XVIII. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SYMPATHY AND PITY.

The most precious thing in the world is sympathy.

That sentence looks well, does it not? And, furthermore, it is just one of those “glittering generalities” that we all accept just as we do silver certificates, with a polite pretense of crediting them at their face valuation and believing them to be “as good as gold.”

I am afraid it is rather a fad of mine to war against these solemn hypocrites of popular sayings. To tell the truth, I never can see anything or anybody, which or who poses as being better and wiser than its surroundings, that I am not impelled to probe it to the center, to rub off its paint, to chip off its veneer, and expose the “true inwardness” of its being.

I have no objection to Tartars in the abstract, but when they prance forth decked in all the ultra civilization of young Russia, I am impelled to abrade the surface just enough to let all the world recognize the Tartar underneath.

So, now, is Sympathy, with its pretentious great S, the most precious balm for a wounded heart?

Yes and no.

Far be it from me to deny that there are forms and measures of sympathy that are indeed healing and sweet, but how seldom are they found! It must be unobtrusive, to begin with. Like violets or lilies of the valley, it is to be known more by the subtle fragrance of its shy presence than, like the sunflower, by its breadth and insistency of form and color.

I have had friends, and I thank God for them, even though they stand in His presence and not in mine, whose very silence was the sweetest of sympathy; friends whose light touch never hurt the wound they healed; who never, by word or even look, suggested that there was a wound until I threw off the covering with which we all instinctively cloak our hurts from the common gaze.

A friend like this, a friend who is content to prove sympathy by silence until the sufferer invites speech, is far more likely to be admitted to the innermost chambers of the heart than the one who loudly knocks at the outer door, clamoring:

“Open, open! I have come to sympathize with you!”

For such a one there is in most outer doors one of those little well grated wickets one sees in old convent portals, where, in answered to the clamorous summons, a pale face appears for a moment, and a chill, repressed voice replies:

“Go in peace! The doors are locked, and none may pass them.”

There are so many classes of these mistaken sympathizers!

First, the loud and aggressive class—the women who swoop down upon you from the door of your own drawing room and fold you close in a smothering embrace of fur and cloth and beads and chains and ribbons (I give you my word I have come out of such an embrace gasping for breath, and with a bleeding scratch upon my cheek), exclaiming the while:

“Oh, my darling! My poor, dear child! You sweet dear, how I pity you! My heart fairly aches for you!”

Issuing from this embrace breathless, wounded, half stifled with the heavy perfume this kind of sympathizer generally uses, one longs to cry aloud with the first possible breath:

“At least, don’t pity me! I can bear suffocation and scratches and musk, but not pity!”

Of course one doesn’t say it, but we know what the parrot did instead of speaking.

To be pitied openly and avowedly and to hear it sweetly is probably the last test of a saint ripe for canonization, but I for one have no idea of how such a being may feel. It is not my métier, and I fully believe in at least one old and vulgar adage, “Cobbler, stick to your last!” So, not claiming saintship, present or prospective, I am free to confess that to be pitied in the style just specified arouses the most murderous qualities of my nature, and although the fetters of civilization may chain both my tongue and my hands the pityist would be very much alarmed if she could see my heart.

I say “she” advisedly, for I do not think men are prone to make this sort of blunder. At any rate, they do not wrap one in a voluminous and odorous embrace, and any movement in that direction is so promptly checked that it is of small moment. The manner in which the male sympathizer most often offends is in imitating the bear in Æsop’s fable, who, being very fond of the gardener, watched beside him while he slept. A mosquito buzzing about the sleeper’s head threatened to disturb his slumber, whereupon the brute of a friend, watching his opportunity, brought down a weighty paw with deadly force upon—the mosquito certainly, but also upon the head of the beloved gardener, who never found words to thank his sympathizing friend, owing to the loss of his brains.

This seems to me one of the anecdotes to which “hæc fabula docet” may be very profitably added. Did you never experience this kind of sympathy?

Well, it is much after this manner:

“You don’t know how sorry I’ve been for you even since I heard of that fellow having run off with your money” (or whatever the special affliction may be, for I am literally supposing a case and never have experienced exactly this calamity). “How in the world came you to trust him so much? You see you are too credulous and too apt to believe every plausible lie that’s told you. You ought to have asked some man to look into the thing and advise you. How did it happen? Come, tell me all about it, and I will show you where the weak point was, so you will know better another time, you poor little woman!”

That phrase, “Tell me all about it!” is one that the acceptable sympathizer never uses. It is as fatal to the desired end as it is to throw open a window and hurl a handful of grain at a bird which you wish to lure to a cage it has deserted. The true way is to softly open the window, strew the grain inside where it is quite obvious, but may be taken or left, as the victim may choose, and then yourself retire out of sight. It is pretty sure that by this stratagem you will finally have your bird just where you want him, and in process of time he will warble out all the secrets of his heart to you. But rushing at him and shouting, “Now, tell me all about it!” is the very last way to win his confidence.

Another kind of sympathizer and a very offensive one is the person who essays to “keep up your spirits” for you in some season of bereavement and affliction. I once saw a friend of mine (not myself) driven nearly mad by this sort of Job’s comforter. She came to the house of mourning for a stay of some days, and apparently had laid in a stock of funny stories, society gossip and all sorts of conundrums, epigrams and frivolities generally. We never sat down at the table but this flood was loosed upon us, until one day my friend burst into tears and left the table, very greatly to the surprise of Mme. Malaprop, who inquired of everybody:

“Why, what is the matter? Did anybody say anything to remind her? And I was trying so hard to keep up her spirits and all!”

I had not the courage to reply, but some one else had, and said in so many words:

“I think it was just that. She couldn’t stand having her spirits kept up any longer.”

“Poor thing! It’s too bad!” replied the sympathizer complacently. “But she’ll be all right when she’s had her cry out, and I’ll tell her the rest of that story when she comes down. There’s nothing so bad for a person as to dwell upon their troubles, and I made up my mind when I came to do everything I could to distract poor Mary, and I think I’ve done it.”

“I think you have,” replied the other dryly. “She seemed nearly distracted when she left the table.”

A kindred spirit to this, but not so objectionable because she is not so funny, is the officious sympathizer, the person who insists upon distracting the mind of the sufferer by forcing all sorts of ordinary details upon it. If it is bereavement and the comforter is a woman, she insists upon discussing the mourning clothes and offering to run out and bring patterns, or send in some bonnets, or tell about the present mode of wearing a widow’s veil. She discusses sleeves, and has an opinion upon the new skirts, and absolutely drags out assents or dissents from the pale lips of the sufferer, who plaintively but quite uselessly declares:

“Oh, I don’t care in the least! Have everything that is proper and use your own judgment.”

“Now, darling, that isn’t right, you know,” persists the comforter. “You really ought to rouse yourself and take an interest. You will care about all this in a little while, and it is so much better to have everything right to begin with.”

“Not but that I could do it all myself perfectly well,” explains the complacent comforter to some one else presently, “but it is so much better that she should be roused, poor dear!”

So she goes on tormenting her.

Perhaps it is another kind of sorrow. It might be a woman whose husband has eloped with another woman. In this case the officious sympathizer is full of good advice and offers of help in the way of sending telegrams, seeing detectives, interviewing reporters and the like, all very useful and perhaps essential modes of service, but with this species of sympathizer all made very obvious and obtruded continually with the avowed object of distracting the mind of the sufferer. One case of this kind that I remember was that of a dear child whom a fortune hunter had deliberately jilted when her father lost his money. The mother came to me full of indignation to complain of the “impertinent interference,” as I grieve to say she called it, of a sympathizer, who visited her and her daughter with the avowed intention of “doing something about it” herself, and brought the copy of a letter she had already written and sent to the delinquent. She called, as she said, to comfort the poor girl with the knowledge that she had at least one sympathizing friend who was ready and anxious to do all that she could for her, even to going to see the young man and publicly upbraiding him in the midst of his family and friends.

“And what did you say?” inquired I, when my friend had poured forth this remarkable story, for I felt that I best showed my sympathy with her mortification by giving her a chance to narrate her successes. Nor was I mistaken, for she held her head very high, and her eyes were very bright as she replied:

“I said that if she really wished to oblige us she would do so best by remaining perfectly silent and quiet about affairs that certainly did not in the least concern her. Now she’ll go around and say all sorts of hateful things about us, but I’d rather she’d do that than try to sympathize.”

“Defend me from my friends, and I’ll take care of my enemies,” quoted I, and she who had come to me drowned in grief went away with smiling lips.

There is nothing in the world that so soon and so surely brings comfort to the human soul as to be placed upon good terms with itself.

One more class of mistaken sympathizers is that of lugubrious ones. They not only mingle their tears with yours, but the torrents of their grief sweep the fountains of yours quite dry and barren. They not only listen to your lamentations, but go beyond them with such jeremiads of woe that you leave off trying to keep up and end by feeling that you had not half appreciated your own misfortunes and listen to the new and enlarged version of them with a certain mournful pride and an access of self-pity which sweeps away all the healing work time may have begun to put in. “Such blows as this come but once in a lifetime. I can’t wonder that you feel all hope of happiness is over, but you must remember that resignation is a duty.”

You had not quite looked at the matter in this light before, and in the depths of your mind are guiltily conscious of a certain dismay at the idea of all happiness being over, but it would not be decent to say so, and you feel that sentence has gone forth against you, and your only course is to submit, so you murmur a mournful assent, and your comforter tearfully goes her way, leaving you a good deal worse off than she found you.

I spoke but now of the healing work of time, but I take it back. Time is not a healer. He is a destroyer. Time is the most heartless of sympathizers or comforters, for he brings no thought of comfort or self-justification. In fact, the harsh and bitter and cruel points of a great sorrow are those that time preserves and insists upon to the very last. Some kinds—nay, I will allow all kinds—of grief grow less poignant after awhile, but it is not because time has healed the wound, but because he has destroyed the sensibility, and the memory, and the environment of the sorrow. He is only kind because he is so ruthless. The best of all the sympathizers this world has ever produced was that Eastern sage who, being required by his king to produce a motto suited to every state of mind possible to humanity, enunciated, “This, too, will pass.”