PUBLIC CALAMITIES AND THE PUBLIC BEARING.
WE English certainly have not the happy art of expressing the shades of feeling with any clearness and delicacy. Just as language is very apt to fail the most accomplished and sensitive per- ception in the attempt to discriminate between the various kinds and degrees of pleasure which the beauty of natural scenery causes to the beholder, so language fails us all preposterously as a nation when we have to give expression to the national pain and regret which a public calamity like the Prince of Wales's imminent danger causes us, and find no words at hand except those which paint the very different emotions excited by the most bitter individual bereavements,—bereavements which alter entirely the colour of a life, and separate, as if by an impassable gulf, the future from the past. The feeling of the English people about the Prince's illness has been as sincere and real as possible. No doubt the excite- ment of the rapidly recurring telegrams may have tended to make the public suspense and restlessness, which were thoroughly real, look more like the restlessness of passionately clinging hope than it could be or ought to be. There has been a very genuine regret for the good-natured Prince himself ; there has been deep sympathy with his wife, who is in as true a sense the delight of the people as any woman whom the millions only hear of, and at best very rarely see from a distance, could be ; there has been a real and earnest fear of another heavy calamity falling upon the Queen, and further darkening a lot which for ten years back has certainly not been a bright one; and there has been, beyond all this, a feeling of genuine pity and awe at the prospect of so sudden and sad a termination to a career promising to be so brilliant, and yet that has not hitherto been by any means what the nation could have wished and hoped. Moreover, every one has felt, what many of the papers have justly pointed out, that the Prince's suffering and danger is in some respects representative of the similar private calamities of which almost every separate household has had its own bitter experience, an experience differ-
ing from the present one only in this,—that the area of sympathy was so much narrower, while now it is wide enough to include the entire nation. Hence the public are apt to feel as if the nation were now lending its sincerest sympathy to each family's own share in those " old, unhappy, far-off things and trials long ago," of which we have all only too vivid a recollection, no less than to the great royal calamity of the hour, and with this comes some- thing of a glow of satisfaction in this new sense of national unity.
But after allowing for all these different sources of the vivid public feeling of the moment, it is impossible to deny that the language in which the Press has striven to embody that feeling has been entirely beyond and beside the truth,—beyond it in intensity and the impression conveyed of the space which it occupies in the thoughts and imaginations of the people,—beside it in character, for while our national trouble has no claim to the character of that kind of shock to the affections which the dreaded opening of a sudden grave in one's own home or family produces, it has much more in it of wide social and political significance, much more of that immediately intelligible meaning to the intellect and imagination of which the stunning blow of a private affliction so seldom admits. The gloom which this illness and danger bring with them to the nation at large is neither nearly so acute as that which would spring from a similar danger to every home, nor quite so mild as that which would be due to universal dread of a sad ending for the hero or heroine of a thoroughly popular fiction, like Dickens's Little Nell,—a dread which brought him, it will be remembered, hosts of letters pleading eagerly against her death. It is something between the two,--less purely imaginative than the latter, far less absorbing and paralys- ing than the former, but certainly of the two nearer the latter in degree and kind. The sufferings and griefs of the Royal Family constitute to Englishmen at large a sort of vivid parable of human calamity, into which we all enter the more deeply because we know it fascinates all alike,—a lesson in sympathy, not in fortitude, in geniality and breadth of feeling, not in patience or courage. Like the imaginative troubles of fiction, the sympathy which the griefs of the Royal Family excite in us is a feeling indefinitely strengthened, even in kind, by the number of those who share it, by the conspicuousness of the grief which calls it forth. Like that, again, it purifies, as it was said that all tragedy purifies, " by pity and by fear,"—pity for the sorrow which is so like our own, fear due to the lesson so vividly impressed on us that no elevation of rank or destiny can mitigate the severity of these bitterest of human sufferings. But then, on the other hand, the fact that the grief which calls out our sympathies is real and pre- sent, and not an artistic or represented trouble, makes it, of course, graver in one respect, though it is less vividly placed before us in others, than any merely painted sorrow. Still it cannot be doubted that the national pain and regret is nearer in kind to that elicited by a vivid story of human trouble, than to that duo' to the threatened breaking of our own closest ties.
Nevertheless, the language in which the public feeling has been expressed has been almost exclusively suitable to the keenest language of private affliction, the anguish of lacerated hearts; and this is mischievous not only because it is false, but because, being false, it throws an air of insincerity over the very different, but equally true, emotion which is really and univers- ally felt. Men who over-express their feelings or express them unfortunately are very apt to be thought destitute of the feeling they have, and that is unquestionably the tendency of the extra- vagant and indeed utterly inappropriate language in which the papers have been so freely indulging this week. Take, for instance, the following, from the Standard of Monday :—" Four days of unparalleled anxiety have now been spent, and a dread suspense still is master of the public bosom. We wait, and hold our breath ; read and despond, and then return and read again, and refuse to be utterly downcast. At such• a lacerating moment genuine comfort there can be none. But even in the midst of the national anguish it is something to be able to feel that this para- lysing blow, this overflow of grief, is making of us one family." The language could not possibly be intenser if war had brought death into every home. If it were true language, if we were really " holding our breath," if the sorrow we feel were really " anguish," if the blow were really "paralysing," we ought to be and should be quite unequal to reading with keen interest books like the biography of Charles Dickens, and George Eliot's and Mr. Trollope's serial tales, or discussing the Tichborne case, or the Megeera Commission, or the translation of Sir R. Collier to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Every one knows that these would not and could not be his real interests, if he were watching in terrible suspense by a bed where death was struggling with life for one in whose lot his own is bound up. When, there- fore, we find any one saying, as one of our public writers did expressly say, and many of them said in effect,—" We all stand within the Palace to-day. It is our home for the momeat, our hearth, the ceotre of oar hopes and .fears," we regret language so extravagant, because it tends to conceal, and even excite a revulsion against, the true sentiment of the nation. Even the Times., when it assumed on Saturday and Monday that there was nothing to which the nation could possibly attend except the Prince of Wales,—that all other subjects had lost their interest for Englishinen,—gave in far more than we should have expected of it to this mischievous temper of exaggeration, and con- tributed to the sentimentalism, as distinguised from the real sentiment of the moment, by writing in Belwerian capitals about the feelings of the Wife and the Mother for the Husband and the Son. No doubt a remark made by the Times on the same day, and which has, we think, been misinterpreted into an implied assertion of the divine right of Kings, is true, and has a valuable political drift,—we mean that the personal relation of the reign- ing family to the nation is closer, and probably more cordial, be- cause it is none of our masking, because it has come down to us as our family relationships come down to us, from a tradition of in- definite length and variety. Nobody can doubt that our national feeling for the troubles of the Royal Family is far keener than would be any feeling for the troubles of the family of a President chosen by ourselves, even though ho had been chosen for life, unless he were a man of great and very exceptional character, which had profoundly impressed itself on the affections of the people, and this it would be simply absurd to assert of the character of the Prince of Wales. President Lincoln, in a time of very great national trial, betrayed a homely magnanimity and equanimity which, no doubt, did make such an impression, in only four years' time, on the very heart of a":great people. The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, had he been not Prince of Wales, but by any political chance elected to succeed the present head of the English nation, and then fallen into this deadly sickness, would have roused in our hearts a kindly commiseration, but nothing more. It is, doubtless, the historical character of the tie, and the fact that we are compelled to think of him, even from his birth, as in a close relation to us, which creates half the strength of the relation, half that customary feeling of reciprocally belonging to each other, which, whatever men may say, lies at the root of almost all natural affection. To point out this is not in any sense an assertion of the divine right of Kings, but it is an assertion that a long past creates relations a great deal broader and stronger than we cau intellectually gauge, and the grasp of which reaches far beyond anything that the mere rationale of the relation would lead us to suppose. Nor can anything be more useful to us than to be made to feel from time to time that whatever anomalies may surround the political institutions into which the nation has grown, they gain, through the mere fact of long existence, a tenacity of hold upon us which it would he exceedingly difficult for any amount of wisdom and statesmanship to replace. In England at least, habit, and that dumb affection which springs out of habit, put forth, as it were, the mortar which holds the stones of the political edifice together, and if we were once to break up the tradition, it would be very long before reason could furnish us with a cement nearly as strong.
But the more clearly we recognize this, the more clearly are we bound to protest against the exaggeration of sentiment which reflects a certain amount of ridicule on the real feeling of the nation, and promotes strong reaction at the next available opportunity. The writers who have been ex- aggerating so extravagantly the intensity of the popular feeling, and writing as if business were almost neglected, work laid aside, politics forgotten, science and art emptied of their interest, and the English world exclusively employed in buying evening papers and running after bulletins, have contributed only to falsify a sincere interest, and create a feeling of disgust at the travesty of a valuable as well as honourable anxiety.
Previous page
