Private Tyrants

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Title:     Private Tyrants
Author: Helen Hunt Jackson [More Titles by Jackson]

We recognize tyranny when it wears a crown and sits on an hereditary throne. We sympathize with nations that overthrow the thrones, and in our secret hearts we almost canonize individuals who slay the tyrants. From the days of Ehud and Eglon down to those of Charlotte Corday and Marat, the world has dealt tenderly with their names whose hands have been red with the blood of oppressors. On moral grounds it would be hard to justify this sentiment, murder being murder all the same, however great gain it may be to this world to have the murdered man put out of it; but that there is such a sentiment, instinctive and strong in the human soul, there is no denying. It is so instinctive and so strong that, if we watch ourselves closely, we shall find it giving alarming shape sometimes to our secret thoughts about our neighbors.

How many communities, how many households even, are without a tyrant? If we could "move for returns of suffering," as that tender and thoughtful man, Arthur Helps, says, we should find a far heavier aggregate of misery inflicted by unsuspected, unresisted tyrannies than by those which are patent to everybody, and sure to be overthrown sooner or later.

An exhaustive sermon on this subject should be set off in three divisions, as follows:--

PRIVATE TYRANTS.

1st. Number of--
2d. Nature of--
3d. Longevity of--

_First_. Their number. They are not enumerated in any census. Not even the most painstaking statistician has meddled with the topic. Fancy takes bold leaps at the very suggestion of such an estimate, and begins to think at once of all things in the universe which are usually mentioned as beyond numbering. Probably one good way of getting at a certain sort of result would be to ask each person of one's acquaintance, "Do you happen to know a private tyrant?"

How well we know beforehand the replies we should get from _some_ beloved men and women,--that is, if they spoke the truth!

But they would not. That is the saddest thing about these private tyrannies. They are in many cases borne in such divine and uncomplaining silence by their victims, perhaps for long years, the world never dreams that they exist. But at last the fine, subtle writing, which no control, no patience, no will can thwart, becomes set on the man's or the woman's face, and tells the whole record. Who does not know such faces? Cheerful usually, even gay, brave, and ready with lines of smile; but in repose so marked, so scarred with unutterable weariness and disappointment, that tears spring in the eyes and love in the hearts of all finely organized persons who meet them.

_Secondly_. Nature of private tyrants. Here also the statistician has not entered. The field is vast; the analysis difficult.

Selfishness is, of course, their leading characteristic; in fact, the very sum and substance of their natures. But selfishness is Protean. It has as many shapes as there are minutes, and as many excuses and wraps of sheep's clothing as ever ravening wolf possessed.

One of its commonest pleas is that of weakness. Here it often is so inextricably mixed with genuine need and legitimate claim that one grows bewildered between sympathy and resentment. In this shape, however, it gets its cruelest dominion over strong and generous and tender people. This kind of tyranny builds up and fortifies its bulwarks on and out of the very virtues of its victims; it gains strength hourly from the very strength of the strength to which it appeals; each slow and fatal encroachment never seems at first so much a thing required as a thing offered; but, like the slow sinking inch by inch of that great, beautiful city of stone into the relentless Adriatic, so is the slow, sure going down and loss of the freedom of a strong, beautiful soul, helpless in the omnipresent circumference of the selfish nature to which it is or believes itself bound.

That the exactions never or rarely take shape in words is, to the unbiassed looker-on, only an exasperating feature in their tyranny. While it saves the conscience of the tyrant,--if such tyrants have any,--it makes doubly sure the success of their tyranny. And probably nothing short of revelation from Heaven, in shape of blinding light, would ever open their eyes to the fact that it is even more selfish to hold a generous spirit fettered hour by hour by a constant fear of giving pain than to coerce or threaten or scold them into the desired behavior. Invalids, all invalids, stand in deadly peril of becoming tyrants of this order. A chronic invalid who entirely escapes it must be so nearly saint or angel that one instinctively feels as if their invalidism would soon end in the health of heaven. We know of one invalid woman, chained to her bed for long years by an incurable disease, who has had the insight and strength to rise triumphant above this danger. Her constant wish and entreaty is that her husband should go freely into all the work and the pleasure of life. Whenever he leaves her, her farewell is not, "How soon do you think you shall come back? At what hour, or day, may I look for you?" but, "Now, pray stay just as long as you enjoy it. If you hurry home one hour sooner for the thought of me, I shall be wretched." It really seems almost as if the longer he stayed away,--hours, days, weeks even,--the happier she were. By this sweet and wise unselfishness she has succeeded in realizing the whole blessedness of wifehood far more than most women who have health. But we doubt if any century sees more than one such woman as she is.

Another large class, next to that of invalids the most difficult to deal with, is made up of people who are by nature or by habit uncomfortably sensitive or irritable. Who has not lived at one time or other in his life in daily contact with people of this sort,--persons whose outbreaks of temper, or of wounded feeling still worse than temper, were as incalculable as meteoric showers? The suppressed atmosphere, the chronic state of alarm and misgiving, in which the victims of this species of tyranny live are withering and exhausting to the stoutest hearts. They are also hardening; perpetually having to wonder and watch how people will "take" things is apt sooner or later to result in indifference as to whether they take them well or ill.

But to define all the shapes of private tyranny would require whole histories; it is safe, however, to say that so far as any human being attempts to set up his own individual need or preference as law to determine the action of any other human being, in small matters or great, so far forth he is a tyrant. The limit of his tyranny may be narrowed by lack of power on his part, or of response on the part of his fellows; but its essence is as purely tyrannous as if he sat on a throne with an executioner within call.

_Thirdly._ Longevity of private tyrants. We have not room under this head to do more--nor, if we had all room, could we do better--than to quote a short paragraph from George Eliot's immortal Mrs. Poyser: "It seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted i' th' other world."

[The end]
Helen Hunt Jackson's essay: Private Tyrants

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