66 With what he feels to be the unanswerable question, "And who to pity thee?" does Landor's Opas, in Count Fulian, sum up the miseries of the Last of the Goths. Behold my solace ! none. I want no pity," is Roderigo's reply.* Sir Walter Scott, when things were with him at their very worst, recorded in his journal his sense of relief at the departure even of some the dearest to his heart of heart: "I am pleased to be left to my own regrets, without being melted by condolences, though of the most sincere and affectionate kind." "I never had an ambition to be pitied," wrote John O'Keeffe, when recording his loss of sight; "and, indeed, effort to be envied, rather than pitied, often proves a successful stimulus to the greatest actions of human life." A late divine remarked that were we to strip our sufferings of all the aggravations which our overbusy imaginations heap upon them, and of all that a morbid craving for sympathy induces us to display to others, they would shrink to less than half their bulk, and what remained would be comparatively easy to support. It was a maxim with Horace Walpole that nobody has a right to tax another for pity on what is past; and on this ground, he, as martyr to gout," 66 66 * Especially is the avowed pity of the vulgar intolerable to higher natures in their time of trouble. When Dockwrath, in Orley Farm, assures Peregrine Orme, "I feel for you, and I pity you," the latter feels it is not pleasant to be pitied by such a man as that, and says so. He declines pity on any terms, and from any quarter. "I require no pity from you or from any man."-Jane Eyre tells Rochester, "I pity you-I do earnestly pity you." And the discriminating reply, worthy of him and of her, is : 'Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it"but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is what he calls a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. Hers, on the other hand, he hails and welcomes, as "the suffering mother of love." To get pity instead of love, after love is gone,—can anything be much more bitter than that? Yet in two at least of his best-known songs Burns makes a plaintive lover press the selfsame piteous plea. In Lord Gregory the forsaken one prays, "At least some pity on me shaw, if love it may na be;” and a male voice sings, "If love for love thou wilt na gie, At least be pity to me shown," in (and to) Mary Morrison. courteously waived the advances of compassionate visitors or correspondents, whenever the attack was over. Complaint of what is over can only make the hearer glad you are in pain no longer, he argued. "Yes, yes, my dear madam,” he tells Miss Hannah More, "you generally place your pity so profitably, that you shall not waste a drop upon me." And in a letter some ten months later, again: "One has no right to draw on the compassion of others for what one has suffered and is past. Some love to be pitied on that score; but forget that they only excite, in the best-natured, joy on their deliverElia calls the convalescent "his own sympathiser "instinctively feeling, as the poor man does, that none can so well perform that office for him: he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only. "He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself." And on the score of physical prostration, allowance would be made for him by Hartley Coleridge, who was thinking of a hale weeper when he said that a full-grown blubberer, with great greenish-grey goggles, swimming in his own pathos, like half-cold calf's-foot jelly, soaked in his own drizzling tenderness, makes one ashamed of humanity. Elia's convalescent has licence, or takes it, to compassionate himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart. Il a pitié de soi-même.* To him might be * J'ai pitié de moi-même :-the phrase is Corneille's. Pronounced experts or adepts in the art and practice of self-pity, might have a section to themselves. Not among those would we reckon such as Bertha in the lane, as Mrs. Browning interprets her, when she walked as if apart from herself, and pitied her own heart, as if she held it in her hand. Nor again such as the laureate's Earl in Enid, when "sweet self-pity, or the fancy of it, Made his eye moist." But there would be perhaps a Martin Fruse, with his heart melting with tender compassion for himself, and nearly weeping at the "pitiful images he had called up of his own fate, in his own mind ;" and a Susan Posey, in Dr. Holmes's Guardian Angel, when a "last touch of self-pity overcame addressed the opening line of the confidante's harangue in Racine, "Ainsi, dans vos malheurs ne songeant qu'à vous plaindre." Montaigne says that whoso makes himself pitied without reason, is a man not to be pitied when there shall be real cause; by always craving pity, he comes to get none from any. Such too, in effect, the philosophy of that sufferer from neuralgia and other ills, the Mr. Christian of George Eliot's drawing, who, next to the pain itself, disliked that any one should know of it: defective health diminished a man's market value. "Poor Blake! one can't help calling him 'poor,'" we read in Tom Brown at Oxford, "although he himself would have winced at it more than at any other name you could have called him :" the object of his life was to raise such feelings towards him as admiration and envy, but pity was the last which he would have liked to excite. Miss Porter's Polish hero can put up with anything rather than the pity which seems to load him with a heavier sense of his calamities. If one chances, as in Mr. Trollope's simile, to slip into the gutter on a wet day, one finds the sympathy her, as it is so apt to do those who indulge in that delightful misery;" and even that unhappily obstinate and obstinately unhappy man, the clerical Crawley, in the Last Chronicle of Barset, where he "pitied himself with a tenderness of commiseration which knew no bounds," as he sat on the gate at Hoggle End, while the rain came down heavily upon him— pitied himself with a commiseration that was sickly in spite of its truth. "This pity, which some people self-pity call, Is sure the most heart-piercing pity of all," sings Cowper's slave-trader, with the refrain, "which nobody can deny, deny, which nobody can deny." The Mr. Sheldon of one popular author, "if he pitied anybody, pitied himself”. '—a kind of compassion very common with that kind of character. The Mr. Amedroz of another, “pitied himself so much in his own misery, that he expected to live in an atmosphere of pity from others." The Parson Levincourt of a third, was apt to spend a good deal of his available store of compassion on himself; his author remarking, however, that there is no more effectual check to the indulgence of our own failings and weaknesses, than the exaggerated manifestation of the same defect in another :—that which in us is only a reasonable and well-grounded dissatisfaction, becomes mere selfish unjustifiable repining in our neighbours. of bystanders to be by far the severest part of one's misfortune. “Did you not declare to yourself that all might yet be well, if the people would only walk on and not look at you?" It was so with Lily Dale, the wounded fawn: the people of Allingham could not regard her with their ordinary eyes they would look at her tenderly, knowing that she was a wounded fawn, and thus they aggravated the soreness of her wound. So with Mrs. Oliphant's Madonna Mary, to whom "all this was very galling;" who "felt that she would rather die than come down" to be pitied by all these people; and who thought, in her disturbed and uneasy mind, that she could bear all the different tones in which they would say "Poor Mary!" The Honourable Miss Byron, in that prolix novel of Richardson's which Macaulay told Mr. Greville, in 1833, that he had read through fifteen times, has this to confess of her dealings with the peerless Sir Charles Grandison : "My pride made me want to find out pity for me in his looks and behaviour, on purpose to quarrel with him in my mind.” Not that she aped the mood, any more than she emulated the morals, of Rowe's Fair Penitent: "No, Altamont; my heart, that scorn'd thy love, a style as large as Sir Fleureant's in Philip van Artevelde, who fires up at the Regent's token of compassion, and bids him There is nothing, it has been said, more grim and repelling than an unbending refusal to acknowledge pain which nevertheless cannot be concealed; it can only make anxious friends feel that they are kept at arm's length. Granted that people who have much to endure are entitled to any alleviation which they can innocently obtain; but the suffering is often too obvious to be thus disposed of; and "nothing adds more bitterness to the pain of seeing suffering than to be denied the right of offering even sympathy." Emily Brontè, in her last illness, made no complaint, would not endure questioning, and rejected sympathy and help. Many a time did her sisters drop their sewing, or cease from their writing, to listen with wrung hearts, as Charlotte's biographer tells us, to the failing step, the laboured breathing, the frequent pauses, with which the dying girl climbed the short staircase; yet they dared not take other notice of what they observed, with pangs of suffering deeper even than hers: they dared not notice it in words, far less by the caressing assistance of a helping arm or hand. But then, to be sure, "Ellis Bell's" was an exceptional, abnormal, anomalous nature altogether. She was an exception to what Mr. de Quincey, commenting on the dying Kant's appeal by signs to his attendant to stoop down and kiss his pallid lips, and on the similar but more memorable “Kiss me, Hardy," of the dying Nelson* on board the Victory, calls the 'mighty power of death in its final agencies;" when the brave man has ceased to be in any exclusive sense a man, but has become an infant in his weakness-has become a woman in his craving for tenderness and pity. 66 W IX. MULTIPLIED WORDS JOB XXXV. 16. 'ORDS, words, words, the phrase is pregnant with import on the lips of the Prince of Denmark. And it is charged against the Man of Uz that he "multiplieth words without knowledge." "Job hath spoken without know * The mention of the "mighty admiral's" name may remind some of his impatient refusal to be "pitied" on account of the restraint once imposed upon him, as Southey tells the story. "Pity!" exclaimed Nelson : Pity, did you say? I shall live, sir, to be envied; and to that point I shall always direct my course."-Southey's Life of Nelson, chap. iii. 66 |