e truths. Our ears would surely burn at
their eloquence.

_A Sense of Universal Pity_

Nearly everybody can "feel sorry"--some, extremely so! Lots of people
can exclaim, "How ghastly!" in front of a mangled corpse--and then pass
shudderingly on their way with a prayer in their hearts that the dead
body isn't their own, nor one belonging to their friends and
acquaintances. But very few people, it seems to me, possess what I will
call a sense of universal pity, which is the intuition to know and
sympathise with people "who have never had a chance"; with men and women
who have never had "their little day"; with the poor, and hungry, and
needy; with those whom the world condemns, and the righteous consider
more worthy of censure than of pity. That is to say, while nearly
everybody can sympathise with a tragedy so palpable that a dog could
perceive it, there are very few people who can sympathise with the misery
which lies behind a smiling face, that sorrow of the "soul" which would
sooner die than be found out. They can realise the tragedy of a broken
back, but they cannot realise the tragedy of a broken heart, still less
of a broken spirit. And if that heart and that spirit struggle to hide
their unshed tears behind a mask of cheerfulness, or bravado, or
assumed--and sometimes very real--courage, they neither can perceive it
nor realise it, and the well-spring of their sympathy, should it be
pointed out to them, is a very faint and uncertain trickle indeed. Most
of us like to take the sorrows of other people merely at their face
value, and if the face be cheerful our imagination does not pierce behind
that mask to take, as it were, the secret sorrow in its all-loving arms.
But personally, to my mind, the easiest sorrows of all to bear are the
sorrows which need not be hidden, which, maybe, cannot be hidden, and
which bring all our friends and neighbours around us in one big echoing
wail. The sorrows which are the real tragedies are the sorrows which we
carry in our hearts every hour of our lives, which stalk beside us in our
days of happy carelessness, and add to the misery of our days of woe. We
do not speak of them--they are too personal for that. We could not well
describe them--their history would be to tell the whole story of our
lives. But we know that they are there nevertheless. And the men or
women who are our intimates, if they do not perceive something of this
shadow behind our smiles, can nev