. It cares nothing for family. It has come to destroy family. It is, in the best sense, dispassionate. Jesus's compas- sion is not unduly concerned with his clerk's father's health, his driver's cough or his cleaning lady's weeding needs. It would never sniffle in the cinema. It would not go weepy over kittens in a basket.

It is impatient both with the sentimental and with the ceremonious. Can you imag- ine Jesus enduring for an instant the parishioners with plaid-coated poodles, the candles and white cassocks, the plump faces, treble voices, raised eyes and piping organs, the bejewelled begging bowls and baby dolls in mangers, the tear in the eye, the tra-la-la, the simpering Anglicanism, the lush Catholicism of our age and our grandfathers' age?

There is something degenerate in a nation which eats meat and weeps over a Daily Mail picture of an orphaned duckling. In 1996 I bore a measure of abuse from readers who disliked my opinion that our treatment of tragedies like Dunblane was mawkish and sterile. I persist in it. The working up of sentiment over sorrows which are only tokens for the problem of suffering is, in the end, the worship of dum- mies. Sentimentality is not the beginning of mercy; it is the evasion of it.

-PAs,`-"-- Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter for the Times.