the weakening of earthly happiness, and that her ministers have
systematically disparaged the things of this world in order to
quicken our desire for things eternal, it might suffice to hint that
Christianity is a large word, and represents at present a great many
different phases of thought. Mr. Arnold objected, rationally enough,
to the lugubrious hymns from which the English middle classes are
wont to draw their spiritual refreshment; and Dr. Holmes, it will be
remembered, has spoken quite as strongly in regard to their depressing
influence upon New England households. But Christianity and the modern
hymn-book are by no means synonymous terms, and to claim that the
early church deliberately lowered the scale of human joy is a very
different and a very grave charge, and one which Mr. Pater, in Marius
the Epicurean, has striven valiantly to refute. With what clear and
delicate touches he paints for us the innocent gayety of that new
birth,--a gayety with no dark background, and no heart-breaking limits
of time and space. Compared to it, the sombre and multitudinous rites
of the Romans and the far-famed blitheness of the Greeks seem incurably
narrow and insipid. The Christians of the catacombs were essentially
a cheerful body, having for their favorite emblem the serene image of
the Good Shepherd, and believing firmly that “grief is the sister of
doubt and ill-temper, and beyond all spirits destroyeth man.” If in the
Middle Ages the Church apparently darkened earth to brighten heaven,
it was simply because she took life as she found it, and strove, as
she still strives, to teach the only doctrine of compensation that the
tyranny of facts cannot cheaply overthrow. The mediæval peasant may
have been less badly off, on the whole, than we are generally pleased
to suppose. He was, from all accounts, a robust, unreasoning creature,
who held his neck at the mercy of his feudal lord, and the rest of his
scanty possessions at the discretion of the tax-gatherer; but who had
not yet bared his back to the intolerable sting of that modern gadfly,
the professional agitator, and socialistic champion of the poor. Yet
even without this last and sorest infliction, it is probable that life
was to him but little worth the living, and that religion could not
well paint the world much blacker than he found it. There was scant
need, in his case, for disparaging the pleasures of the flesh; and
hope, lingering alone in his Pandora box of troubles, saved him from
utter annihilation by pointing steadily beyond the doors of death.
As a matter of fact, the abstract question of whether our present
existence be enjoyable or otherwise is one which creeds do not
materially modify. A pessimist may be deeply religious like Pascal and
Châteaubriand, or utterly skeptical like Schopenhauer and Hartmann,
or purely philosophical like faint-hearted Amiel. He may agree with
Lamennais, that “man is the most suffering of all creatures;” or with
Voltaire, that “happiness is a dream, and pain alone is real.” He
may listen to Saint Theresa, “It is given to us either to die or to
suffer;” or to Leopardi, “Life is fit only to be despised.” He may read
in the diary of that devout recluse, Eugénie de Guérin that “dejection
is the ground-work of human life;” or he may turn over the pages of
Sir Walter Raleigh, and see how a typical man of the world, soldier,
courtier, and navigator, can find no words ardent enough in which to
praise “the workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business
of a wretched life.” I do not mean to imply that Leopardi and Eugénie
de Guérin regarded existence from the same point of view, or found the
same solace for their pain; but that they both struck the keynote of
pessimistic philosophy by recognizing that, in this world at least,
sorrow outbalances joy, and that it is given to all men to eat their
bread in tears. On the other hand, if we are disinclined to take this
view, we shall find no lack of guides, both saints and sinners, ready
to look the Sphinx smilingly in the face, and puzzle out a different
answer to her riddle.
Another curious notion is that poets have a prescriptive right to
pessimism, and should feel themselves more or less obliged, in virtue
of their craft, to take upon their shoulders the weight of suffering
humanity. Mr. James Sully, for instance, whose word, as a student of
these matters, cannot be disregarded, thinks it natural and almost
inevitable that a true poet should be of a melancholy cast, by reason
of the sensitiveness of his moral nature and his exalted sympathy for
pain. But it has yet to be proved that poets are a more compassionate
race than their obscurer brethren who sit in counting-houses or brew
beer. They are readier, indeed, to moralize over the knife-grinder,
but quite as slow to tip him the coveted sixpence. Shelley, whose soul
swelled at the wrongs of all mankind, did not hesitate to inflict
pain on the one human being whom it was his obvious duty to protect.
But then Shelley, like Carlyle, belonged to the category of reformers
rather than to the pessimists; believing that though the world as he
saw it was as bad as possible, things could be easily mended by simply
turning them topsy-turvy under his direction. Now the pessimist proper
is the most modest of men. He does not flatter himself for a moment
that he can alter the existing state of evil, or that the human race,
by its combined efforts, can do anything better than simply cease to
live. He may entertain with Novalis a shadowy hope that when mankind,
wearied of its own impotence, shall efface itself from the bosom of the
earth, a better and happier species shall fill the vacant land. Or he
may believe with Hartmann that there is even less felicity possible in
the coming centuries than in the present day; that humanity is already
on the wane; that the higher we stand in the physical and intellectual
scale the more inevitable becomes our suffering; and that when men
shall have thrown aside the last illusion of their youth, namely, the
hope of any obtainable good either in this world or in another, they
will then no longer consent to bear the burden of life, but, by the
supreme force of their united volition, will overcome the resistance
of nature, and achieve the destruction of the universe. But under no
circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain,
can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.
To return to the poets, however, it is edifying to hear Mr. Leslie
Stephen assert that “nothing is less poetical than optimism,” or to
listen to Mr. John Addington Symonds, who, scanning the thoughtful soul
for a solution of man’s place in the order of creation, can find for
him no more joyous task than, Prometheus-like,
“To dree life’s doom on Caucasus.”
Even when a poem appears to the uninitiated to be of a cheerful, not to
say blithesome cast, the critics are busy reading unutterable sadness
between the lines; and while we smile at Puck, and the fairies, and
the sweet Titania nursing her uncouth love, we must remember that the
learned Dr. Ulrici has pronounced the Midsummer Night’s Dream to be
a serious homily, preached with grave heart to an unthinking world.
But is Robin Goodfellow really a missionary in disguise, and are the
poets as pessimistic in their teaching as their interpreters would
have us understand? Heine undoubtedly was, and Byron pretended to be.
Keats, with all the pathos of his shadowed young life, was nothing of
the sort, nor was Milton, nor Goethe, nor Wordsworth; while Scott,
lost, apparently, to the decent requirements of his art, confessed
unblushingly that fortune could not long play a dirge upon his buoyant
spirits. And Shakespeare? Why, he was all and everything. Day and
night, sunlight and starlight, were embraced in his affluent nature. He
laid his hand on the quivering pulses of the world, and, recognizing
that life was often in itself both pleasant and good, he yet knew, and
knew it without pain, that death was better still. Look only at the
character of Horatio, the very type of the blithe, sturdy, and somewhat
commonplace young student, to whom enjoyment seems a birthright,--
“A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks.”
Yet it is to this man, of all others, that the dying Hamlet utters the
pathetic plea,--
“If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.”
Here at last is a ray of real light, guiding us miles away from the
murky paths of modern French and English poetry, where we have stumbled
along, growing despondent in the gloom. To brave life cheerfully, to
welcome death gladly, are possible things, after all, and better worth
man’s courage and convictions than to dree on Caucasus forever.
It is ludicrous to turn from the poets to the politicians, but nowadays
every question, even the old unanswered one, “Is life worth living?”
must needs be viewed from its political standpoint. What can be more
delightful than to hear Mr. Courthope assert that optimism is the
note of the Liberal party, while the Conservatives are necessarily
pessimistic?--especially when one remembers the genial utterance
of Mr. Walter Bagehot, contending that the very essence of Toryism
is enjoyment. “The way to be satisfied with existing things is to
enjoy them.” Yet Sir Francis Doyle bears witness in his memoirs that
the stoutest of Tories can find plenty to grumble at, which is not
altogether surprising in a sadly ill-regulated world; and while the
optimistic Liberal fondly believes that he is marching straight along
the chosen road to the gilded towers of El Dorado, the less sanguine
Conservative contents himself with trying, after his dull, practical
fashion, to step clear of some of the ruts and quagmires by the way. As
for the extreme Radicals,--and every nation has its full share of these
gentry,--their optimism is too glittering for sober eyes to bear. A
classical tradition says that each time Sisyphos rolls his mighty stone
up the steep mountain side he believes that it will reach the summit;
and, its ever-repeated falls failing to teach him any surer lesson, his
doom, like that of our reforming brothers, is softened into eternal
hope. But it may at least be questioned whether the other inhabitants
of Tartarus--none of whom, it will be remembered, are without their
private grievances--do not occasionally weary of the dust and racket,
and of the great ball forever thundering about their ears, as it rolls
impotently down to the level whence it came.
The pessimist, however,--be it recorded to his credit,--is seldom an
agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he
does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced. We
have, indeed, an anecdote of Dr. Johnson, who broadly asserted upon
one occasion that no one could well be happy in this world, whereupon
an unreasonable old lady had the bad taste to contradict him, and to
insist that she, for one, was happy, and knew it. “Madam,” replied
the irate philosopher, “it is impossible. You are old, you are ugly,
you are sickly and poor. How, then, can you be happy?” But this, we
think, was rather a natural burst of indignation on the good doctor’s
part than a distinct attempt at proselytizing, though it is likely
that he somewhat damped the boasted felicity of his antagonist.
Schopenhauer, the great apostle of pessimism, while willing enough to
make converts on a grand scale, was scornfully unconcerned about the
every-day opinions of his every-day--I was going to say associates, but
the fact is that Schopenhauer was never guilty of really associating
with anybody. He had at all times the courage of his convictions, and
delighted in illustrating his least attractive theories. Teaching
asceticism, he avoided women; despising human companionship, he
isolated himself from men. A luminous selfishness guided him through
life, and saved him from an incredible number of discomforts. It was
his rule to expect nothing, to desire as little as possible, and to
learn all he could. Want, he held to be the scourge of the poor, as
_ennui_ is that of the rich; accordingly, he avoided the one by looking
sharply after his money, and the other by working with unremitting
industry. Pleasure, he insisted, was but a purely negative quality,
a mere absence from pain. He smiled at the sweet, hot delusions of
youth, and shrugged his shoulders over the limitless follies of
manhood, regarding both from the standpoint of a wholly disinterested
observer. If the test of happiness in the Arabian paradise be to hear
the measured beating of one’s own heart, Schopenhauer was certainly
qualified for admission. Even in this world he was so far from being
miserable, that an atmosphere of snug comfort surrounds the man whose
very name has become a synonym for melancholy; and to turn from
his cold and witty epigrams to the smothered despair that burdens
Leopardi’s pages is like stepping at once from a pallid, sunless
afternoon into the heart of midnight. It is always a pleasant task for
optimists to dwell as much as possible on the buoyancy with which every
healthy man regards his unknown future, and on the natural pleasure he
takes in recalling the brightness of the past; but Leopardi, playing
the trump card of pessimism, demonstrates with merciless precision the
insufficiency of such relief. We cannot in reason expect, he argues,
that, with youth behind us and old age in front, our future will be
any improvement on our past, for with increasing years come increasing
sorrows to all men; and as for the boasted happiness of that past,
which of us would live it over again for the sake of the joys it
contained? Memory cheats us no less than hope by hazing over those
things that we would fain forget; but who that has plodded on to middle
age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with
their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is
forever pretending to regret?
Such thoughts are not cheerful companions; but if they stand the test
of application, it is useless to call them morbid. The pessimist does
not contend that there is no happiness in life, but that, for the
generality of mankind, it is outbalanced by trouble; and this flinty
assurance is all he has to offer in place of the fascinating theory
of compensation. It would seem as though no sane man could hesitate
between them, if he had the choice, for one pleasant delusion is worth
a hundred disagreeable facts; but in this serious and truth-hunting age
people have forgotten the value of fiction, and, like sulky children,
refuse to play at anything. Certainly it would be hard to find a more
dispiriting literature than we enjoy at present. Scientists, indeed,
are reported by those who have the strength of mind to follow them
as being exceedingly merry and complacent; but the less ponderous
illuminati, to whom feebler souls turn instinctively for guidance, are
shining just now with a severe and chastened light. When on pleasure
bent they are as frugal as Mrs. Gilpin, but they sup sorrow with a long
spoon, utterly regardless of their own or their readers’ digestions.
Germany still rings with Heine’s discordant laughter, and France, rich
in the poets of decadence, offers us Les Fleurs du Mal to wear upon
our bosoms. England listens, sighing, while Carlyle’s denunciations
linger like muttering thunder in the air; or while Mr. Ruskin, “the
most inspired of the modern prophets,” vindicates his oracular spirit
by crying,
“Woe! woe! O earth! Apollo, O Apollo!”
with the monotonous persistency of Cassandra. Mr. Mallock, proud
to kneel at Mr. Ruskin’s feet as “an intellectual debtor to a
public teacher,” binds us in his turn within the fine meshes of
his exhaustless subtleties, until we grow light-headed rather than
light-hearted under such depressing manipulation. Mr. Pater, who at
one time gave us to understand that he would teach us how to enjoy
life, has, so far, revealed nothing but its everlasting sadness. If
the old Cyrenaics were no gayer than their modern representatives,
Aristippus of Cyrene might just as well have been Diogenes sulking in
his tub, or Heraclitus adding useless tears to the trickling moisture
of his cave.
Even our fiction has grown disconcertingly sad within the last few
years, and with a new order of sadness, invented apparently to keep
pace with the melancholy march of mind. The novelist of the past had
but two courses open to him: either to leave Edwin and Angelina clasped
in each other’s arms, or to provide for one of them a picturesque and
daisy-strewn grave. Ordinarily he chose the former alternative, as
being less harassing to himself, and more gratifying to his readers.
Books that end badly have seldom been really popular, though sometimes
a tragic conclusion is essential to the artistic development of the
story. When Tom and Maggie Tulliver go down, hand in hand, amid the
rushing waters of the Floss, we feel, even through our tears,--and
mine are fresh each time I read the page,--that the one possible
solution of the problem, has been reached; that only thus could the
widely contrasting natures of brother and sister meet in unison, and
the hard-fought battle be gained. Such an end is not sad, it is happy
and beautiful; and, moreover, it is in a measure inevitable, the
climax being shadowed from the beginning, as in the tragedy of the
Greeks, and the whole tale moving swiftly and surely to its appointed
close. If we compare a finely chiseled piece of work like this with
the flat, faintly colored sketches which are at present passing muster
for novels, we feel that beauty of form is something not compounded of
earthly materials only, and that neither the savage strength of French
and Russian realism, nor the dreary monotony of German speculative
fiction, can lift us any nearer the tranquil realms of art.
Nor can we even claim that we have gained in cheerfulness what we have
lost in symmetry, for the latest device of the pessimistic story-writer
is to marry his pair of lovers, and then coldly inform us that, owing
to the inevitable evils of life, they were not particularly happy
after all. Now Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), that loving student and
impersonator of Shakespeare’s heroines, has expressed her melancholy
conviction that the gentle Hero was but ill-mated with one so fretful
and paltry-souled as Claudio; and that Imogen the fair was doomed to an
early death, the bitter fruit of her sad pilgrimage to Milford-Haven.
But be this as it may,--and we more than fear that Lady Martin is
rightly acquainted with the matter,--Shakespeare himself has whispered
us no word of such ill-tidings, but has left us free, an’ it please
us, to dream out happier things. So, too, Dorothea Brooke, wedded to
Will Ladislaw, has before her many long and weary hours of regretful
self-communings; yet, while we sigh over her doubtful future, we
are glad, nevertheless, to take our last look at her smiling in her
husband’s arms. But when Basil Ransom, in The Bostonians, makes a
brave fight for his young bride, and carries her off in triumph, we
are not for a moment permitted to feel elated at his victory. We want
to rejoice with Verena, and to congratulate her on her escape from Mr.
Filer and the tawdry music-hall celebrity; but we are forced to take
leave of her in tears, and to hear with unwilling ears that “these were
not the last she was destined to shed.” This hurts our best feelings,
and hurts them all the more because we have allowed our sympathies to
be excited. It reminds us of that ill-natured habit of the Romans,
who were ungrateful enough to spoil a conqueror’s triumph by hiring
somebody to stand in his chariot, and keep whispering in his ear that
he was only human, after all; and it speaks volumes for the stern
self-restraint of the Roman nature that the officious truth-teller
was not promptly kicked out in the dust. In the same grudging spirit,
Mr. Thomas Hardy, after conducting one of his heroines safely through
a great many trials, and marrying her at last to the husband of
her choice, winds up, by way of wedding-bells, with the following
consolatory reflections: “Her experience had been of a kind to teach
her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit
through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the
path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by day-dreams rich
as hers.... And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate,
she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when
the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the
adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was
but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” “What should
a man do but be merry?” says Hamlet drearily; and, with this reckless
mirth pervading even our novels, we bid fair in time to become as
jocund as he.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] The Sons of Cydippe, by Edmund Gosse.
THE CAVALIER.
“An evil reputation is light to raise, but heavy to bear, and very
difficult to put aside. No Rumor which many people chatter of
altogether dieth away; she too is, after her kind, an immortal.” So
moralizes Hesiod over an exceedingly thankless truth, which, even in
the primitive simplicity of the golden age, had forced itself upon
man’s unwilling convictions; and while many later philosophers have
given caustic expression to the same thought, few have clothed it
with more delicate and agreeable irony. Rumor is, after her kind,
an immortal. Antæus-like, she gains new strength each time she is
driven to the ground, and it is a wholesome humiliation for our very
enlightened minds to see how little she has suffered from centuries
of analysis and research. Rumor still writes our histories, directs
our diplomacy, and controls our ethics, until we have grown to think
that this is probably what is meant by the _vox populi_, and that any
absurdity credited by a great many people becomes in some mysterious
way sacred to the cause of humanity, and infinitely more precious
than truth. When Wodrow, and Walker, and the author of The Cloud of
Witnesses, were compiling their interesting narratives, Rumor, in
the person of “ilka auld wife in the chimley-neuck,” gave them all
the information they desired; and this information, countersigned by
Macaulay, has passed muster for history down to the present day. As
a result, the introduction of Graham of Claverhouse into Mr. Lang’s
list of English Worthies has been received with severely qualified
approbation, and Mr. Mowbray Morris has written the biography of a
great soldier in the cautious tone of a lawyer pleading for a criminal
at the bar.
If ever the words of Hesiod stood in need of an accurate illustration,
it has been furnished by the memory of Claverhouse; for his evil
reputation was not only raised with astonishing facility, but it has
never been put aside at all. In fact, it seems to have been a matter
of pride in the grim-visaged Scottish saints to believe that their
departed brethren were, one and all, the immediate victims of his
wrath; and to hint that they might perhaps have fallen by any meaner
hand was, as Aytoun wittily expressed it, “an insult to martyrology.”
The terror inspired by his inflexible severity gave zest to their
lurid denunciations, and their liveliest efforts of imagination were
devoted to conjuring up in his behalf some fresh device of evil. In
that shameless pasquinade, the Elegy, there is no species of wickedness
that is not freely charged, in most vile language, to the account of
every Jacobite in the land, from the royal house of Stuart down to its
humblest supporter; yet even amid such goodly company, Claverhouse
stands preëminent, and is the recipient of its choicest flowers of
speech.
“He to Rome’s cause most firmly stood,
And drunken was with the saints’ blood.
He rifled houses, and did plunder
In moor and dale many a hunder;
He all the shires in south and west
With blood and rapine sore opprest.”
It is needless to say that Claverhouse, though he served a Catholic
master, had about as much affinity for the Church of Rome as the
great Gustavus himself, and that the extent of his shortcomings in
this direction lay in his protesting against the insults offered by a
Selkirk preacher to King James through the easy medium of his religion.