THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POPULAR EMOTION.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1360, 24 June 1878, Page 3

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POPULAR EMOTION.

[“Medical Examiner.”] There has been few periods when an observant man has had more to note than is provided for him by the current of contemporary events. Excitement is in the air, while with every newspaper he unfolds he expects to find some new surprise, some fresh alarm. The times are not conducive to calm observation, but to hurried collection of facts and thoughts which some calmer period may allow him to elaborate. It necessarily forms part of the shocks of the hour that many tolerably steady principles should be shaken, and some progress be temporarily checked. The humane portion of society is, in reality, not so large as a kindly natured man might conjecture, but the number of persons professing wide and gracious sympathies is very great. To pity the distressed, and to relieve the suffering, to help the oppressed, and to encourage the pursuer of freedom, would seem, at first sight, to be essential elements of a civilieed man’s course of thought and action. But there are evidences of the hour that are out of joint with these acknowledged axioms of procedure. We may note just now a slight dash of brutality in the social mixture. Take the case of sympathy with the Turks. This feeling is not altogether identified with anxiety about British interests. It could not be that any body of men suppose the bulwark of British liberty and civilisation exists in the ineffable rottenness of the Ottoman Empire —an Empire that, after sheltering itself for a few months behind a few casual mud-heaps, is tumbling to pieces like a child’s house of cards. Low forms of life are tenacious of their existence, but here at any rate is a low form of political life that has been washed away before any serious attempt has been made to extinguish it. As an ally, every Englishman of reasonable education must have known that the Turk’s alliance is a worm eaten stay. Notwithstanding, the Turk has received sympathy. His rapes, his manglings and mutilations, his tramping of all decency and humanity under his foul and obscene tread are admired. The sufferings of his victims, the abominations of his lust are the stock of the West-end joke, or the cultured sneer. They are, it is urged, but co rpora v'dta on whom he wreaks his worst. The Turk’s chastiser, the Russian, is reminded of his doings in Poland, in Circassia, in Siberia, not for the impeachment of the Russian, but fur the acquittal of the Turk. Mon of whoso usual humanity there can bo no doubt rejoice in the rough methods, so called, of Turkish repression, and talk as if they, too, would not have shrunk from their share of the horrors of Batak, of Arduhan, or Plevna. Or, again, take the Pengo ease, in which the convicts clearly carried with them a vast amount of popular sympathy. It could not bo that the thousands whose hands agreed to liberate the convicts from the penalty of their crime wore all such ardent lovers of justice as to feel that Astnca had been insulted. Justice is too delicate a sentiment to bo very common property. There was something else—(here was an idea abroad that the victim, as an iil-tcmpercd, illfavoured, crack-brained sot, was fit for her fate. Conformably to this idea too close scrutiny into the method of riddance was deprecated. Men imagined themselves in the like position, tied up tight to a poor creature like Harriet Staunton, and perhaps shrink from quite thoroughly contemplating what under the circumstances they would do. Tho convicts suggested a modus operandi, bunglingly executed, but improvable. Or take the case again of the stylo of entertainment popular, say, at the Aquarium. Here, for a shilling, one can see a gentleman sit upon his own head, another gentleman perform more with one leg than millions of his fellows can execute with twos, another gentleman thrust blades and bayonet, down the upper part of his alimentary canal, o child gyrate in mid air performing convulsive feats, and a girl of slight frame and alarmingly hilarious visage', full a space ox nearly lOUft. These spectacles are not beautiful nor edifying. They do not inspire to im|tato, they idealise no emotion, they represent no possible facts or situations of ordinary life; they are not funny, nor do they wake tho awe of the tragic mood, yet they attract, and attract largely. Tho reason is tolerably evident. It is the same which prompts the Englishman in Eugene Sue’s terrible novel, to .follow the leopard tamer from town to town, hoping to see the leopard mangle his owner

at last. None would readily acknowledge the motive, and some will not bo conscious of it, but the habitue of the place will regret his absence should ho bo absent what time the catastrophe occurs. The dull thud, the shrieks, the turmoil will satisfy his soul; his shillings will have been redeemed. These are but brief instances of the passion of the hour. Others are unnecessary, but the motive power subjacent is not easy of analysis It is not the same feeling that thrills the listener when tragedy culminates in climax, and ho thanks his stars that his fate is not that of a Macbeth, an Overreach, a Faustus. Here he contemplates a state of things at all times possible even to himself, from which present freedom is enjoyable. And, perhaps, the most subtle of all enjoyments is the contemplation of fictitious misery. The misfortunes of others are in themselves agreeable to us, and while our moral (raining teaches us to detest the delight, there is always enough of the old leaven remaining to account for the pleasures of tragic spectacle. This is not the feeling that prompts the Turcophile, the apologist for murdor, the lover of acrobatic perils. These persons, so far as they represent the emotions of the hour, seem to be moved by the backward set which has characterised surface feelings these f;w years past. The motives seem to chime in with the revival of the past, characteristic of our time. It has become fashionable to sneer at generous emotion—if it be shared by masses of people. With the sneer naturally come the low apologetics of brutality, and the enjoyment of sensational feats performed in an atmosphere of danger. The facts and their motives are ephemeral —a better mind will soon return ; but while they are at their flow the observation of them is interesting, while it is still more interesting that an echo of the past is still so powerful as to command attention.