Part 3

As concerns emotions connected with Religion, the contagion of them has been notorious in all ages, for good or evil, according to the character of the religion in question. The intoxication of the dances of old Mænads and the modern Dervishes, the shrieks and self-woundings of the priests of Baal and Cybele, the frenzied scenes of sacrifice to Moloch and the Aztec gods, and a hundred other examples will occur to every reader. Probably those on the largest scale of all recorded in history were the first Crusades, when “Europe precipitated itself on Asia” in a delirium of religious enthusiasm caught from Peter the Hermit and Bernard of Clairvaux. The outbursts of the Anabaptists, the Flagellants and Prophets of the Cevennes, in Christendom, and of Moslem fanatics under Prophets and Mahdis (of which we have probably by no means heard the last), and finally the Revivals of various sects in England and America, and the triumphs of the Salvation Army, are all instances of the part played by the contagion of emotion in the religion of the community at large. I shall speak hereafter of its share in personal religious experience.

In much smaller matters than religion, and where no explosion reveals the contagion of sentiments, it is yet often possible to trace the spread of an emotion, good or bad, from one individual of a family or village to all the other members or inhabitants. It suffices for some spiteful boy or idle girl to call a miserable old woman a witch, or to express hatred of some foreigner or harmless eccentric, to set afloat prejudices which end in something approaching to persecution of the victims, who may be thankful they did not live two hundred years ago, when, instead of being boycotted, they would have been burned. A child in a school or large household who has the misfortune to be lame or ugly, or to exhibit any peculiarity physical or mental, may, without any fault on its side, become obnoxious to the blind dislike of a stupid servant or jealous step-mother, and then—the contagion spreading and intensifying as it extends—to the common hatred of the little community,—a hatred justifying itself by the sullenness or deceptions to which the poor victim at last is driven. Even domestic animals suffer from this kind of contagious dislike, and benefit on the other hand by contagious admiration and fondness.[9] “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” is true in more senses than one.

We need not pursue this part of the subject further. Every day’s experience may supply fresh illustrations of the immense influence of contagion in the development of all human emotions. Nor is it by any means to be set down as a weakness peculiar to or characteristic of a feeble mind to be blindly susceptible of such contagion. Even the strongest wills are bent and warped by the winds of other men’s passions, persistently blowing in given directions. Original minds, gifted with what the French call _l’esprit primesautier_, are perhaps, indeed, affected rather more than less than commonplace people by the emotions of those around them, because their larger natures are more open to the sympathetic shock. Like ships with all sails set, they are caught by every breeze. It is a question of degree how _much_ each man receives of influence from his neighbors; but (to use the new medical barbarism) we are never “immune” altogether from the contagion.

We may now approach our proper subject of the Education of the Emotions, carrying with us the important fact that no means are so efficacious in promoting good ones as the wise employment of the great agency of Contagion; and, further, that this contagion works only by exhibiting the genuine emotion to the person we desire to influence. Only by being brave can we inspire courage. Only by reverencing holy things can we communicate veneration. Only by being tender and loving can we move other hearts to pity and affection.

Let us glance over the variety of circumstances wherein great good might be effected by systematic attention to the natural laws of the development of the emotions. We may begin by considering those connected with the education of the young.

In the first place, parents duly impressed with the importance of the subject would carefully suppress, or at least conceal, such of their own emotions as they would regret to see caught up by their children. At present, numberless sufficiently conscientious fathers and mothers, who would be horrified at the suggestion of placing books teaching bad lessons in the hands of their sons and daughters, yet carelessly allow them to witness (and of course to receive the contagion of) all manner of angry, envious, cowardly, and scornful emotions, just as they chance to be called out in themselves. It would be to revolutionize many homes to induce parents to revise their own sentiments, with a view to deciding which they should communicate to their children. In one way in particular, the result of such self-questioning might be startling. Every good father desires his son to respect his mother, and would be sorry to teach him only the half of the Fifth Commandment—_in words_. Yet how do scores of such well-meaning men set about conveying the sentiment of reverence which they recognize will be invaluable to their sons? They treat those same mothers, in the presence of those same sons, with such rudeness, dismiss their opinions with such levity, and perhaps exhibit such actual contempt for their wishes that it is not in nature but that the boy will receive a lesson of disrespect. His father’s feelings, backed up as they are by the disabilities under which the Constitution places women, can scarcely fail to impress the young mind with that contempt for women in general, and for his mother in particular, which is precisely the reverse of chivalry and filial piety.

Almost as important as the contagion of parental emotion is that of the sentiments of Teachers; yet on this subject nobody seems to think it needful even to institute inquiries. So far as I can learn, the sole question asked nowadays when a professor is to be appointed to a Chair at the Universities is, “Whether he be the man among the candidates who knows most [or rather who _has the reputation_ of knowing most] of the subject which he proposes to teach?” This point being ascertained, and nothing serious alleged against his moral conduct, the fortunate gentleman receives his appointment as a matter of course. Even electors who personally detest the notorious opinions of the professor on religion or politics acquiesce cheerfully in the choice; apparently satisfied that he will carve out to his students the particular pound of knowledge he is bound to give them, and not a drop of blood besides. The same principle, I presume (I have little information on the subject), prevails in schools generally, as it does in private education. A professor or governess is engaged to instruct boys or girls, let us say in Latin, History, or Physiology, and it is assumed that he or she will act precisely like a teaching machine for that particular subject, and never step beyond its borders. A little common sense would dissipate this idle presumption,—supposing it to be really entertained, and that the mania for cramming sheer knowledge down the throats of the young does not make their elders wilfully disregardful of the moral poison which may filter along with it. Every human being, as I have said, exercises some influence over the emotions of his neighbor; but that of a Teacher, especially if he be a brilliant one, over his students, often amounts to a contagion of enthusiasm throughout the class. His admirations are adored, the objects of his sneers despised, and every opinion he enunciates is an oracle. And it is these professors and teachers, forsooth, whose opinions on ethics, theology, and politics it is not thought worth while to ascertain before installing them in their Chairs to become the guides of the young men and women who are the hope of the nation!

It does not require any direct, or even indirect, inculcation of _opinion_ on the teacher’s part to do mischief. It is the contagion of his emotions which is to be feared, if those emotions be base or bad. Let him teach History and betray his enthusiasm for selfish and sanguinary conquerors, or justify assassins and anarchists, or jest—Gibbon fashion—at martyrs and heroes, will he not communicate those base sentiments to his young audience? Or let him teach Science, and convey to every student’s mind that deification of mere knowledge, that insolent sense of superiority in the possession of it, that remorseless determination to pursue it regardless of every moral restraint, which is too often the “note” of modern scientism, will the instruction he affords to his students’ brains counterbalance the harm he will do to their hearts?

And, on the other hand, what a splendid vantage-ground for the dissemination not merely of knowledge, but of elevated feelings, is that of a Teacher! Merely in teaching a dead or modern language, a fine-natured man communicates his own glowing feelings respecting the masterpieces of national literature which it is his duty to expound.

The last point we need notice as regards the contagion of emotions among the young is the subject of Companions. Here again, as in the case of respect for mothers, there is great unanimity in theory. Every one admits that bad companions are ruinous for boys or girls. But, when it comes to taking precautions against the herding of innocent and well-nurtured children with others who have been familiar with vice, I see little trace of the anxious care and discrimination which ought to prevail. Nay, in the case of the children of the poor, it seems to me the law is often wickedly applied to compel good parents to send them, against their own will and convictions, to sit beside companions who have come straight to school out of slums of filth, moral and physical. I have known Americans argue that it is right for children of all classes to associate together, so that the well-trained may communicate good ideas to the ill-trained. The reasoning appears to be on a par with a proposal to send healthy people to sleep in a cholera hospital. But, while we allow ourselves to be terrified beyond bounds by alarms about the infection of bodily disease, we take hardly any precautions against the more dreadful, and quite as real, infection of moral corruption.[10]

The general sentiment of boys and youths in the great public schools and colleges of England—thanks to the high-minded Masters who have been at their head—is, on the whole, good and honorable. It may be taken for granted that a boy from Harrow, Eton, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster, or Uppingham, and _a fortiori_ a man from Oxford or Cambridge, will despise lying and cowardice and admire fair play and justice. How grand a foundation for national character has thus been laid! What a debt do we owe alike to the Masters and the “Tom Browns” who have communicated the contagion of such noble emotions! In Continental _lycées_ and academies, public opinion among the boys is, by all accounts, wofully inferior to that which is current in our great schools. There has never been an Arnold in a French Rugby.

As regards girls, their doubly emotional natures make it a matter of moral life and death that their companions (of whose emotions they are perfectly certain to experience the contagion) should be pure and honorable-minded. It is most encouraging to every woman who reads Mrs. Pfeiffer’s masterly new book, “Women and Work,” to see the rising generation of girls displaying such splendid abilities and zeal for instruction, and—as Mrs. Pfeiffer amply proves—without paying for it in loss of bodily vigor. Fain would I see the “blessed Damozels,” who are still standing behind the golden bars of noble homes, all flocking to the new colleges for women, as their brothers do to Christchurch and Trinity, there to imbibe parallel sentiments of truthfulness and _pluck_, more precious than Greek, Latin, or mathematics!

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.

And of all this the entire working class of the nation is systematically deprived! Formerly it was only in cases of extreme poverty, where the crowded lodging was an altogether unfit place to nurse the sufferer, that recourse was had to the public Hospitals. Now it has become the invariable practice the moment that illness, even of non-infectious kind, declares itself, to send straight away to the hospital artisans, small tradesmen, and farmers from their own comfortable abodes, servants from the large and airy houses where they have labored faithfully, and even children from their mothers’ arms. It is not a mere matter of conjecture that such a custom must do harm and weaken the sense of family obligation. It is a fact that it has done so already, and is doing so more every day. Sons and daughters place their blind and palsied parents in asylums; wives send their husbands in a decline to Brompton Hospital; and it has become a surprising piece of filial devotion if a daughter remain at home to take care of a bed-ridden mother, even when her means fully permit of such sacrifice of time. What deadly injury is all this to the hearts of men, women, and children!