The knell of a departing phase of inner life was sounding when womanhood acquired the power to sift evidence from childish recollections, to detect the utter uselessness of the suffering jealousy creates and the ignominy of allowing it to become a cause of suffering at all.
Mrs. Jamieson stands on the threshold of a new era, for critical intellect here enters the sphere of the emotions, and these, yielding to guidance and control, human reason is henceforth a prime factor in emotional evolution.
But further, sympathy when developed to a certain point inevitably leads men astray if not guided by reason. Let me here relate a sequence of events that occurred in my own experience.
Two girls became deeply attached; they worked and studied together, and their friendship was a source of constant joy. In course of time, however, one married, and the other girl felt forsaken. She suffered from jealousy, and imagined that the husband would suffer similarly if she kept her place in her friend’s affections. A husband’s right amounted, in her view, to a monopoly of a wife’s tenderness. She strove, therefore, to loosen the bond of friendship; to cool her own ardent affection and make no claims, lest it should disturb conjugal bliss. The action was brave and prompted by sympathy, but it did not make for happiness. In a few short years the wife on her deathbed spoke thus to her former friend: “Why did you separate yourself from me? How could you think my love would change? I have been happy in my husband and child, but love never narrowed, it widened me. There was plenty of room for friendship, too. I sorely missed you, and felt your loss threw a shadow over my married life.”
Sympathy alone, then, is no unerring guide to conduct. Nevertheless, in a society permeated by true knowledge of the nature of the emotions and their significance in evolution primitive good-feeling may evolve, passing through each stage from the basic or simple to the complex, and every generous emotion prove accordant with the truth of things, and therefore productive of inward joy and outward right action, i.e. action tending to general welfare even in all the labyrinthine complexities of a high civilization. Emotion accordant with the truth of things—that is the crux of the position; and again I can best illustrate the point by reference to events that occurred within my own knowledge—events, too, by no means uncommon. During eight years a girl was engaged to marry a man we shall call Roger. He was in India and she in England. They corresponded, but meanwhile an intimacy sprang up between the girl and another man—we may call him Mark—to whom unwittingly her heart went out more warmly than it had ever done to Roger. She thought the relation to Mark was one of pure friendship, and he knew nothing of her engagement to Roger. The latter’s approaching return to England, however, opened the girl’s eyes to her true position, and on Mark it fell as a cruel blow. He had courted affection and responded to it in all sincerity, and was merely withheld from an open avowal by the consciousness of, as yet, insufficient means to justify his suit in the eyes of her parents. When concealment was at an end the problem to him seemed simple enough. “Which do you love best?” he asked, and added dominantly, “he is the man you should marry.” The girl was not convinced. The knowledge that she could not love Roger best filled her with tenderness towards him. Her emotional nature—wide enough to embrace both rivals with sympathy—could give no decision, and intellect was confused by false teaching in childhood. “Duty,” she thought, “is always difficult; ought I not then to choose the hardest path of the two before me, and give up Mark?” In this grave dilemma she turned for advice to an elderly man on whose judgment she felt reliance. Bravely and truthfully she stated her case, innocently betraying that ignorance and the wish to do right were dangerously near carrying her into action that was wrong. “Let us reverse the position,” said her mentor. “Roger, we shall suppose, has written to you to come out to India and marry him, the fact being he has fallen in love with another girl. He did not mean to do that. His heart slipped away from you to her unconsciously, and he is shocked, and blames himself, not wholly without cause. But being an honourable man, he reasons with himself thus: ‘I am bound to keep my engagement to Mary; I will do so, and strive to make her happy.’ He meets you then with a lie in his heart, not on his tongue, for he will say nothing of your rival and of his sacrifice and pain. Would you be happy, think you? Would you miss nothing? And if later you discovered the truth, would you feel that the generous action was a just one to you?” “No, no,” she cried, “I never could wish him to sacrifice his happiness to mine; I would infinitely rather he told me the truth, and married the other girl.” “Precisely so,” said her friend, “the truth is always best; but I see you think Roger is less unselfish than you are! Is that just to him?” “I hardly know,” she murmured, “men are jealous, are they not?” “Jealous, ah, well, we men are frail, no doubt! But were I Roger, I tell you frankly, it would not mend matters to me that I had won my wife without the priceless jewel of her love. Be true to yourself, my young friend, that means also justice to him, and fling to the winds all fears that make you swerve from the path of open rectitude.” The girl fulfilled her difficult task. She relinquished the heroic mood, met her first lover with perfect candour, and a short time later became Mark’s wife. “Roger freed me at once,” she said to her wise mentor; “he’d rather have my friendship, which is perfectly sincere, than love with a strain of falseness. Oh, I am glad, and yet I know he grieves; I would give much to be able to console him!” “Ah,” said her friend, “beware of sentimentality and self-importance there. Roger’s consolation will come through his own true heart. In time he will love again. See to it that you ‘let the dead past bury its dead.’”
Loyalty to truth is not firmly rooted in humanity, while without truth as its guiding principle social feeling, constantly rising, overflows old channels and floods with new dangers the semi-civilization of the present. There is no escape at this juncture from the absolute necessity of developing the critical faculty and applying it to the social questions of the day; in other words, using reason, intelligence, knowledge, as the guides and controllers of feeling.
We turn now from personal emotions to an emotion that sways mankind collectively, and manifests itself in still more direful results than those of individual jealousy. Patriotism, like jealousy, is of ancient origin, and at one time possessed social utility. Without it there could hardly have occurred the transformation of vagrant tribes into massive communities solidly established on one portion of the earth’s surface and sectionally swarming to other portions as occasion requires.
The original element holding a tribe together has been termed by a recent sociologist “consciousness of kind,” i.e. a feeling not dependent on intellectual congeniality or emotional sympathy, but simply on nearness in place, time and blood. With tribal growth cohesion proves necessary to self-protection from adverse environments, whether of natural forces, wild animals or human foes. Experience reveals that union is strength, and hostility to other tribes fosters union in opposition. The inward attitude becomes complex; it embraces cohesion and repulsion; it is essentially a union in enmity. Now we have seen how in boyhood an innocent camaraderie or esprit de corps begets injustice to schoolmasters, and balks the development of the modern conscience; similarly here there are ethical dangers inseparable from a sentiment that beginning in “consciousness of kind” expands into sociality, yet has a converse side of hostility and hate. At the present day patriotism and international warfare are closely combined. The student of life who knows that the general trend of evolution is towards a reign of universal peace, recognizes that although nations have been consolidated by outward warfare and inward patriotism, this sentiment, so limited in range and so largely anti-social, can be no virtue for all time. Patriotism belongs to the militant stage of national history, and as regards Great Britain it is plainly out of date. Its action is not good, but evil.
The war in South Africa begun in 1899 was not caused by racial enmity, but by mercantile enterprise. Economic forces involved in Great Britain’s competitive commercial system were the prime factors in its creation, but without the existence of a vague unintelligent patriotic sentiment in the country generally the Government would not have been supported by the people in the prosecution of that war. Our enfranchised masses, fired by a sudden enthusiasm and racked by sympathy in the brave deeds and cruel sufferings of our soldiers and sailors, saw the phantasmagoria of modern warfare in false colours. Imagination was grasped and controlled by a press working—though half-unconsciously—in the interests of a special mercantile class; and while tender emotions overflowed in generous help to one’s own kind, a sympathy stimulated by public laudation, the reverse side of the picture was ignored. But in this, as in all wars, sympathy had its counterpoise in antagonism and rancorous enmity. All the brutal instincts latent in a race that had fought its way to supremacy among European Powers were roused afresh and stirred into fatal activity, and the evolving modern conscience and sentiments of justice, honour, truth towards all men, were checked and overborne by a loyalty that condones the fierce primitive passions. Hatred and uncharitableness were even voiced from some pulpits, and the term Pro-Boer was opprobriously launched at those lovers of peace who tried to defend their country’s foes from exaggerated blame. It was skilfully handled to promote militant enthusiasm, and discountenance all criticism of militant action and feeling.
On the emotional side of human nature inimical effects of warfare were wholly disregarded, and opinions on the subject of war given forth by a so-called educated class of men and eagerly imbibed by an ignorant public were confused, often false and shamefully misleading. One of these pseudo-teachers alleged that the wars of past times indicated chronic disease, but militarism in the present was useful, because in the home-life of the nation the restraints of authority are becoming weak (Capt. Mahan). And an eminent statesman announced his impression that the South African war was “designed to build up those moral qualities which are after all the only solid and the only permanent foundation on which any empire can be built”! (Mr. Balfour’s speech at Manchester; Scotsman’s Report, January 9, 1900.)