Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/112

 for mercy without thought or purpose of pleading. The man whose thought is thus gloriously done into words is as other men are, only with a better brain and heart than the common, with more of mind and compassion, with better eye to see and quicker pulse to beat, with a more generous intellect and a finer taste of things; and his chance companion of a night is no ruined angel or self-immolated sacrifice, but a girl who plies her trade like any other trade, without show or sense of reluctance or repulsion; there is no hint that she was first made to fit better into a smoother groove of life, to run more easily on a higher line of being; that anything seen in prospect or retrospect rebukes or recalls her fancy into any fairer field than she may reach by her present road. All the open sources of pathetic effusion to which a common shepherd of souls would have led the flock of his readers to drink and weep and be refreshed, and leave the medicinal wellspring of sentiment warmer and fuller from their easy tears, are here dried up. This poor hireling of the streets and casinos is professionally pitiable; the world's contempt of her fellow tradeswomen is not in itself groundless or unrighteous; there is no need to raise any mirage about her as of a fallen star, a glorious wreck; but not in that bitterest cry of Othello's own agony—"a sufferance panging as soul and body's severing"—was there a more divine heat of burning compassion than the high heart of a man may naturally lavish, as in this poem, upon such an one as she is. Iago indeed could not share it, nor Roderigo; the naked understanding cannot feel this, nor the mere fool of flesh apprehend it; but only in one or the other of these can all sense be dead of "the pity of it."