THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POPULAR EMOTION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5390, 6 July 1878, Page 3

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POPULAR EMOTION.

(From the Mfdical Examine c.)

There have been' few periods when an observant man has had more to note than is provided lor him by tho current of contemporaneous events. Excitement is in the air, while with every newspaper he' unfolds he expects to find some new surprise, some fresh alarm. Tho times are not conducive to calm observation,.but to hurried" collection, of facts aud 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. Tho humane portion r of society is, in reality, not so largo as a kindly natured man might conjecture, but the number of persons professing wide and gracious sympathies is very great. To pity tho distressed, and to relieve the suffering, to help the oppressed, and to encourage "the pursuer of freedom, would seem,-at first sight, to bo essential elements of a civilised man’s course of thought and action. But there Arc evidences of tho hour that arc 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 tho Turks. This feeling is not altogether identified with anxiety about British inter-

eats. It could not be that any body of men suppose the bulwark of British liberty and civilisation exists in the iutffable 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 lilco 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 inanglings and. mutilations, his trampling of all decency and humanity under his foul and obscene tread are 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 corpora villa on whom he wreaks his worst. The Turk’s chastiser, the Russian, is reminded of his doings iu Poland, in Circassia, in Siberia, not for the impeachment of the Russian, but for the acquittal of the Turk. Men of whose usual humanity there can be no doubt rejoice in the rough methods, so called, of Turkish repressions, and talk as if they, too, would not have shrunk from their shave of the horrors of Batak, of Ardahan, or Plevna. Or, again, take the Penge case, iu which the convicts do irly carried with them a vast amount of popular s’ympathy. It could not be that the thousands whose hands agreed to liberate the convicts from the penalty of their crime were all such ardent lovers of justice as to feel thatf Astnea had been insulted. Justice is too delicate a sentiment to be very common property. There was something else: there was an idea abroad that the victim, as an ill-tempered, ill-favored, 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 iu the like position, tied up tight to a poor .creature like Harriet Staunton, and perhaps shrank from quite thorougly contemplating what under the circumstances they would do. The convicts suggested a modus bungingly executed, but improveable. Or take the case again of the style 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 two, another gentleman thrust blades and bayonets down the upper part of his alimentary canal, a child gyrate in mid-air performing convulsive feats, and a girl of slight frame and alarmingly hilarious visage, fall a space of nearly one hundred feet. These spectacles- are not beautiful nor edifying. They do not inspire to.imitate, tbay idealise no emotion, theyrepresent.no possible facts or situations of ordinary life ; they are not funny, nor do they wake the awe of the tragic mood, yet they attract, and attract largely. The 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, arid some will not bo conscions of it, but the habitue of the place will regret his absence should he be absent what time the catastrophe occurs. The dull thud, the shrieks, the turmoil will satisfy Ins 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 he 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 training 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 pronqjts the Turcophile, the apologist for murder* 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 few yeais past. The motives seem to chime in with the revival of the past, characteristic of bur 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 ofbrutality, 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 tho 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.