8. Sympathy

________________________________________________
_ VIII. SYMPATHY

"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer

"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For,
if every individual had the choice between his own
destruction and that of every other person in the
world, I need not say what the decision would be
in the vast majority of cases."

"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons are every-day affairs among wild tribes.

[FOOTNOTE 22: _Grundlage der Moral_, Sec. 14.]

 

EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED

Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle disguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the present day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists, but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans, barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality they manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the case being valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could not have its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallas says in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes:

"The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged
not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and
erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the
same time perform slavish duties for their husbands,
who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on
them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to
anticipate all their desires."

The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he "loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair and hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest indication of love--that is, of affection--for her. It is all egoism, and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Not that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Romantic love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are subdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not love unless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruistic ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which is the entering wedge of altruism.

 

DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS

Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling the other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures. Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloats over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of humanity. Monteiro says (_A. and C._, 134) that the negro

"has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or
compassion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal,
writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly
provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a
number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children,
stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor
mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and
roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put
it out of its misery."

Cozzens relates an instance of Indian cruelty which he witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible cries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill the beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason than because meat cut from a live animal "was considered more tender," Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as "a savage in every sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert." In the _Jesuit Relations_ (Vol. XIII., 61) it takes _ten_ pages to describe the tortures inflicted by the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his _Winning of the West_ (I., 95):

"The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not
one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes
torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look
another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred
stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints
chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be
mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and
customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially
when women are the victims."

In his famous book, _The Jesuits in North America_, the historian Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the Iroquois that

"they planted stakes in the bark houses of St.
Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners
whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from
old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children,
side by side. Then, as they retreated, they set the
town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the
shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing
dwellings."

On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty. Among their prisoners

"were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who
had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the
first halt, their captors took the infants from them,
tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly
before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of
the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and
frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were
met with mockery and laughter."

Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures

"designed to cause all possible suffering without
touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and
cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off
their fingers with clamshells, scorching them with
firebrands, and other indescribable tortures."

They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eat them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd.

If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and insulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while "pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted." They were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor were the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came to torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate, altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with another's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to make romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for his supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is a fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural inference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in free lust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as is possible under the circumstances.

The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the madhouse.

 

INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING

It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The African explorer Andersson (_O.R._, 156) describes the "heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly," of a Damara woman whose husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most melancholy way:

"I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was
the only person present of all the members assembled
... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a
laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or
cared about the man, but each and all made anxious
inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of
barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau
school--for some such still remain--witness what I have
witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon
cease to envy and praise the life of the savages."

"A sick person," writes Galton (190), "meets with no
compassion; he is pushed out of his hut by his
relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all
they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to
be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is
suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death."

In his book on the Indian Tribes of Guiana the Rev. W.H. Brett gives two typical instances of the lack of sympathy in the New World. The first is that of a poor young girl who was dreadfully burnt by lying in a hammock when it caught fire:

"She seemed a very meek and patient child, and her
look of gratitude for our sympathy was most affecting.
Her friends, however, took no trouble about her, and
she probably died soon after."

The second case is that of an Arawak boy who, during a canoe voyage, was seized with cholera. The Indians simply cast him on the edge of the shore, to be drowned by the rising tide.

Going to the other end of the continent we find Le Jeune writing of the Canadian Indians (in the _Jesuit Relations_, VI., 245): "These people are very little moved by compassion. They give the sick food and drink, but otherwise show no regard for them." In the second volume of the _Relations_ (15) the missionary writer tells of a sick girl of nine, reduced to skin and bone. He asked the permission of the parents to baptize her, and they answered that he might take her and keep her, "for to them she was no better than a dead dog." And again (93) we read that in case of illness "they soon abandon those whose recovery is deemed hopeless."

Crossing the Continent to California we find in Powers (118) a pathetic account of the lack of filial piety, or sympathy with old age, which, he says, is peculiar to Indians in general. After a man has ceased to be useful as a warrior, though he may have been a hero of a hundred battles, he is compelled to go with his sons into the forest and bear home on his poor old shoulders the game they have killed. He totters along behind them "almost crushed to earth beneath a burden which their unencumbered strength is greatly more able to support, but they touch it not with so much as one of their fingers."

 

EXPOSING THE SICK AND AGED

"The Gallinomeros kill their aged parents in a most coldblooded manner," says Bancroft (I., 390), and this custom, too, prevails on both sides of the Continent. The Canadians, according to Lalemant (_Jesuit Relations_, IV., 199),

"kill their fathers and mothers when they are so old
that they can walk no longer, thinking that they
are thus doing them a good service; for otherwise
they would be compelled to die of hunger, as they
have become unable to follow others when they
change their location."

Henry Norman, in his book on the Far East, explains (553) why so few deaf, blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed or left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight different races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to starvation (II., Chap. 7), adding:

"Yet in their villages we saw no want of kindness
to the aged: on the contrary, probably because in
villages the means of more abundant subsistence
renders such cruelty unnecessary, old people
appeared to be treated with attention."

But it is obvious that kindness which does not go beyond the point where it interferes with our own comfort, is not true altruism. If one of two men who are perishing of thirst in the desert finds a cupful of water and shares it with the other, he shows sympathy; but if he finds a whole spring and shares it with the companion, his action does not deserve that name. It would be superfluous to make this remark were it not that the sentimentalists are constantly pointing to such sharing of abundance as evidence of sympathetic kindness. There is a whole volume of philosophy in Bates's remark (293) concerning Brazilian Indians: "The good-fellowship of our Cucamas seemed to arise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small matters." The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune devotes a whole chapter (V., 229-31) to such good qualities as he could find among the Canadian Indians. He is just to the point of generosity, but he is compelled to end with these words: "And yet I would not dare to assert that I have seen one act of real moral virtue in a savage. They have nothing but their own pleasure and satisfaction in view."

 

BIRTH OF SYMPATHY

Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place (_Oneota,_ 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman. It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born --together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man, immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness.

Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was hardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but a sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book on Brazil we read, that the Indians "are cold in their family affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."

 

WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN

Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to seek in the savage women as in the men. Authorities agree that in respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors. Thus Le Jeune attests (_Jes. Rel._, VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women were crueler toward captives than the men. In another place (V., 29), he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls "blew and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them." In every Huron town, says Parkman (_Jes. in N.A._, XXXIV.), there were old squaws who "in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men." The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who "delight in torturing the male prisoners." Concerning Chippewa war captives, Keating says (I., 173): "The marriageable women are reduced to servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws." Among the Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280). These are typical instances. In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian women follow their husbands, armed with clubs, sometimes and swords, and ravage and plunder the houses of everything they can find. Powers relates that when California Indians get too old to fight they have to assist the women in their drudgery. Thereupon the women, instead of setting them a good example by showing sympathy for their weakness, take their revenge and make them feel their humiliation keenly. Obviously among these savages, cruelty and ferocity have no sex, wherefore it would be as useless in one sex as in the other to seek for that sympathy which is an ingredient and a condition of romantic love.

 

PLATO DENOUNCES SYMPATHY

From a Canadian Indian to a Greek philosopher it seems a far cry; yet the transition is easy and natural. To the Indian, as Parkman points out, "pity was a cowardly weakness," to be sternly repressed as unworthy of a man. Plato, for his part, wanted to banish poetry from his ideal republic because it overwhelms our feelings and makes us give way to sympathies which in real life our pride causes us to repress and which are "deemed the part of a woman" (_Repub._, X., 665). As for the special form of sympathy which enters into the nobler phases of the love between men and women--fusing their hearts and blending their souls--Plato's inability to appreciate such a thing may be inferred from the fact that in this same ideal republic he wanted to abolish the marriage even of individual bodies. Of the marriage of souls he, like the other Greeks, knew nothing. To him, as to his countrymen in general, love between man and woman was mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, or friendship, or to filial, parental, or brotherly love.

From the point of view of sympathy, the difference between ancient passion and modern love is admirably revealed in Wagner's _Tannhaeuser_. As I have summed it up elsewhere[23]:

"Venus shares only the joys of Tannhaeuser, while
Elizabeth is ready to suffer with him. Venus is carnal
and selfish, Elizabeth affectionate and
self-sacrificing. Venus degrades, Elizabeth ennobles;
the depth of her love atones for the shallow, sinful
infatuation of Tannhaeuser. The abandoned Venus
threatens revenge, the forsaken Elizabeth dies of
grief."

[FOOTNOTE 23: _Wagner and his Works_, II., 163.]

There are stories of wifely devotion in Greek literature, but, like Oriental stories of the same kind (especially in India) they have a suspicious appearance of having been invented as object-lessons for wives, to render them more subservient to the selfish wishes of the husbands. Plutarch counsels a wife to share her husband's joys and sorrows, laugh when he laughs, weep when he weeps; but he fails to suggest the virtue of reciprocal sympathy on the husband's part; yet Plutarch had much higher notions regarding conjugal life than most of the Greeks. An approximation to the modern ideal is found only when we consider the curious Greek adoration of boys. Callicratides, in Lucian's [Greek: Erotes], after expressing his contempt for women and their ways, contrasts with them the manners of a well-bred youth who spends his time associating with poets and philosophers, or taking gymnastic and military exercises. "Who would not like," he continues,

"to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share
his labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness,
go to sea with him, share darkness and chains with
him if necessary? Those who hated him should be my
enemies, those who loved him my friends. When he
dies, I too should wish to die, and one grave
should cover us."

Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism. Callicratides does not say he will die _for_ the other, or that the other's pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]

[FOOTNOTE 24: In Burton the translator has changed the sex of the beloved. This proceeding, a very common one, has done much to confuse the public regarding the modernity of Greek love. It is not Greek love of women, but romantic friendship for boys, that resembles modern love for women.]

 

SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA

India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism long before Christ came to preach it. Kalidasa anticipates a modern idea when he remarks, in _Sakuntala_, that "Among persons who are very fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved." India, too, is famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48). But in reality the penitents were actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they made of the power thus acquired. In _Sakuntala_ we read how a poor girl's whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of these "saints," for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his personal comforts at once; while _Kausika's Rage_ illustrates the diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations. It is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of sympathy. He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings. How far he was from realizing Christ's "blessed are the merciful," may be inferred from what the Abbe Dubois says:

"The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as
respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his
heart. He will see an unhappy being perish on the road,
or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste;
and will not stir to help him to a drop of water,
though it were to save his life."

"To kill a cow," says the same writer (I., 176), "is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death;" and these same Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty. It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals. Superstition is the spring of their actions. In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive. In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally. What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superstitions:

"The enraged multitude did not wait for the
slow process of law, but put the offender to
death with their own hands." At the same time
some animals "which were deemed divinities in
one home, were treated as nuisances and destroyed
in others." (Kendrick, II., I-21.)

 

EVOLUTION OF SYMPATHY

If we study the evolution of human sympathy we find that it begins, not in reference to animals but to human beings. The first stage is a mother's feeling going out to her child. Next, the family as a whole is included, and then the tribe. An Australian kills, as a matter of course, everyone he comes across in the wilderness not belonging to his tribe. To the present day race hatred, jingoism, and religious differences obstruct the growth of cosmopolitan sympathy such as Christ demanded. His religion has done much, however, to widen the circle of sympathy and to make known its ravishing delights. The doctrine that it is more blessed to give than to receive is literally true for those who are of a sympathetic disposition. Parents enjoy the pleasures of their children as they never did their own egotistic delights. In various ways sympathy has continued to grow, and at the present day the most refined and tender men and women include animals within the range of their pity and affection. We organize societies for their protection, and we protest against the slaughter of birds that live on islands, thousands of miles away. Our imagination has become so sensitive and vivid that it gives us a keen pang to think of the happy lives of these birds as being ruthlessly cut short and their young left to die in their nests in the agonies of cruel starvation. If we compare with this state of mind that of the African of whom Burton wrote in his _Two Trips to Gorilla Land_, that "Cruelty seems to be with him a necessity of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death"--we need no other argument to convince us that a savage cannot possibly feel romantic love, because that implies a capacity for the tenderest and subtlest sympathy. I would sooner believe a tiger capable of such love than a savage, for the tiger practises cruelty unconsciously and accidentally while in quest of food, whereas the primitive man indulges in cruelty for cruelty's sake, and for the delight it gives him. We have here one more illustration of the change and growth of sentiments. Man's emotions develop as well as his reasoning powers, and one might as well expect an Australian, who cannot count five, to solve a problem in trigonometry as to love a woman as we love her.

 

AMOROUS SYMPATHY

In romantic love altruism reaches its climax. Turgenieff did not exaggerate when he said that "it is in a man really in love as if his personality were eliminated." Genuine love makes a man shed egoism as a snake sheds its skin. His one thought is: "How can I make her happy and save her from grief" at whatever cost to his own comfort. Amorous sympathy implies a complete self-surrender, an exchange of personalities:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.
---Sidney.

It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.
---Scott.

To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than beauty. The author of _Love Affairs of Some Famous Men_ has wittily remarked that "Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants is a man who can love her when he sees her every day." That, he might have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another's joys and sorrows. Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a cold and selfish character. A man feels instinctively that a girl who is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere. Selfishness in a man is perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however much he may be infatuated. There can be sympathy without love, but no love without sympathy. It is an essential ingredient, an absolute test, of romantic love. _

Read next: 9. Adoration

Read previous: 7. Pride

Table of content of What Is Romantic Love?


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book