OFFICIAL PESSIMISM
In this writer’s youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New
York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the
“Independent.” Its literary editor was Paul Elmer More, and he gave me a
chance to write book reviews for him--and then, alas! decided that he
could find other people whose writing he preferred. Mr. More evolved
into a critic, and has published I don’t know how many volumes of what
he calls the “Shelburne Essays.” Up to a few years ago, when Professor
Sherman made his appearance, I used to say that More was the one
literary conservative in America who was not intellectually
contemptible; the one man who combined scholarship with a perfectly
definite and consistent point of view, no sentimentality, and no
water-tight compartments in his brain.
In the third volume of the “Shelburne Essays” Mr. More has one dealing
with Byron’s “Don Juan.” I smile when I reflect with what contempt Mr.
More would greet the proposition that he should read a modern writer as
slangy, as licentious, and as popular as Byron! But “Don Juan” was
written a hundred years ago; so it is a “classic,” and Mr. More greets
its author as the last of the great pessimists, one who had the wit to
recognize the futility of human life, and the courage to speak his
conclusions plainly.
Things have changed since Byron’s day, Mr. More explains. “We, who have
approached the consummation of the world’s hope, know that happiness and
peace and the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down and brood
for ever more over the lot of mankind.” This, I had better explain, is
sarcasm on Mr. More’s part. He is irritated because modern scientific
people have presumed to think that human problems can be solved. He is
so much irritated that he turns his essay on Byron into a series of
sneers at “the new dispensation of official optimism.” For example, this
kind of thing:
Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which will
prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish
ignorance of man’s sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new
element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding
over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some
acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all
tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality
and a possession forever; some new philosophy of the soul will
convert the old poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale
and unprofitable.
What is the meaning of this attitude of envenomed resentment at the idea
of a hope for mankind? We shall note it again and again among the poets
and critics of the ancient regime--of what we may call “the old
dispensation of official pessimism.” It used to puzzle me that scholars
and thinkers should be so malicious and perverted as to find pleasure in
trampling upon human aspiration; but after years of pondering I think I
understand it. These gentlemen are guests at a banquet, who, seeing the
food too long delayed, and despairing of anything better, have filled
their bellies with husks and straw; and now, when they are full, and can
no longer eat, they see the good food coming to the table!
It was a perfectly natural thing for an ancient to be pessimistic. He
saw the world as a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces
which he did not understand; and what guarantee could he have that the
feeble intellect of man would ever tame these giants? So he made for
himself a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but
mournful despair. The scholars and lovers of old things have identified
themselves and their reputations with these ancient dignities and
renunciations, these tender and touching griefs; and how shall they
express their irritation when bumptious youth arises, and proceeds to
take charge of life, to abolish pestilence and famine, poverty, war,
crime--and perhaps, in the end, even old age and death?
All this is preliminary to the introduction of another Victorian poet;
one who moved me deeply in my youth, and still holds my undimmed
affection. I would choose Matthew Arnold as the perfect exemplar of the
“classical” attitude toward life; that is, resignation, at once pathetic
and heroic, to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth. Listen to him at
his best:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The author of these lines was the son of a great teacher, and therefore
had no money. He spent thirty years of his life as an inspector of
schools; a most pitiful destiny for a poet--traveling all over England
to hear little children recite the list of the kings and the counties,
and tell the number of legs on a spider. The fountain of his poetry
dried up, and he became a critic, not merely of English letters but of
English life; in many ways the most radical and most intelligent critic
that Victorian England had. He preached the gospel of sweetness and
light; also, alas, he went on the war-path against an infamous bill
which was being agitated in Parliament, to permit a man to violate the
old Mosaic code by marrying the sister of his deceased wife!
Matthew Arnold insisted that it wasn’t on account of Moses, but on
account of a thing he called “delicacy.” You cannot travel in Victorian
England without encountering phenomena like this. You will be introduced
to what appears to you a perfectly sane and self-contained and
cultivated gentleman, wearing exactly the correct frock-coat and tie;
but then, you will happen to touch one of his tribal taboos, and
suddenly he will shriek, and tear off his shirt, and pull out a sharp
knife, and begin to slash himself, and dance and whirl in a holy frenzy.
--Ogi, wishing to make sure about this point, goes to the source of all
information on the subject of refinement in sex matters. “Tell me,” he
says, “if you were to die, would it be indelicate of me to marry one of
your younger sisters?”
Mrs. Ogi, who has never read the Mosaic code, and is not learned in the
Victorian lunacies, looks at her husband with a puzzled expression. “I
helped to raise my sisters,” she says. “Surely any wife would want to
leave her husband in safe hands!”