The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions

by Frances Power Cobbe

Leaving now the subject of the Education of the Emotions of the Young, by parents, teachers, and companions, I proceed to speak of the general education of the emotions of the community by public and private instrumentality,—a wide field, over which we can only glance. What machinery is disposable to cultivate the better and discourage the lower emotions, either by the exhibition of the direct natural stimulus to the former and withdrawal of it in the latter cases, or by the aid of contagion?

In the grand matter of Legislation I do not know that there is much more to be done than has already been achieved by the abolition of those public punishments of criminals—hanging, drawing and quartering, flogging at the cart’s tail, and the pillory—which must have been frightfully prolific of cruel passions in the spectators. To have taken part in such executions, e.g. in the old stonings to death, in the burning of witches and heretics, or in the minor but yet barbarous and cowardly pelting of the helpless wretches in the pillory, must have been an apprenticeship worthy of a Red Indian. Even to have been a passive spectator of a Newgate execution in later years, amid the yelling crowd, must have been excessively demoralizing, and in fact was at last recognized by the Legislature to be so, instead of a wholesome warning. It is a cause for rejoicing that there is an end of this kind of contagious emotion in England, except in the case of experiments on animals, of which the Act of 1876 sanctions the exhibition to classes under special certificates which require the subjects to be fully anæsthetized. On this point the warning of the late lamented Professor Rolleston ought, I think, to have sufficed. He told the Royal Commission: “The sight of a living, bleeding, and quivering organism most undoubtedly does act in a particular way upon what Dr. Carpenter calls the emotiono-motor nature in us.... When men are massed together, the emotiono-motor nature is more responsive, it becomes more sensitive to impression than it does at other times, and that of course bears very greatly on the question of interference with vivisections before masses” (Minutes, 1287[^[11]]). The time will come when it will be looked upon as a monstrous inconsistency that the spectacle of the execution of murderers should be shut off from the adult population on account of its recognized ill effects in fostering contagious cruelty, and, at the same time, as many as nineteen certificates should be issued in one year by the Home Office, specially authorizing the mutilation of harmless animals before classes of young men and women.

Majestic public functions, coronations, thanksgivings, state entries into great cities, and funerals of distinguished men afford admirable machinery for the communication of noble emotions through the masses. It was worth the cost and trouble of last year’s Jubilee ten times over to have sent through so many brains and hearts the thrill of sympathy which followed the Queen to the old throne of her fathers, while the kings of the earth stood around her as witnesses that she had kept the oath to her people, sworn there fifty years before. For one day England and all her vast colonies beat with one heart, and the contagion of loyal emotion, love, reverence, pride, and pity, for woman, empress, mother, widow, ran round the globe. Sad was it (as many must have remembered) that he who would have found the true words to give utterance to the sentiment in the heaving breast of the nation, he whose proud duty it would have been to welcome the Queen to his own Abbey, was lying on that day silent beneath its pavement.

Beyond Legislation and Public Functions, the largest influence which sways the emotions of all educated people is undoubtedly Literature. The power of Books to awaken the most vivid feelings is a phenomenon at which savages may well wonder. The magic which enables both the living and the long departed to move us to the depths of our being by the aid only of a few marks on sheets of paper is a never-ending miracle. It were vain to attempt to do any justice to the subject, or show how the contagion of piety, patriotism, enthusiasm for justice and truth, and sympathy with other nations and other classes than our own, is borne to us in the pages of the poets and historians and novelists of the world. Pitiful it is to think how narrow must be the scope of the emotions of any man whose breast has never dilated nor his eyes flashed over the grandeur of the Book of Job, over Dante or Shakspere, and whose heart has never been warmed and his sympathies extended, backwards through time and around him in space, by Walter Scott, and Defoe, and Dickens, and George Eliot. Alas that we must add that Literature can not only kindle the noblest emotions, but also light up baleful fires, of the basest and most sensual,—to look for which we have not now even to cross the Channel! M. Zola has been translated into English.

After Literature I presume that the Stage is the greatest public agency for the promotion of fine emotions, and it is to the honor of human nature that it is found (at least in our country) to be most popular when it fulfils its office best, and calls out sympathy for generous and heroic actions. When the Roman audience rose en masse to applaud the line of Terence which first proclaimed the brotherhood of man,—“Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,”—the highest mission of the Drama was fulfilled. Of course no one desires the string of high emotion to be exclusively or perpetually harped upon; and for my own part I think that the mere production of the emotion of harmless merriment is one of the greatest boons of the stage. The contagion of laughter, in a theatre or out of it, is an altogether wholesome and beneficent thing. How it unseats black Care from our backs! How it carries away, as on a fresh spring breeze, a whole swarm of buzzing worries and grievances! How it warms our hearts for ever after to the people with whom we have once shared a good honest fou rire! “Behold how good and how pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,” and (with all respect let us add) in hilarity! A good joke partaken with a man is like the Arab’s salt. Our common emotion of humorous pleasure is a bond between us which we would not thereafter lightly break.

The education of the emotions of actors and actresses, apart from that which they afford to the emotions of the public, is a very curious subject of consideration. Great part of the training of an actor consists in learning to give the uttermost possible external expression to those emotions which it is the task of other people to reduce to a vanishing point. Undoubtedly (as one of the most gifted of the profession has remarked), the “habit of representing fictitious feeling tends to produce a superficial sensibility, and an exaggerated mode of expressing the same.” But it may be questioned whether this extreme be worse than the opposite, wherein the expression of the emotions is so effectually repressed that the feelings themselves die out for want of air and exercise,—a consummation not unknown in the reposeful “caste of Vere de Vere.”

Besides Literature and the Stage, Music no doubt is a most marvellous agency for calling out Emotion. It is, in fact, the Art of Emotion. The musician plays with the strings of the human heart while he touches those of his instrument. Since Collins wrote his “Ode to the Passions” and Pope his “Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day,” there is no need to describe how every emotion known to man may be brought out by music. Something may well be hoped for a generation which, rejecting the more trivial and sensuous music of Italy, finds delight in the exalted play of the emotions which follows the wands of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. The efforts now made to offer music at once cheap and good to as many of the working classes as can be found to enjoy it is perhaps the most direct way conceivable of fostering their best emotions.

The Beauty of Nature and of Art are also powerful levers of the higher emotions, which it becomes us to use for the benefit of our fellows whenever it is practicable to do so.

But, while these varied engines are at work to stir beneficently the emotions of the masses, there are on the other hand certain agencies in full play amongst us which have, I fear, a totally different effect; which, in fact, can only tend to deaden, if not destroy, the most precious of emotions, those of family affection. I do not know that the question has ever been faced: What are the moral effects of our enormous Hospitals? From the side of the bodily interests of the patients, they may be wholly advantageous.[^[12]] But as regards the sacred institutions of the Family, on which society itself is based, I ask what, except evil, can result from the habitual separation of relatives the moment that illness makes a claim for tenderness and care?

It is the law of human nature that the sentiment of sympathy should be drawn forth by personal service to the suffering; and feelings of gratitude and affection by the receipt of such personal service. In comparison of these sources of emotion, those which act in times of prosperity are weak and poor. If we subtract in imagination from our own affections those which have come to us either through nursing or being nursed in sickness and danger, the residue will represent all which we leave within reach of the million. Many of us can remember quarrels which have been reconciled, unkindnesses atoned for, and bonds of sacred union in faith and eternal hope linked beside beds of pain when death seemed standing at the door. These things form some of the highest educational influences which Providence brings to bear on the human spirit, and out of them arise the sweetest affections, the warmest gratitude, the most vivid sense of a common nearness to God and the Immortal Life.