Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

Ha ha! Then there's more sympathy; you love sack, so do I; would you desire better sympathy?" Certainly not. Jack, my boy, thou art indeed the heart'sblood of a good fellow, and the world is indebted to thee for more happiness than it will ever derive from Sam Johnson, for all his learning and pomposity.

And as sympathy is the highest endowment of Nature so also is it the finest achievement of art. Orators, poets, painters, sculptors, actors, are great in their respective callings in the precise proportion of their ability to touch the tender chord of sympathy in the human heart. The amount of their success in this regard is the exact measure of their skill. There are speakers who, as the French are wont felicitously to express it, "ont des larmes dans la voix," have tears in their voices; and magical indeed is the effect of their utterances. It is not so much what they say, as their manner of saying it, that awakens the sensibilities of their hearers. The "sanctimonious rhetoric" of Mr. Gladstone, as Mr. Disraeli once happily described it, falls mellifluously upon the ear, but rarely reaches the heart; nor indeed is Mr. Disraeli himself much more fortunate in this respect, for brilliant as he is in debate, and poignant in repartee, he is singularly deficient in tender emotion. There is but little of pathetic sentiment in anything that usually falls from the lips of Mr. Bright. Yet is his voice of a timbre so musical, manly, and sympathetic, that the most commonplace matter spoken by him would acquire a certain tragic significance in the delivery. His voice is in itself eloquence, and that too of a very refined order, for he modulates it with the utmost delicacy. Among by-gone orators I should imagine that Burke, Erskine, and Curran, were probably

the greatest masters of pathos. They belong to an era which is not likely to be paralleled in coming time, for our age is utilitarian and money-searching in a sense hardly consistent with picturesque and impassioned speech. Oratory, rare in the pulpit, has all but vanished from the bar, and is now seldom heard even in what was once its peculiar domain-the legislative councils of the nation. We have but few native painters whose genius can be said to be sympathetic. Mr. Poole and Mr. Faed have the gift, though in senses as different as their styles are dissimilar. Madame Henrietta Browne is richly endowed in this regard; still more so is Mr. Israels, who of all Continental artists is probably the most powerful in his appeal to the sympathies of the spectator. Two pictures of his I especially remember as works not to be viewed without emotion. The one entitled "The Flitting," represents a poor widow by whose side toddle her two fatherless little children, while she is herself pushing before her, through a desolate landscape, a little cart containing her few "sticks" of furniture, late on a cold autumnal evening, while the trees shiver in the bleak blast, and the rain-fraught sky looks dreary and disconsolate, and the dusk is quickly thickening into dark. The other simply reveals the interior of a peasant's cottage, where a mother and her son are saying grace with a guileless expression of profound devotion before partaking of their dinner, which consists of a dish of potatoes and one solitary herring. 'Their pious resignation in the midst of poverty, which is not abject only because no adversity encountered in such a spirit can be so described, is a sermon in colors, and may well wring the hearts of the selfish and luxurious. The sympathetic element in poetry is its most

essential constituent.

Without it there were no poetry

worthy of the name. The dying speech of Hamlet to Horatio brings the tragedy to a tearful conclusion :"If ever thou didst hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story." As uttered by a melodious and sympathetic voice there is nothing in Shakespeare more touching than these words. I remember to have read in a country churchyard an epitaph which he who has ever lost a child under the like circumstance will probably appreciate in the plenitude of its pathetic beauty. It ran thus :—

"Sacred to the sweet memory of Mary died in her 18th year.

"Thine only fault, what travell'rs give the moon,
Thy light was lovely, but-it died too soon."

who

Shenstone's exquisite Latin epitaph on a young girl who perished in her prime has never been surpassed, perhaps never equalled, "Eheu! quam minus est cum aliis versari quam tui meminisse !" Gray's "Elegy," and Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore," are alike immortal in right of their resistless appeals to the sympathy of the reader. Very sweet and tender, too, are these lines of Gerald Griffin on the death of his sweetheart :

"The tie is broke, my Irish girl,
Which bound me here to thee,
My heart has lost its only pearl,

And thine at last is free!

Dead as the turf that wraps thy clay!

Dead as the stone above thee!

Cold as this heart which breaks to say
It never more can love thee!

The calm pure eloquence and sublime simplicity of these lines are beyond all praise. But of all artists the actor exercises the most powerful sway over the sympathies of humanity. True, his triumphs are short-lived as instantaneous, but they are superb, enchanting. Mr. Justice Talfourd has a charming passage upon this subject:

"Surely no career is more apparently joyous, more crowded with pleasure, and more abundant in rewards than that of a successful actor. Nor is his art, when honorably pursued, wanting in dignity. He is not a mere reciter of the poet's language, for his greatest successes often occur when the words are few and unimportant, and when he has no prompter inferior to nature. It is nothing to detect shades of tenderness and thought-streaks and veins of fancy, as a painter discovers graces in the landscape unheeded by others? Is it nothing to bid a crowded theatre feel those touches of nature which make the whole world kin; to break the crust of self-love which encircles the worldling's heart and compel it to feel for others; to afford some hint to the rude clown of the heroism and the suffering of which his nature is capable, and to impart the first mild touch of sympathy and thought to the child? These surely are triumphs worth achieving; if they are short in duration they are proportionately intense, and are in truth the more genial as they partake of the fragility which belongs to all the pride and glory of human life."

Happily for the world, sympathy is of no particular class, creed, or country, it is common to them all. Who has not some times missed it where he had the best right to expect it? Who has not sometimes found it where he had the least reason to look for it? I have

received it with equal liberality from foreigners and my own countrymen-plenteously at the hands of Christians, and quite as abundantly at those of a Hebrew family accomplished as benevolent. It is the sweetest solace of life, and without it life were little worth.

IF

THE DELIGHTS OF MUSIC.

there is in this turbulent little planet of ours one thing thoroughly delightful, altogether enjoyable, it is assuredly music. Talk of the world without the sun! The world without the gamut were quite as intolerable. The alliance between the heart of man and the concord of sweet sounds is mystical as subtle. For every

phase of human feeling, for every mode of human thought, there is a correspondent symphony. If a man be in a merry mood, music will enhance the brilliancy and effervescence of his mirth; if he be sorrowful, music will either dispel his anguish or shed around him a sentiment of luxurious sadness more acceptable than the most uproarious merriment; if he would taste the pleasures of the festive board, music will make him Anacreontic; if he would be devout, music will develop all that is reverential in his nature and waft him to the seventh heaven. "The meaning of song goes deep," says Mr. Carlyle. "Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us?-a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that".

« ПредишнаНапред »