same fashion. It is well if the sufferer and his helper do not begin a quarrel that will last a lifetime, all because of the meddlesome self-sacrifice of the officious helper. For to the wretched any help is apt to seem officious, because no help is immediately and unconditionally successful.
So then, if you are tender-hearted, does tender-heartedness dictate all this waste of sympathy? Plainly not. Tender-heartedness need not say: My neighbor must be relieved. Tender-heartedness, as a personal affection of yours, says only: Satisfy me. And you can satisfy this affection if you forget about all those degraded wretches that are doomed to suffer, and associate with those blessed ones whose innocent joy shall make your tender heart glad of its own tenderness. Let us rejoice with those that do rejoice, and those that weep, let them take care of themselves in everlasting oblivion. Such is the dictate of tender-hearted selfishness; and our present point is the not at all novel thought, so often elaborated in George Eliot’s novels, the thought that, the tenderer the heart, the more exclusively selfish becomes this dictate of tender-heartedness. Very sensitive people, who cannot overcome their sensitiveness, are perforce selfish in this world of pain. They must forget that there is suffering. Their pity makes them cruel. They cannot bear the sight of suffering; they must shut the door upon it. If he is a Dives, such a man must first of all insist that the police shall prevent people like Lazarus, covered with sores, from lying in plain sight at the gate. Such men must treat pain as, in these days of
