The Modern Stoic: An Ill-natured Duologue.

(From the Outlook, 1913.)

“Well, I can only say that to my mind it’s just another appeal to false emotion; pandering to the softness of our times. This mawkish humanitarianism is undermining our virility. I protest against all this agitation and rot about suffering.”

“Suffering of others is what you mean, I believe?”

“How do you know they suffer?”

“Forgive me, but where there is all the prim facie evidence of suffering, it is surely ‘up’ to you to prove its non-existence. Now, if you yourself were to try these various experiences of animals which you tell us it is mawkish to concern ourselves about, then when you say they are nothing, we shall perhaps believe you.”

“Ah! Will you be good enough to suggest how I can do that?”

“Get yourself chained to your study chair—as a watchdog is to its kennel—for a year or so. You could then write convincingly on our morbidity for desiring to do away with your chain by law. ‘It is nothing,’ you would say; ‘no virile person——’ Or, better, cause yourself to be taken down a mine and kept there all your life working goodness knows how many hours a day, like one of those pit ponies, to gush about whose sufferings you told me was effeminate. The papers would be delighted to get a letter from your death-bed saying that it was all greatly exaggerated.”

“Your suggestions don’t excite me, so far.”

“Very well. Why not, in the interests of science, submit your body to some of the less exacting vivisections, in order that you may reinforce from personal experience your remarks about the squeamishness of cranks, and the efficacy of curare. For, think how much more valuable to us all experiments on the human you would be! I won’t go so far as to suggest that you should be killed for food; for even under the comparatively slow present methods, which, in contempt of morbid sensibility I suppose you would uphold, you would not be in a condition (though you might possibly have time) to write a letter to the paper saying that your suffering was really nothing. No! I should rather advise you to have little bits cut off your ears—a pity you have not a tail!—but the effect can well be got by having your hands tied behind you on a hot day in a fly-infested field. We should then get from you a definite pronouncement that the sufferings of being nicked and docked are nothing, instead of the mere contemptuous silence with which you at present regard our mawkish attempts to stop these processes. Oh! there are lots of things you could experience, so that your letters to the Press might acquire that convincing quality which at present seems to me rather lacking.”

“Quite finished? You forget a little, don’t you, that a human being is not an animal; so that if I followed your charming suggestions I should still be no nearer knowing whether or no animals suffer, as you say they do.”

“Oh! there’s no necessity for you to restrict your experiences to those which you advocate for animals. I’ve noticed that you are always complaining of the morbid twaddle talked about the sufferings of criminals, the unhappily married, and the poor. It would very much increase our respect for your pronouncements if you would cause yourself to be confined in a space eight feet by twelve, in your own company, for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, for those nine months, whose reduction not long ago, in the case of convicts, I remember you disapproved of. Or again, if you would marry a hopeless inebriate, or merely grow to hate your wife—a letter from you to some well-known journal to say that it was all really of no consequence would then be of incalculably greater value than it is at present. Or dare I hope that you might be induced to embrace the career of making match-boxes, or carding buttons, or sewing shirts or trousers for, say, twelve or fifteen hours a day, on a wage of seven shillings or so a week, in order that we might have the benefit of knowing that your strenuous remarks about the mawkishness of believing that the poor really suffer were inspired by a thorough and personal knowledge of the subject.”

“You’re unfortunate in your choice of sufferings. Those you mention are all necessary—society being what it is.”

“Oh! then you admit that they are sufferings?”

“To an extent—much exaggerated.”

“Very well! You have not yet, I perceive, grasped my points: First, what gives you the right to say these sufferings are necessary to society, and to interfere with our attempts to reduce them so far as we can? Secondly, what makes you an authority at all on the nature and degree of suffering?”

“I refuse to answer your first question, which I consider insolent. As to the second, which is also insolent, of what use is one’s imagination, if not to gauge the experiences of others without experiencing them oneself?”

“My dear sir, imagination is not, believe me, a mere capacity for failing to grasp what you have not yourself experienced. It is an active quality, and even when stretched to the utmost is a little liable to fall short of the poignancy of experience. Let me remind you of Poe’s tale about the man on whom the walls of a room gradually closed in. That tale, I am sure, made even you feel that his sufferings might not be nil—though I honestly believe it only roused you because it was so obviously romance. But do you think your imagination when you read the story really provided you with the intensity of the sensations of that man, especially at the moment when the walls were grinding his bones?”

“That was, as you say, romance. But you humanitarians are always magnifying and distorting into the dreadful what is very ordinary experience; your imaginations are your masters, not your servants. What you want is to be familiarized with the ordinary sights of Nature, and the look of blood; we shouldn’t then have all this namby-pambyism to put up with.”

“You recommend that we should be familiarized with the sight of blood? Might I suggest that no blood could be so educative as that of one who propounds the doctrine: Suffering is nil! Let your own blood flow for our enlightenment. Believe me, we shall pay a much more rapt attention to it than we should to that of any other creature.”

“That, as you well know, is an absurd suggestion.”

“Yes! Quite. But what I want you to appreciate is, how tiny the difference between us is. We think, that a man should make light of his own suffering, but make light the suffering of others. Now, transposing that first ‘of’ would make our philosophy identical with yours.”

“And how do you know that I have not sufferings, made light of—hidden from every one?”

“Have you? We have, you see, no means of knowing; and you must prove it if you wish for the luxury of having attention paid to you when you make light of suffering for others. But if indeed you have, are you not a most unhappy person in that you do not let a fellow-feeling make you wondrous kind?”

“Ah! I thought that was coming. Shall I tell you my opinion of you, sir? You are a sickly sentimentalist.”

“My feeling about you, is not so hackneyed. With your philosophy of: ‘I am all right. Let them suffer!’—you are—the Modern Stoic.”