PATHOS.
OHNS ON did not include the word " pathos" in his dic- tionary, though he included the words " pathetic " and "pathetical." But even to these he gave a meaning which we should hardly recognise now, namely, "that which appeals to the passions." It is only in more modern dictionaries that we find the meaning given which our own century would re- gard as the true one, namely, "that which moves the tender emotions." To us of to-day, the passions rather suggest pride, anger, envy, jealousy, resentment. We should never have thought of calling Iago's speeches, in playing upon Othello's furious jealousy, "pathetic," though Johnson ,appa- rently would have done so. The truth is, we imagine, that the trouble of the gentler emotions has come to need a word to itself, much more urgently in the present century than ever before. Such a scene as that between Desdemona and Emilia just before the murder,—such a scene as that in which Ophelia distributes her herbs, after her reason has given way under the shock of her father's death at the hand of her lover, was too rare in the Elizabethan literature to need a separate term to describe its essence. But when Cowper and Burns and Goldsmith began to write, and Coleridge and Wordsworth began to sift and analyse the feelings which their predecessors' work had brought so prominently into view, the word " pity " was no longer sufficient for the feelings our fathers had to express. A word was needed which described not only the commiseration which the irremediable misfortunes of others excite in us, but those more complex emotions in which a tinge of sweetness and exaltation mingles with the pain, and we hardly know whether we are most disturbed by the hap- less fate of another, or most touched with admiration at the gentleness and unresisting acquiescence with which that hap- less fate is met. Wordsworth, in " The Excursion," has touched the true springs of pathos when he says that—.
" What we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change and all the grief That passing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream that could maintain, Nowhere, dominion o'er the enlightened spirit Whose meditative sympathies repose Upon the breast of Faith."
The mere pity of a situation does not adequately express its pathos. It is pity mingled with a certain glow of exaltation, which has compelled men to employ the separate term "pathos." Sir Walter Scott, for instance, rightly terms the plain and beautiful words in which Jeanie Deans pleads with Queen Caroline for her sister's life, words filled" with a pathos which was at once simple and solemn." "Oh, Madam, if ever ye kenn'd what it was to sorrow for and with a sinning and suffering creature whose mind is so tooled that she can be neither ca'd fit to live or die, have sonic compassion on our misery ! Alas ! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other people's sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, and we are for righting our am wrangs and fighting our amn battles. But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body,—and seldom may it visit your Leddyship,—and when the hour of death comes that comes to high and low,— lang and late may it be yours-0, my Leddy, then it is not what we hae dune for oursels, but what we hae dune for others that we think on moist pleasantly. And the thoughts that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing's life, will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow." It is the strain of exaltation there which gives to the passion and pity of the situation its true depth of pathos.
We have been led to this train of thought in the present instance by the strangely pathetic letter which was published in the Echo of yesterday week from a little boy in Dublin, aged, it is said, only twelve, who drowned himself, apparently without any consciousness that he was shrinking from a misery which God had given him to bear, not however in order to escape his own sufferings, but because he supposed that by insuring Ins life in various ways and then dying, he could extricate his mother and brother and sister from the grinding poverty to which they had recently been reduced. The pathos there is wholly in the methodical detail with which the poor little man, who bad evidently no idea that his confession of suicide would render his various plans for securing wealth to his mother, futile, explains his measures for enriching that mother by his death, and bids her not waste money on his funeral. There is none of the exaltation of faith there ; but as coming from so young, and apparently so untaught, a child, there is plenty of the exaltation of pure affection, and that courage which affection inspires :— " DEAR MOTHER,—I spent the 4s. Old. for your benefit, and I hope the money it will bring you will help you to forgive my rash act. Toll the police to search in the harbour at Portobello, and when they have found me, get them to write a description of my clothes and what I have in my pockets. They will find a cap that coat 6d., and will entiirle you to 4200 insurance money ; pair of suspenders, 4id., with a coupon on them for £300; a belt, 6d., for £100; and papers, one entitling you to 41,000, and the others to 4500 each,—in all, 43.500. Don't spend too much on my funeral, and mind the money, which will make you rich.—Your loving son, FERDINAND DE FREYNE RIENZI DE COURCY.—P,S.—Good-bye Apparently the child was as ignorant that his life was not given him to traffic it away for his mother's sake,—unless the word" rash " suggests some vague feeling of that kind,—as he was that his self-sacrifice would be in vain, but there is something to us supremely touching in the elaborate pro- visions he recounts by which he hopes to rescue his mother from her penury by the sacrifice of himself. One cannot read his list of anxious provisions for those he left behind him, without hoping that even his ignorant and hasty meddling with his own life would be forgiven him for the sake of the love which had constrained him to lay it down for others.
Perhaps this kind of pathos, pathos of which extravagant and indeed culpable self-f orgetf ulness,—culpable at least, when those who exhibit it are old enough to feel its evil,—is the very essence, is getting only too common in the present day. And, indeed, when religion decays, it is only to be expected that that elan of self-sacrifice which leads religious men and women to give up theirdives to God, will lead agnostic men and women to give up their lives with equal enthusiasm for the brother "whom they have seen." Yet there is always something wanting in this kind of out-and-out self-obliteration, and the pathos of the situations.to which it leads, always seems, unless one's pity for a child's ignorance softens and elevates the character of those situations, a. little spurious. The truth is, we suppose, that in the highest pathos there must be that sense of personal worth in the sufferer which is inconsistent with the last extreme of what is now called altruism. If there he no higher object in human life than to offer oneself up on the altar of some other human life, then indeed not only is all flesh grass, but all soul and all spirit too. Even an ideal society would become, under such a conception of the social ideal, a perfect labyrinth of vain and mutual self- immolations. Self-obliteration is not higher than self-sacri- fice, but lower. The exquisite pathos of Jeanie Deana' self- sacrifice is heightened indefinitely by her sheer inability to swear falsely on her sister's behalf. It is the profound sense of purity and innocence in Desdemona which makes her un- resisting obedience to her husband, even when she feels the imminence of her peril, so pathetic. Perhaps the most pathetic poem of the century is either Wordsworth's "Cuckoo," or Tennyson's "Break, break, break,"—the one representing the pathos of happiness (for there is a pathos of happiness which brings tears to the eyes mainly from the strange contrast between its sources and the sources of superficial joy), the other the commoner pathos of deep sadness. The singular
" Though babbling only to the vale Of sunshine and'of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours."
Here the "tale of visionary hours" makes the fleeting sunshine and the short-lived flowers speak of a life far deeper than their own :— " And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill
But 0 for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still ! "
There the "stately ships" express the inner depth and gran- deur of the passion which rings in the last two lines of the verse. And in all scenes of highest pathos,—in Colonel New- come's death, for instance, and in Lady Castlewood's passion of gratitude for Henry Esmond's safe return (which she pours forth in the words of the psalm, "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, then were we like to them that dream ") we always find that religious strain which raises self-sacrifice far above self-obliteration. In- deed, the pathos of the poor little Irish boy's letter would not be what it is, but that the child's pathetic ignorance of worldly affairs suggests to us his still more pathetic ignorance of what he owed to God and to himself, and makes us feel that there was that in him which, if it had but been developed, would have taught him that it was a higher thing to share frankly his mother's misery than to endeavour to help her by extinguishing his own opportunities of suffering. In all scenes of true pathos the heart is even more exalted than it is oppressed. resonance of both poems is entirely due to the depth to which the heart is stirred by the memories of the past in combina- tion with the apparent fragility of the associations which stir it :—
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