THE SYMPATHETIC MAN

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2330, 17 September 1921, Page 4

THE SYMPATHETIC MAN

There are two things about sympathetic people which I make haste to note. In the first place, they arc people who, without any pretence of humility, have a sufficient conciousncss of their own failures. And in the next place ; they are not generally, in the hard, metallic sense, successful men. I do not think that successful men, especially those who owe a great deal to self-help, are very sympathetic souls. Not as a rule. They are likely to have small tenderness for the lad who stands where they stood twenty years before. “Let him fight his own battles as I had to fight mine. Whoever gave me a helping hand?” No doubt their own personal qualities do account very largely for their success, but they are apt to take all the credit to themselves and leave none for their friends or forbearers. If I were a youth with my way to make, while I would certainly learn what' I could from the successful, self-made man, I would not go to him expecting sympathy or any real help beyond the sight of his example, framed in gilt, and hung on principal wall. The sympathetic men are the men who know what it is to fail, or at least lo miss the first prize, and miss it more than once. Yet even here one has to be careful, for repeated failure may have the same hardening effect as uninterrupted success. Sympathetic people must be those whose lives have been neither all golden nor all leaden, neither a long' June nor a long December, but a bit of both, and something of April and October.

The same thing is true on the physical side. The man who had always had robust health is likely to be unsympathetic to those who are ill. He believes their neuralgia to be only toothaches, their influenzas to be only a cold in the head. Bless his life, if he had given way to every ache and pain, every hiccough and sneeze —and so on. On the other hand, I am not sure that invalids arc the most sympathetic people in the world. It comes rather as a shock to find a person, normally and unselfish, reduced by illness to a peevish and selfcentred condition. Very often in sickness and particularly in convalescence, it is not the invalid who needs sympathy so much as the rest of the household.

It needs a fine adjustment of fortune, therefore, to be a synipathetic man—-a very careful stropping of the razor, not too much on this, nor too much on that. —Harry Cooper, in the Sunday at Home.