Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows.

Fortunately I had been given a very good place. By my side sat the brown-eyed, proud beauty, the pretty niece, who had, after all, it appeared, noticed my admiring gaze in the pâtisserie, for she smiled at me kindly as at an old acquaintance. Her eyes were like coffee-beans, and, when she laughed, they really did seem to crackle like roasting beans. She had charming, translucent little ears beneath luxuriant dark hair; like pink cyclamen nestling in moss, I thought. She had bare arms, soft and smooth; they must be like peeled peaches to the touch.

When, eventually, sleep came, it can only have been a light, fitful sleep, during which my fears were still feverishly at work within me.

And yet that one angry look, that moment when I had perceived in the eyes of a crippled girl hitherto undreamed-of depths of human suffering, had rent something asunder within me, and I now felt a sudden warmth streaming through my being, precipitating that mysterious fever that was, and continued to be, as inexplicable to me as an illness always is to the sufferer.

It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.

And I could never take leave of her without her saying in a certain pleading way that shook me to the core, ‘You will come tomorrow, won’t you? You’re not angry with me because of all the stupid things I said today?’ At such moments I felt a kind of obscure amazement at the thought that I, who had, after all, given her nothing except my sincere sympathy, should possess so much power over another person.

that was the kind of person one ought to be, a person who’d rather be betrayed than betray — a decent, guileless person. That’s the only kind that’s blessed by God. All my wiles, he thought, haven’t made me happy. I’m still a lost soul who knows no peace. Leopold Kanitz walked on to the end of the street, a stranger to himself, and never had he felt more wretched than on this day of his greatest triumph.

After experiencing profound emotions one sleeps profoundly. It was not until I awoke next morning that I realized how completely bemused I had been both by the sultriness preceding the storm and by the overcharged atmosphere of my conversation of the night before. Starting up out of unfathomable depths, I stared at first in bewilderment at my familiar room, and made vain efforts to recollect when and how I had fallen into sleep of this depth.

Yes, I know, I know that you only weakened out of pity, out of the best possible motives. But — and I think I’ve already once warned you on this score — pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heart, off it. It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison.

But there are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond. It is only when one goes on to the end, to the extreme, bitter end, only when one has an inexhaustible fund of patience, that one can help one’s fellows.

Even in my own circle it always caught me on the raw to hear money spoken of contemptuously in my presence just as if it grew like thistles. This was my sore spot. In this respect I was lame, I walked on crutches. It was solely for this reason that I was so immoderately upset by the fact that this spoiled, pampered creature, who herself suffered all the pangs of hell at being at such a physical disadvantage, should not understand my feelings.

the desire to take my revenge on someone for innumerable minor humiliations had suddenly overwhelmed me, and I struck out, blindly, heedlessly, as one always does in anger, without realizing how hard I was hitting.

They must all have seen through the whole thing from the very start — the old man and Ilona and Josef and the other servants. They must all long since have suspected her love, her passion, viewed it with alarm, no doubt with foreboding. I alone had had no inkling of it, I, the foolish slave of my pity, who had played the role of the good, kind, blundering comrade, who had joked like a clown and never noticed that my blindness, my incomprehensible lack of perception, had been excruciating torture to her ardent soul. Just as in a cheap farce the sorry hero is the centre of an intrigue, the ramifications of which everyone in the audience has long since realized, and only he, poor innocent, goes on playing in deadly earnest, blissfully unaware of the net in which he is entangled

But there is no escape. The dark thoughts, those restless rats, gnawing their way through the black shell of sleep, burrow even into your dreams, the same thoughts over and over again, and when you awake in the morning you feel as though you have been drained and sucked dry by vampires.

And then I had a stroke of luck, the sort of luck that only comes your way after you’ve drawn a hundred thousand blanks: the Consul happened to walk across the waiting-room, and who should he turn out to be but Elemèr von Juhácz, whom I had met God knows how many times at the Jockey Club. He seized me by both hands and immediately invited me to his club, and then, by another stroke of luck, one stroke after another — I’m only telling you all this so you can see how many strokes of luck are needed to pull chaps like us out of the mire — my present wife was there.

I felt as though Condor had stabbed me to the heart with one of his fine, sharp needles. For I had long since subconsciously felt what he was now saying, but had not allowed myself to think it.

From the moment I knew that there was a limit to what was expected of me I felt a kind of fresh strength.

I let it happen, powerless, defenceless, yet subconsciously ashamed at the thought of being loved so infinitely, while for my part feeling nothing but shy confusion, an embarrassed thrill.

Once more my pity had been stronger than my will. I had yielded myself up. I no longer belonged to myself.

And behold, there sat a girl in a chaise-longue whom I scarcely recognized, so gaily did she look up, such brightness emanated from her. She was wearing a dress of pale blue silk which made her look more girlish, more childish than ever. In her auburn hair gleamed white blossoms — were they myrtle? — and arranged round her chair were baskets of flowers, a gaily coloured hedge.

Oh that night, I cannot describe it! Wild thoughts, confused images, chasing madly through my brain, and I myself dead-tired and yet wakeful, waiting and waiting with every nerve in my body, listening to every step on the stairs and in the corridor, to every ring and clatter in the street, to every movement and every sound, and at the same time reeling with weariness, washed out, worn out, and then, at last, sleep, far too deep, too long a sleep, timeless as death, abysmal as nothingness.

To have the death of a human being on one’s conscience no longer meant the same to a man who had been to the front as to a man of the pre-war era. In the vast blood-bath of the war my own private guilt had been absorbed into the general guilt;