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With all his Italian sympathies and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense; for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central European politics.
Macleod had paid but little attention to stories of this kind when he had merely read them; but when the situation was visible when actual people were before him the whole thing looked more real, and his sympathies became active enough.
"Not at all. Quite the contrary. My certainties are on his side. My sympathies are on yours." "Because you think I need them." "Because I think you may." "In case I " "In case you should condemn yourself in the thing you're going to allow." "But what's it to be?" "That's for you to settle with yourself." He was silent a minute. When he spoke it was with some conviction.
I am very curious about it, and therefore about him. I want to know what has produced this strange state of feeling in a young man who ought to have all the common instincts of a social being. I believe there are unexplained facts in the region of sympathies and antipathies which will repay study with a deeper insight into the mysteries of life than we have dreamed of hitherto.
Hence many of our anti-tyranny agitations and philanthropies, not always beneficial to the subjects of them, and also many of our misplaced sympathies. We see a spider eating a fly, and long to crush the spider, while we shed a tear for the fly. But the spider is much the higher animal of the two. It labours long hours laying out a net, and then waits all day for the fruit of its toil.
To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.
Mill says, "a portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others; which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than other people; desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be a government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively."
Indeed, he put his strength to rude proofs in the many lessons which he always gave, and the many hours he spent at his own Piano. It is to be regretted that the indubitable advantage for the artist resulting from the cultivation of only a select audience, should be so sensibly diminished by the rare and cold expression of its sympathies.
On the contrary, I have found them joyful and even hilarious, broad in their views and sympathies, lovers of the good in literature and art. The mental and spiritual growth of students who left me years ago for a foreign field has greatly surprised me. Then they were boys; now they are men.
I will only pray my readers to believe that I have tried hard to cast prejudice aside in listening, in marking, and in recording; my opportunities of forming a deliberate judgment on the sympathies of all classes in this especial State were such as have fallen to the lot of very few strangers; and my observations ought, certainly, to have been the more accurate, from their field having been necessarily narrowed.
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