Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett

      Introduction

      Compassion’s Edge

      A man fixes his gaze resolutely on something beyond the edge of the page, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration, his eyes a little downcast, his mouth slightly open, somewhere between apprehension and alarm (fig. 1). This is a sketch in black chalk by Charles Le Brun, Louis XIV’s favored painter, gathered in a collection used to teach other painters the proper representation of the passions. The drawing was not included in Le Brun’s original lecture in 1668, but by 1727 it had been bundled into a volume with those that were and coupled with a text narrating it as “compassion,” a label many subsequent critics have resisted on the grounds of the subject’s fierce and unyielding aspect. And indeed, the head is very distant from our imaginings of the compassionate, especially the compassionate as framed for us by the sympathetic and sentimental eighteenth century.¹ Yet within its seventeenth-century context, the man’s unyielding aspect is easier to understand: the drawing represents the austere masculine compassion central to discussions of the emotion in the seventeenth century, far from our current understandings of the term. In Compassion’s Edge, I restore the severe face of early modern compassion, and suggest what we lose if we turn away from its historical significance.

      This book pursues the varied inflections of the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration in 1685 with that edict’s revocation. But this is not a story about compassion overcoming difference; rather, it’s about compassion reinforcing divides. Where an eighteenth-century literature of sympathy is often imagined to usher in newly communal concerns, in earlier texts the language of fellow-feeling marks or even brings about isolation. Instead of being a precursor to eighteenth-century sensibility, early modern compassion stands as evidence of the persistently painful residues from France’s sixteenth-century wars. This emotional legacy continues to shape the way we think about difference and our emotional response to it today.

      Figure 1. Charles Le Brun. Compassion: man’s head in profile, facing left, 1690. White paper, black stone, 20.6 cm × 20.2 cm. INV28324-recto-folio34. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

      Compassion’s overarching affective grammar structures relations between the object of compassion and its subject, the compassionater. Yet this clear grammar of suffering and response could also pivot: the early modern adjectives piteux and pitoyable indicated both someone likely to show pity but also someone who should be shown it.² Compassion’s clarity is easily troubled by the fear that we might find ourselves no longer merely compassionate but rather the object of the compassion of others. Accordingly, much early modern writing about compassion attends anxiously to the proper disposition of the compassionate self, rather than to the suffering abounding in the period.³

      For seventeenth-century writers, the categorization of the passions was central to moral and political discourse. Many texts, especially from the middle of the century, devoted themselves to the repetitive but compelling task of defining and distinguishing the passions, determining their origin, their manifestation, and the best way to control