Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/686

670. Consider the pleasure given by a painting representing a scene which moves our sympathies, or the delight with which we read some work of fiction in which kindly emotions are dealt with, and it will be seen how large a portion of our æsthetic gratifications depend on our sympathy with others. The hard and selfish care little for art and nothing for fiction. How should we bear to lose the pleasures which painting and sculpture, music and fiction, afford us? How even should we bear to change the pleasures given by the kindly and sympathetic art of to-day for the harsher effects of the arts of harder times when only deeds of conquest or ceremonial observances were represented in paintings and sculptures, suggested in musical strains, or recited in story or in song? What material gains, what sensual gratifications, what power, wealth, or fame, would make up (to us) for the pleasure we derive from the higher emotions? and how largely do these depend on the sympathies by which men are moved to loving care for the well-being of their fellows!

It remains lastly to be noticed that as there should be thought for others, and for the just rights and interests of others in the family, in the society with which we are directly associated, and within the race or nation, so there should be a wider altruism having regard to the rights of other races and nations. Hitherto men have scarcely at all recognized this duty. Very gradually the sense of altruistic duty passed beyond the family to the community of families, and thence still widening to the nation formed of such communities. Men learned that as personal selfishness is in the long-run opposed to the true interests of self, so family selfishness is only a degree less pernicious. The selfishness of parochialism was in turn seen to be mischievous, though it is still prevalent enough. But the selfishness of what is called patriotism—though it is as unlike true patriotism as personal selfishness is unlike due and wise self-regard—still remains as a virtue in the minds of most men, though characterized by inherent defects akin to those which belong to personal, family, and parochial selfishness. Men fail, indeed, to recognize any selfishness in undue care for what is called a man's own country—though with but vague and indefinite meaning. Nay, a blind love of country is regarded as something so directly the converse of selfishness, that Sir Walter Scott speaks of the absence of this sort of patriotism as simple selfishness. After asking if the man lives with soul so dead as never to have said to himself, "This is my own, my native land?" he goes on to say that such a man, a "wretch concentered all in self," can be swelled by no minstrel music, and is bound to go unmourned and unsung to an unhonored grave. The idea that patriotism could under any circumstances be exaggerated, and become but a widened form of selfishness, would doubtless have outraged utterly Scott's sense of the fitness of things. Yet viewing matters from the outside, and, as far as possible, independently of inbred ideas, there is nothing except its wider range to