Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo the excess,
And each man have enough.”
Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited from the lips of Lear, even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said.
The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a denunciation of woe to them that lie upon beds of ivory, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of the viol,—but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race—pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, with disregard of all means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar was, as some scholars interpret the passage, “content to be fed” on the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; in which case he would not appear to have been refused the crumbs: indeed, had this been the case, it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of Abraham. “The rich man’s sins were ravenousness and negligence rather than inhumanity.”[3] He took too little care of this—that beggary lay in helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.
La Bruyère observes that “la santé et les richesses ôtent aux hommes l’expérience du mal, leur inspirent la dureté pour leurs semblables;” and adds, that “les gens déjà chargés de leur propre misère sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d’autrui.” If these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them so. Haud ignari mali, miseris succurrere discunt. In another chapter of his “Characters,” La Bruyère sketches the portrait of one he styles Champagne, who “au sortir d’un long dîner qui lui enfle l’estomac, et dans les douces fumées d’un vin d’Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu’on lui présente, qui ôterait le pain à toute une province, si l’on n’y remédiait: il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la première heure de la digestion, qu’on puisse quelque part mourir de faim?” Il est excusable, on the principle of Horace Walpole’s similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t’other prince—but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. “They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation? Poor creatures! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath—somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately afterwards sugar-plum’d) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. No part of a royal brat’s memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of human suffering.” “Il y a une espèce de honte d’être heureux à la vue de certaines misères,” writes La Bruyère again. Adam Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those “whining and melancholy moralists,” who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. “Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men.” Adam Smith opposes this “extreme sympathy” as altogether absurd and unreasonable; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose than to render miserable the person who possessed it. This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser’s relief. Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson’s celebrated passage:
“Ah! little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;