It needs no very long stay in Europe to detect a strange drooping of
spirit. The rank corn and cotton optimism of the West quickly feels
the deep sadness that lurks behind French balls, Prussian parades, and
Italian festivals. Europe, when once you pry beneath its surface and
find what its people are thinking and feeling, seems cankered and
honeycombed with pessimism. You need go but a little way beyond the
table d'hote and the guide book to feel the chill of despondency.
Without taking into account this new mood, it is vain to try to
understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought,
politics. The one word "despair" is the key that opens up the meaning
of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen
Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal.
It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with
Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary.
Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" in poetry, realism in art, tragedy
in music, scepticism in religion, cynicism in politics, and pessimism
in philosophy, all spring from the same root. They are the means by
which the age records its feelings of disillusionment.
The broad basis of the sadness of Europe to-day is keen political
disappointment. Forty years ago everybody hailed the policy of free
trade, peace, and international exhibitions as ushering in the era
"When the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled
In the Parliament of mankind, the Federation of the World."
As if in mockery of these hopes came that terrific relapse of
civilization between 1855 and 1870. Then came a pause, and hope might
have revived had not the war epoch left behind it a strange and
appalling condition.
No one so unfortunate as to live between the Bosphorus and the English
Channel can view without dread the course Continental Europe has taken
since 1870. The armies have increased until France and Germany alone
have over six millions of soldiers. The Great Powers have now three
armed men for every two of ten years ago. "Our armaments," says
Premier Crispi, "are ruining Europe for the benefit of America." In a
paper picked up in a Venetian cafe I read these lines:--
"Throughout Europe we now hear of nothing but smokeless powder
and small bore rifles, heavy ironclads and swift cruisers,
torpedo boats and dynamite guns. Europe seems hastening on to
that time foretold by General Grant when, worn out by a fatal and
ruinous policy, she will bow to the supremacy of peace-loving
America, and learn anew from her the lessons of true
civilization."
Can we wonder that the European despairs? He finds himself aboard a
train that seems speeding to sure destruction. Neither pope, nor
churches, nor peace societies, nor alliances nor votes, can check its
course. Nothing, it seems, can save Europe from the fatal plunge into
the abyss of war. A shot on the Alsatian frontier, a plot hatched in a
Servian barrack-room, or a riot in the Armenian quarter of
Constantinople, may kindle a strife that may last, Von Moltke tells
us, for thirty years.
It is true that many alarms have proved false, but then it is the
steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pathetic to see on the
continent, how men fear to face the future. Public speakers dwell upon
the glories of former times. The churches seek to revive the spirit of
the Middle Ages. In schools there is immense interest in history,
archaeology, and the classics. The age yearns to lose itself in the
past, and delights in _genre_ pictures of the naive olden time, or of
life in remote valleys untouched by the breath of progress. No one has
heart to probe the next decade, to ask, "Where shall we be in ten
years,--in fifty years?" The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in
the park or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the
pleasures of the moment with the desperation of doomed men who hear
the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. Ibsen, applying an old
sailor's superstition to the European ship of state, tells how one
night he stood on the deck and looked down on the throng of
passengers, each the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or
dark presentiment, and as he looked he seemed to hear a voice crying,
"There's a corpse on board!"
With the growth of armies has come a gloomier view of life. The vision
of the nations "lapped in universal law" has vanished, and the new
phrase, "struggle for existence," seems to sum up human history. War
has been raised to the dignity of a means of progress and killing has
been consecrated by biology. Not long ago three noted men, Count Von
Moltke, General Wolseley, and Ex-Minister Phelps, declared it vain to
hope for a time when wars should vanish from the earth. In Germany the
youth are filled with the brutal cynicism of Prince Bismarck. "Blood
and iron does it," said a Berlin divinity student to me. "You can no
more stop war than you can stop the thunderbolt when two clouds meet
charged with opposite electricities." "No," said another, "Europe has
too many people, too much pressure on the boundaries. There must be a
war now and then to thin them out."
With loss of faith in moral progress men have lost faith in political
progress. The ideals of '48 are _passe_. Liberty, equality, and
fraternity are exploded bubbles. The imperialism of Bismarck, the foe
of popular government and champion of divine right, rules the hour. To
the fighting type of society the politics of industrial democracy seem
absurd. You cannot set up the hustings in an armed camp of
twenty-eight millions. Kings and nobles, rank and privilege, police,
spies, and censors--all those hoary abuses that roused the men of
'48,--are deemed necessary to a strong military state. They are
hallowed by the new phrase of political fatalism "historical
continuity."
This drift of thought cannot but lead to a despairing view.
Civilization seems to have lost itself in a _cul-de-sac_. Progress has
ended in an aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according
to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are
places to fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great, hungry,
intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and
it seems sometimes as if the Middle Ages will swallow up everything
won by modern struggles. The Liberal wonders at moments if he be not
really fighting against destiny. Often in his _Culturkampf_ with
Ultramontanism has he proved the truth of Gambetta's saying, "_Le
clericalism, voila l'ennemi!_"
Science, too, has had its share in disturbing men's minds. Science,
during the last twenty years, has been most successful in studying the
past. It has traced the origin of institutions and followed the upward
path of man. It has lifted the veil of mystery. It says, "See, I can
show you how our feelings arose. I will lay bare the root of modesty,
of filial piety, sexual love, patriotism, loyalty, justice, honor,
aesthetic delight, conscience, religion, fear of God. I will explain
the origin of institutions like the household, the church, the state.
I will show the rise of prayer, worship, sacrifice, marriage-customs,
ceremonies social forms, and laws. Nothing is found mysterious,
nothing unique, nothing divine. There is no need of looking for a
stream of tendency, an influx from another source, the descent of a
new power. The notion of a soul from a spiritual world encysted in
customs and feelings developed upon it by nature, is a myth. Man is a
formation. The race has accommodated itself to its environment as a
stream to its bed. The manifold adaptation of Nature to man is really
the adaptation of man to Nature. To marvel at it is as if the cake
should marvel at the fit of the dough-pan. Everything in man is the
outcome of forces and conditions still present with us. Man and his
civilization are held suspended in protoplasm and sunlight. Let but a
plague sweep us away to-day, and to-morrow would begin the second
evolution of man."
But science, not content with tracing institutions, has been analyzing
personality. We see now that there can never again be such an orgie of
the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission
and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual.
Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against
the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval
necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the
fates," says Wilde, "and the most terrible. It is the only one of the
gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our
ends" and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science
dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities,
predispositions, and transmitted taints, atavisms, and reversions. It
finds the soul not a spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of
strange contradictions and warring tendencies, with traces of spent
passion and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of forgotten deeds
and survivals of vanished habits. We are "possessed" not by demons but
by the dead. These are in Ibsen's drama the real ghosts which throng
our lives and haunt our footsteps, remorseless as the furies. We are
followed by the shades of our ancestors who visit us, not with
midnight squeak and gibber, but in the broad noonday, speaking with
our speech, and doing with our deed. We are bound to a destiny fixed
before birth, and choice is the greatest of illusions. The world is
indeed a stage, and life is but a hollow ceremony, spontaneous enough
to the eye, but wherein the actors recite speeches and follow stage
directions written for them long before they were born. Thus science
grinds color for our modern Rembrandts.
The final blow to the old notion of the ego is given by the doctrine
of multiple individuality. Science tells of the conscious and the
sub-conscious, of the higher nerve centres and the lower, of the
double cerebrum and the wayward ganglia. It hints at the many
voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy and pain, and
scarce give sign, dwellers in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be,
often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself
free. This _I_ is, no doubt, a hierarchy or commonwealth of psychical
units that at death dissolves and sinks below the threshold of
consciousness.
It is plain, then, that the swift spread of science has brought men
into a new universe. Few there are that can adorn the new home with
ornaments saved from the old. For most men the universe which science
tells of rises about them unsightly and barn-like, with bare walls and
naked rafters, and until art can beautify the walls, and poetry gild
the rafters, men will have that appalling feeling of being nowhere at
home, that awful sinking as if the bottom were dropping out of all
things.
The last great motive to despair is supplied by Indo-German
philosophy. Under the headship of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, there
has grown up of late a black pessimism rooted in Hindoo thought, and
allied to that strange exotic cult of Eastern religions that has
enabled Neo-Buddhism to proselyte even in Christian Europe. Its
success has been brilliant. In twenty years Hartmann's "Philosophy of
the Unconscious" has reached its tenth German edition, entered all the
great languages of Europe, and called forth a vast literature of its
own. Thoroughly in touch with modern culture and gifted with a
striking style, Hartmann is to-day, perhaps, the best read philosopher
on the continent.
Hartmann dwells upon the sorrow inherent in all existence. Happiness,
whether expected in one's own life, in an ecstatic life beyond the
grave, or in the far future of humanity, is an illusion. The breaking
through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on
pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The
world is a mistake--a stupendous blunder of the blind unconscious.
From it there is no escape until the world is hurled back into
nothingness by a supreme effort of the collective human will. To bring
about this replunge into Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The
vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of
organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit of
life--all these exist to bring forth the pessimist. He alone has
gained true culture, and reached a rational insight into the emptiness
of existence. He alone has rent the veil of Maya and pierced the last
illusion. His task is to waken humanity, now tossing on its bed of
pain, from the spell of the great alluring world-dream. By showing the
vanity of endeavor he is to still the fatal lust for life and bring
all men to despair and longing for Nirvana. Thus does he become the
true savior of mankind; for at this point the world, obeying the
desperate resolve of the human race, will vanish utterly,
"And like the baseless fabric of a dream
Leave not a rack behind."
The pessimistic temper of the age reveals itself in every field where
mood finds utterance. Every book that makes a sensation does it by
virtue of the phase of despair it presents. Every drama that creates a
furore does it by uncovering some new tragic element in life. Anything
optimistic falls flat. The literary men of Europe are recklessly
underbidding each other in the attempt to show that life is sadder,
or meaner, or baser, or emptier than had been supposed. The cynic and
the pessimist share public attention. Not that European writers are
insincere. The authors and thinkers themselves have been the first to
feel the Zeitgeist. They have written as they have because they have
found the melancholy view of life the most fruitful thing in recent
culture. They have found it the richest in novelty, surprises, images,
scenes, reflections, effects, and sensations. The worthlessness of
life is an idea that agrees with science, meets the mood of the age,
and fires the imagination of the artist.
The French, Norwegian, and Russian realism of the last decade is the
utterance of later pessimism. For the term "realism" describes
something more than an art. It describes an ethical view. It means the
conviction of Flaubert: "You may fatten the human beast, give him
straw up to his belly, and gild his manger; but he remains a brute,
say what you will." The realists are filled with the scientific
notions of human nature. They base romances on psychology, physiology,
or pathology. They study Darwin, and Spencer, and Ribot. They look
constantly for the traces of the savage cave-dweller. The great
masters,--Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen, Maupassant, Flaubert, Gautier, Loti,
Bourget,--as well as their swarms of disciples, are ever on the watch
for marks of decadence, or for vestiges of the brute in man's
instincts and passions. To the old romanticism of Victor Hugo they
oppose blunt truth-telling and remorseless analysis. They spare no
illusions. "Love, marriage, family," cries Tolstoi's hero, "are lies,
lies, lies!"
This same ethical spirit is shared by realism in art. A painter
seeking in the work-house a model for his "job," an actress visiting
the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,--these show the modern
appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times'
spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of
Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and
despair.
Most of our great critics of life,--Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew
Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoi, and Ruskin--have felt, or at least
recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement
and despair.
The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of
the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to
Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled
about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly
asks in a recent poem:--
"What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own
corpse-coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps
of a meaningless Past?"
Since the time of Goethe, poetry has turned from Hellenic to Hindoo
sources. Cultured Europe seizes with a strange eagerness on the
sublime, dreamy conceptions that underlie Hindoo pantheism--Sansara,
the unabiding pain-world; Nirvana world of rest and re-absorption; the
deceptive veil of Maya, the wheel of life, the melting bubbles poured
from the bowl of Saki, the Brahma fallen from unity and serenity into
multiplicity and pain, the illusion of birth and death, the evil of
all individual existence, the retreat from life, the euthanasia of the
will and the return to non-existence,--these with their rich train of
imagery thrill the jaded and _blase_ European with a rare and profound
emotion. Besides these spoils, the poet of to-day revels in the
results of later metaphysics. The naive balance of pleasure and pain
is disturbed. Suffering becomes an almost supernatural fact hid in a
halo of mystery, and is not to be blotted out by any quantity of joy.
One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than
nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical
meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the
altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the
legend of a suffering unconscious.