By the same Author.
BALZAC.
A STUDY.
_With a Bibliography of Balzac's
Writings, and a Portrait._
Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
_Publishers_,
BOSTON.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
DISENCHANTMENT
BY
EDGAR EVERTSON SALTUS
In Arkadien geboren sind wir Alle
SCHILLER
[Illustration]
BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street,
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1887
Copyright, 1885,
BY EDGAR EVERTSON SALTUS.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge:_
Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE GENESIS OF DISENCHANTMENT 1
CHAPTER II.
THE HIGH PRIEST OF PESSIMISM 36
CHAPTER III.
THE SPHINX'S RIDDLE 77
CHAPTER IV.
THE BORDERLANDS OF HAPPINESS 124
CHAPTER V.
THE GREAT QUIETUS 163
CHAPTER VI.
IS LIFE AN AFFLICTION? 208
THE PHILOSOPHY OF DISENCHANTMENT.
CHAPTER I.
THE GENESIS OF DISENCHANTMENT.
The trite and commonplace question of contentment and dissatisfaction
is a topic which is not only of every-day interest, but one which in
recent years has so claimed the attention of thinkers, that they have
broadly divided mankind into those who accept life off-hand, as a more
or less pleasing possession, and those who resolutely look the gift in
the mouth and say it is not worth the having.
Viewed simply as systems of thought, the first of these two divisions
is evidently contemporaneous with humanity, while the second will be
found to be of purely modern origin; for from the earliest times man,
admittedly and with but few exceptions, has been ever accustomed to
regard this world as the best one possible, and through nearly every
creed and sect he has considered happiness somewhat in the light of an
inviolable birthright.
Within the last half century, however, there has come into being a new
school, which, in denying the possibility of any happiness, holds as
first principle that the world is a theatre of misery in which, were
the choice accorded, it would be preferable not to be born at all.
In stating that this view of life is of distinctly modern origin, it
should be understood that it is so only in the systematic form which it
has recently assumed, for individual expressions of discontent have
been handed down from remote ages, and any one who cared to rummage
through the dust-bins of literature would find material enough to
compile a dictionary of pessimistic quotation.
For these pages but little rummaging will be attempted, but as the
proper presentation of the subject demands a brief account of the ideas
and opinions in which it was cradled, a momentary examination of
general literature will not, it is believed, cause any after-reproach
of time misspent.
To begin, then, with Greece, whose literature has precedence over all
others, it will be remembered that in former days, when the citizen
expended the greater part of his activity for the common good, the
poets in like manner sang of national topics, the gods, the heroes, and
the charms of love. There was, therefore, little opportunity for the
expression of purely personal ideas, and the whole background of the
poetry of antiquity is in consequence brilliant with optimistic
effect. Nevertheless, here and there, a few complaints crop out from
time to time. Homer, for instance, says that man is the unhappiest
wight that ever breathed or strutted, and describes his ephemeral
existence in a wail of gloomy hexameters.
Then, too, there is the touching Orphean distich, which runs:--
"From thy smile, O Jove, sprang the gods,
But man was born of thy sorrow."
Pindar in one of his graceful odes compared men to the shadows of a
dream, while the familiar quotation, "Whom the gods love die young,"
comes to us straight from Menander.
With the peculiar melancholy of genius, that in those favored days
seems more a presentiment than the expression of a general conception,
Sophocles, in his last tragedy, says that not to be born at all is the
greatest of all possible benefits, but inasmuch as man has appeared on
earth, the very best thing he can do is to hurry back where he came
from.
In spite, too, of the general tendency of thought, sentiments not
dissimilar are to be found in Æschylus and Euripides, while something
of this instinctive pessimism was expanded into a quaint and national
custom by the Thracians, who, according to Herodotus, met birth with
lamentations, but greeted death with salvos and welcoming festivals.
With but few exceptions the early philosophers considered death not as
a misfortune, but as an advantage. Empedocles taught that the sojourn
on earth was one of vexatious torment, an opinion in which he was
firmly supported by Heraclitus, and even Plato, whose general drift of
thought was grandly optimistic, said in the "Apology," "If death is the
withdrawal of every sensation, if it is like a sleep which no dream
disturbs, what an incomparable blessing it must be! for let any one
select a night passed in undisturbed and entire rest, and compare it
with the other nights and days that have filled his existence, and then
from his conscience let him answer how many nights and days he has
known which have been sweeter and more agreeable than that. For my part
I am sure that not the ordinary individual alone, but even the great
King of Persia would find such days and nights most easy to enumerate."
The doctrine of Epicurus held, in substance, that the moment it was no
longer possible to delight the senses death became a benefit, and
suicide a crowning act of wisdom. The teaching of the Socratic school
and its offshoots amounted, in brief, to the idea that the only
admissible aim of life was the pursuit and attainment of absolute
knowledge. Absolute knowledge, however, being found unattainable, the
logical culmination of their doctrine was delivered by Hegesias, in
Alexandria, in the third century before the Christian era. This
disciple of Socrates argued that as there was a limit to the knowable,
and happiness was a pure illusion, a further prolongation of existence
was useless. "Life seems pleasing only to the fool," he stated; "the
wise regard it with indifference, and consider death just as
acceptable." "Death," he added, "is as good as life; it is but a
supreme renunciation in which man is freed from idle complaints and
long deceptions. Life is full of pain, and the pangs of the flesh gnaw
at the mind and rout its calm. In countless ways fate intercepts and
thwarts our hopes. Contentment is not to be relied on, and even wisdom
cannot preserve us from the treachery and insecurity of the
perceptions. Since happiness, then, is intangible we should cease to
pursue it, and take for our goal the absence of pain; this condition,"
he explained, "is best obtained in making ourselves indifferent to
every object of desire and every cause of dislike, and above all to
life itself. In any event," he concluded, "death is advantageous in
this, it takes us not from blessings but from evil."[1]
This curious mixture of pessimism and theology was, it is said,
delivered with such charm of persuasive grace and eloquence that
several of his listeners put his ideas into instant practice, and that
the city might be preserved from the contagion of suicide, King Ptolemy
felt himself obliged to prevent this seductive misanthrope from
delivering any further harangues.
Literature has the same tendency to repeat itself as history, and as
the Romans took much of their culture and many of their ideas from
Greece, the tone of their principal writers is only dissimilar to those
already quoted in that with the fall of their religion, the decline of
the empire and the universal intoxication of the senses, the pessimist
element became somewhat accentuated. It would be an idle task, however,
to attempt to cite even a fraction of the cheerless distress which
pervades the Roman classics, and it will perhaps suffice for the moment
to note but a passage or two, which bear directly upon the subject.
Seneca, for instance, whose insight was as clear and whose
understanding was as unclouded as any writer with whom the world is
acquainted, sent his letters down the centuries freighted with such
ideas as these: "Death is nature's most admirable invention." "There is
no need to complain of particular grievances, for life in its entirety
is lamentable." "No one would accept life were it not received in
ignorance of what it is."
Pliny, also, is very quotable. "Nature's most pleasing invention," he
says, "is brevity of life." And he adds, "No mortal is happy, for even
if there is no other cause for discontent there is at least the fear of
possible misfortune."
Then, too, Petronius, the poet of the Roman orgy, opening and closing
his veins, toying with death, as with a last and supreme delight, is of
familiar, if repulsive, memory.
English literature is naturally as well stocked with individual
expressions of distaste for existence as that of Rome. The poets,
nearly one and all, from Chaucer to Rossetti, have told their sorrow in
a variety of more or less polished metre, and even Macpherson was
careful, in dowering his century with another bard, to put thoughts
into Ossian's verse which would not have been unfitting in a Greek
chorus.
In speaking of the world, Chaucer had already said,--
"Here is no home, here is but a wilderness,"
when Sir Thomas Wyatt, enlarging on the theme, repeated,--
"Wherefore come death and let me dye."
The delicate muse of Samuel Fletcher found--
"Nothing's so dainty sweet, as lovely melancholy,"
and Shakespeare's depressing lines on the value of life are familiar to
every schoolboy.
Dryden wrote,--
"When I consider life, 't is all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit,
Trust on and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day."
All of which was afterwards summed up in the well-known line,--
"Man never _is_ but always _to be_ blessed,"
while Thomson noted--
... "all the thousand, nameless ills
That one incessant struggle render life."
Keats, and especially Byron, wrote stanza after stanza of enervating
sadness. Moore's dear gazelle is nowadays a familiar comparison.
Shelley's tremulous sensibility forbade his finding any charm in life,
and we none of us need to be reminded that Poe's soul was sorrow-laden.
But the poets are not alone in their tale of the deceptions of life;
the moralists and essayists, too, have added their quota to the general
budget, and it is not simply the value of life that has been questioned
by many of the best writers; there has been also a certain surprise
expressed that man should care to live at all. Indeed, the "I see no
necessity" of the wit, to the beggar imploring aid that he might live,
is the epigram of the thoughts of a hundred scholars.
In France, pessimism cannot be said to have been ever regarded
otherwise than as an intellectual curiosity. The Frenchman, it is true,
not infrequently lapses into a cynical indifference; yet the value of
life is as a rule so evident to him, that he seldom vouchsafes more
than a passing shrug to any theory of disparagement. In the first
place, death, to which the hat is gravely raised, has never been in
France a polite or welcome topic; moreover, French literature, while
lawless enough in other respects, has left its readers generally
unprepared to view the world as a fiasco, in which misery is the one
immense success. The trouvères and troubadours sang to the mediæval
châtelaine little else than the praise of love, with here and there the
account of some combat, to show what they might do were they put to
the test. Later, Villon told gently of the _neiges d'antan_, Ronsard
aimed a dart or two at fate, and Rabelais's laugh was sometimes very
near to tears; but, broadly speaking, the French asked of their writers
little else than wit,--if they could not give them that, then should
they hold their peace.
The delicate irony of Candide had, therefore, when appreciated,
something almost novel in its savor; and, indeed, it may fairly be said
that it was not until the blight of Byron had been cheerfully
translated, that the French were in any measure prepared to understand
Rolla and the pathetic beauties of De Musset's verse. Pascal,
Helvetius, and other writers of desultory depression had of course
already appeared. Maupertuis had found no difficulty in showing that
life held more pain than pleasure, while Chamfort's conclusions on the
same subject were as luminous as they were gloomy; and yet it is
difficult to say that the gall with which these authors dashed their
pages served otherwise than as a condiment to fresher and less flavored
works. Baudelaire, the poet of boredom, praying for a new vice that
should wrest life into some semblance of reality, was in consequence
almost a novelty, and not a perfectly satisfactory one at that. It is
therefore only within the last ten years or so that pessimism has in
any wise attracted the notice of French thinkers, and the attention
which has recently been paid to it is due partly to Leconte de Lisle,
and partly to a surge of German thought.
During the eighteenth century the majority of the scholars who
represented the culture of Germany were faithfully following the
optimist theories of Leibnitz and Wolf. The doctrine that the world was
the best one possible, supported as it was by official theology and
strictly in accord with the deism of Pope and Paley, was very generally
and unhesitatingly accepted. Indeed, there is no apparent reason why it
should not have been. The Minnesingers doubtless had formulated some
few complaints, but then these literary vagrants had already begun to
form part of mythology, and besides, poets are all more or less prone
to discontent and voluble of sorrow. Beyond the classics of Greece and
Rome there was, therefore, no precedent for pessimistic thought. German
literature, strictly speaking, did not begin until Lessing's advent,
and before that the theatre, with its Hans Wurst and its Pickleherring,
had offered only a succession of the broadest farce.
The calm and quiet which the Germans then enjoyed was ruffled, if at
all, only by some confused echoes of the _obiter dicta_ which
Voltaire's royal disciple was pleased to disseminate, but it is
probable that the better part of this ferocious gayety was drowned in
crossing the Rhine, and, in any event, it was too delicately pungent to
do more than disturb the placid current of their thought.
Later, when Kant appeared, the effect of his philosophy was very much
like a successful treatment of cataract on the eyes of the whole
nation. "Happiness," he insisted in the "Kritik der Urtheilskraft,"
"has never been attained by man, for he is unable to find contentment
in any possession or enjoyment, ... and were he called upon to fashion
a system of happiness for his fellows he would be unable to do so, for
happiness is in its essence intangible." "No one," he added elsewhere,
"has a right conception of life who would care to prolong it beyond its
natural duration, for it would then be only the continuation of an
already tiresome struggle."
After this the teaching of Leibnitz slowly disappeared, and though a
certain amount of optimism necessarily subsisted, the tendency of
thought veered to the opposite direction. Fichte, Kant's immediate
successor, declared, in direct contradiction to Leibnitz, that this
world was the worst one possible, and was only consoled by thinking he
could raise himself by the aid of pure thought into the felicity of the
"supersensible." "Men," he says, "in the vehement pursuit of happiness
grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of
satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask,
'Am I happy?' and at once from their innermost being a voice answers
distinctly, 'No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.' Then they
think it was the object that deceived them, and turn precipitately to
another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first....
Wandering then through life, restless and tormented, at each
successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but
when they reach it happiness is no longer there. In whatever position
they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern
from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished
delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the
way and stands in haunting constancy before them."[2]
Schelling expressed himself more guardedly. As professional pantheist,
he seemed to think that anything not rigidly vague and inaccessible was
inconsistent with his philosophy. Still there was probably a secret
revolt, some propelling impulse to deny his own syllogisms, and to
bathe for once in some clear stream of common sense. In the
"Nachtwachen," which he published under the pseudonym of Bonaventura,
this incentive is evidently, though unsuccessfully, at work. It may be
that the force of habit was too strong, but at any rate this rhapsody,
which was intended to be a confession of the combat that he had waged
with his belief, and a recognition of the immedicable misery of life,
brings with it something of that impression of delirium which Poe and
Doré not infrequently suggest.
Nor was Hegel hostile to pessimism; he regarded it as an inevitable
phase of universal evolution, and indeed its dawn as a science had then
already broken.
Meanwhile the poets had not been idle. Herder and Schiller had already
attested the bitterness of life to unreluctant ears, and the number of
suicides that were directly traceable to the appearance of Werther and
his sorrows was instructively large. This phase of sentimentalism,
which immediately preceded the riotous rebirth of the Romantic school,
was not without its influence on Heine's verse, and in some measure
affected the literary tone of the day.
It would, however, be erroneous to suppose that the poets of this epoch
were more agitated by the impression of universal worthlessness of life
than were their classic predecessors. The distress of Werther, as that
of Lara and of Rolla, was not the pain of suffering humanity; it was in
each case merely the poet's complacent analysis of his own exceptional
nature and personal grievances; it was the expression of the inevitable
surprise of youth, which notes for the first time reality's unsuspected
yet yawning indifference to the ideal, and the stubborn disaccord
between aspiration and fact. It was indeed very beautiful and elegiac,
and yet so fluent in its polished melancholy that somehow it did not at
all times seem to have been really felt. In any case, it was not a
theory of common woe, and lacked that clear conception of the
universality of suffering, which the less exalted minds of the
philosophers had already signaled, but for which no one as yet had been
able to suggest a remedy.
It was about this time that an action was being instituted against
humanity by a young Italian, the Count Giacomo Leopardi, and the
muffled discontent which for centuries had been throbbing through land
and literature was raised by his verse into one clear note of eloquent
arraignment.
Now, in most countries there is a provision which inhibits a judge from
hearing a cause which is pleaded by one of his connections, for it is
considered that the scales of justice are so delicately balanced, that
their holder should be preserved from any biasing influence, however
indirect; for much the same reason, there are few communities that
permit a man to sit in judgment on his own case. Some knowledge of
Leopardi himself, therefore, will be of service in deciding whether the
verdict which he brought against the world should be accepted without
appeal, or returned as vitiated by extraneous circumstances.
Leopardi passed a joyless boyhood at Recanti, one of those maddeningly
monotonous Italian towns whose unspeakable dreariness is only
attractive when viewed through the pages of Stendhal. The unrelaxing
severity of an austere and pedant father curbed, as with a bit, every
symptom of that haphazard gayety which is incident to youth. At once
precocious and restive, deformed yet inflammable, he was necessarily
enervated by the exasperating dullness of his life, and chafed, too, by
the rigid poverty to which his father condemned him. As he grew up,
his mind, richly stored with the wealth of antiquity, rioted in a
turbulency of imagination which, unable to find sympathetic welcome
without, consumed itself in morbid distrust within, and led him at last
from fervid Catholicism down the precipitate steps of negation.
He was not much over twenty before excessive study had well-nigh ruined
such health as he once possessed. The slightest application was
wearisome both to eye and brain. He wandered silently about the
neighboring forests, seeking solitude not only for the sake of
solitude, but also perhaps for the suggestions, at once soothing and
rebellious, which solitude always whispers to him who courts her truly.
At other times he sat hour by hour in a state as motionless as that of
catalepsy. "I am so much overcome," he wrote to a friend, "by the
nothingness that surrounds me, that I do not know how I have the
strength to answer your letter. If at this moment I lost my reason, I
think that my insanity would consist in sitting always with eyes fixed,
open-mouthed, without laughing or weeping, or changing place. I have no
longer the strength to form a desire, be it even for death."
The Muse, however, would have none of this; she flaunted her peplum so
seductively before him that, a little later, when he had been visited
by some semblance of returning health, he resisted no longer, and
delivered himself up to her, heart and soul.
The present century, especially during its earlier decades, has been
racked with a great glut of despondent verse; but no batch of poets,
however distressed, has been able, at any time, to catch and cling to
such a persistent monotone of complaint as that which runs through
every line of Leopardi's verse. To quote De Musset:--
"Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots."
His odes, his adjurations to Italy, and his elegies are, one and all,
stamped with such unvarying and changeless despair, that their dominant
motive seems not unlike that tower which René, finding alone in the
desert, compared to a great thought in a mind ravaged by years and by
grief. His theory of life never altered; he resumed it in a distich,--
... "Arcano é tutto
Fuor che il nostro dolor."
It may be said, and with justice perhaps, that it was the invalid body,
aggravating and coexisting with a mind naturally morbid, that
afterwards wrote of the _gentilezza del morir_, but it was the thinker,
conquering the ills of the flesh, who later whispered to the suffering
world the panacea of patience and resignation.
In Leopardi there is none of the vapid elegance and gaudy vocabulary of
French verse; technically, he wrote in what the Italians call _rime
sciolte_, and he charms the reader as well through a palpitant
sincerity as evident and continuous inspiration. Now, the educated
Italian turns naturally to rhyme; any incident holds to him the germ
of a sonnet, and there is perhaps no other country in the world so
richly dowered with patriotic canzoni as this joyously unhappy land.
But of all who have sounded this eloquent chord, not one has done so
with the masculine originality and fervor of expression that Leopardi
reached in his ode to Italy, in which, in a resounding call to arms, he
exclaims:--
"Let my blood, O gods! be a flame to Italian hearts."
Italian hearts, however, had other matters to attend to, and Leopardi's
magnificent invocation was barely honored with a passing notice. For
that matter, his poetry, in spite of its resonant merit, has, through
some inexplicable cause, been generally ignored; and while it resembles
no other, it has never, so to speak, been in vogue.
As has been seen, he was a lover of solitude; indeed, it would not be
an exaggeration to say that he was glued to it; and in the isolation
which he partly made himself, and which was partly forced upon him, he
watched the incubation of thought very much as another might have noted
the progress of a disease. A life of this description, even at best, is
hardly calculated to awaken much enthusiasm for every-day matters, and
it was not long before Leopardi became not only heartily sick of the
commonplace aspects of life, but contemptuous, too, of those who lived
in broader and more active spheres.
Poetically untrammeled, and of advanced views on all subjects, he
regarded erudition as the simple novitiate of the man of letters, or in
other words, as a preparation which renders the intelligence supple and
pliant; and in one of those rare moments, when the timid approach of
ambition was seemingly unnoticed, he caressed the pleasing plan of
attacking Italian torpor with reason, passion with laughter, and of
becoming, in fact, the Plato, the Shakespeare, and the Lucian of his
epoch. To Giordani, his mentor, he wrote: "I study night and day, so
long as my health permits; when it prevents me from working, I wait a
month or so, and then begin again. As I am now totally different from
that which I was, my plan of study has altered with me. Everything
which savors of the pathetic or the eloquent wearies me beyond
expression. I seek now only the true, the real, which before was so
repulsive. I take pleasure in analyzing the misery of men and things,
and in shivering as I note the sinister and terrible mystery of life. I
see very clearly that when passion is once extinguished, there subsists
in study no other source of pleasure save that of vain curiosity, whose
satisfaction, however, is not without a certain charm."
But Leopardi was so essentially the poet that, in spite of his growing
disdain of the pathetic and the eloquent, he became not infrequently
the dupe of his own imagination. That which he took for the fruit of
deduction was probably little more than ordinary hypochondria, and in
turning as he did to other work, he was never able to free himself
entirely from the jealous influence of the muse.
He was, from a variety of causes, very miserable himself, and his
belief in universal misery amounted very nearly to a mania. His logic
reduced itself to the paraphrase of an axiom, "I am, therefore I
suffer," and the suffering which he experienced was not, he was very
sure, limited solely to himself. It was, he considered, the garment and
appanage of every sentient being. In this he was perfectly correct, but
his error consisted in holding all cases to be equally intense, and in
imagining that means might be devised which would at once do away with
or, at least, lessen the evil. Patience and resignation he had already
suggested, but naturally without appreciable success; indeed, the
regeneration of man, he clearly saw, was not to be brought about
through verse, and he turned therefore to philosophy with a fixity of
purpose, which was strengthened by the idea that he could work therein
another revolution. This was in 1825. Leopardi at that time was in his
twenty-seventh year, and the task to which he then devoted himself was,
he said, to be the sad ending of a miserable life. His intention was to
run the bitter truth to earth, to learn the obscure destinies of the
mortal and the eternal, to discover the wherefore of creation, and the
reason of man's burden of misery. "I wish," he said, "to dig to the
root of nature and seek the aim of the mysterious universe, whose
praises the sages sing, and before which I stand aghast."
Forthwith, then, in the "Operette Morale," Leopardi began a resolute,
if poetic, siege against every form of illusion. His philosophy,
however, provoked no revolution, nor can it be even said that he
discovered any truth more bitter than the old new ones, which antiquity
had unearthed before him. His work, nevertheless, sent the old facts
spinning into fresh and novel positions, and is to be particularly
admired for the artistic manner in which it handles the most stubborn
topics. The starting point of each of his arguments is that life is
evil; to any objection, and the objections that have been made are
countless, Leopardi has one invariable reply, "All that is advanced to
the contrary is the result of illusion." "But supposing life to be
painless," some one presumably may interject, whereupon Leopardi, with
the air of an oracle, too busy with weighty matters to descend to
chit-chat on the weather, will answer tersely, "Evil still."
It is useless for the practical man of the day, who knows the price of
wheat the whole world over before he has tasted his coffee, and who
digests a history of the world's doings and misdoings each morning with
his breakfast,--it is useless for him to say, as he invariably
does:--Why, this is rubbish, look at modern institutions, look at
progress, look at science; for if he listens to Leopardi he will learn
that all these palpable advantages have, in expanding activity, only
aggravated the misery of man. In other words, that the sorrows of men
and of nations develop in proportion to their intelligence, and the
most civilized are in consequence the most unhappy.
Indeed, Leopardi's philosophy is nothing if not destructive; he does
not aim so much to edify as to undermine. According to his theory the
universe is the resultant of an unconscious force, and this force, he
teaches, is shrouded in a vexatious mystery, behind which it is not
given to man to look. In one of his dialogues, certain mummies
resurrect for a quarter of an hour and tell in what manner they died.
"And what follows death?" their auditor asks, eagerly. But the quarter
of an hour has expired and the mummies relapse into silence.
In another fantastic scene, an Icelander, convinced that happiness is
unattainable, and solely occupied in avoiding pain, has, in shunning
society, found himself in the heart of the Sahara, face to face with
Nature. This Icelander, who, by the way, singularly resembles Leopardi,
had found but one protection against the ills of life, and that was
solitude; but wherever he wandered he had been pursued by a certain
malevolence. In spite of all he could do, he had roasted in summer and
shivered in winter. In vain he had sought a temperate climate: one land
was an ice-field, another an oven, and everywhere tempests or
earthquakes, vicious brutes or distracting insects. In short, unalloyed
misery. Finding himself, at last, face to face with Nature he took her
to task, demanding what right she had to create him without his
permission, and then, having done so, to leave him to his own devices?
Nature answers that she has but one duty, and that is to turn the wheel
of the universe, in which death supports life, and life death. "Well,
then," the obstinate Icelander asks, "tell me at least for whose
pleasure and for what purpose this miserable universe subsists?" But
before Nature can enlighten her embarrassing questioner, he is
surprised by two famished lions and conveniently devoured.
The moral of all this is not difficult to find. Life, such as it is, is
all this is accorded. Beyond it there is only an impenetrable silence.
The blue of the heavens is pervasive, but void. The hope of
ultramundane felicity is, therefore, an illusion, and man is to seek
such happiness as is possible only in this life. But if it be asked
what the possibilities of earthly happiness are, Leopardi is quick to
tell his reader that there are none at all.
As has been seen, he regarded life as an evil; and he insisted in so
regarding it, not only as a whole, but in each of its fractional
divisions. This idea is quaintly expressed in a dialogue between a
sorcerer and a demon, the latter having been presumably summoned with
an incantatory blue flame. The demon is somewhat sulky at first, and
asks why he has been disturbed. Is it wealth that the sorcerer wishes?
Is it glory or grandeur? But the sorcerer has neither greed nor
ambition.
"Do you wish me to procure for you a woman as captiously capricious as
Penelope?"
The sorcerer probably smiles, for he answers wittily:--
"Do you think I need the aid of a devil for that?"
Thus outfaced, the demon begs to know in what manner he may be of
service.
"I simply want one moment of happiness," the sorcerer answers.
But Mephisto declares, on his word as a gentleman, that such a thing is
impossible, because the desire for happiness is insatiable, and no one
can be happy so long as it is unsatisfied.
"Well, then?" the sorcerer asks, moodily querulous.
"Well, then," answers the demon, "if you think it worth while to give
me your soul before the time, behold me ready to oblige you."
Since happiness, then, is intangible, the wisest thing to do is to try
to be as little unhappy as possible. One of the chief opponents to such
a state of being is evidently discontent, and this, Leopardi hints,
should be routed at any cost, and the yawning spectre of ennui flung
with it into fettered exile. In the warmth of these instructions it is
curious to note how Leopardi turns on himself, so to speak, and
recommends as cure-all the very activity which he had before
proscribed. In his dialogue between Columbus and Gutierrez, the
navigator admits to his discouraged companion that the success of the
undertaking is far from certain; "but," he adds, "even if no other
benefit accrue from our voyage, it will be an advantage at least in
this; it has for a certain time delivered us from boredom; it has made
us love life, and appreciate, moreover, many things of which otherwise
we would have thought nothing."
It should not, however, be supposed that Leopardi had no higher rule of
life than that which is circumscribed in the narrow avoidance of
discontent. That man has certain duties to perform, he frequently
admitted, but he denied that he owed any to the unconscious and
tyrannical force which had given him life. "I will never kiss," he
said, "the hand that strikes." Any obligation to society was equally
out of the question. "Society," he noted in the _Pensieri_, "is a
league of blackguards against honest men." Man's duties are to himself
alone; and the essence of Leopardi's ethics (as, indeed, of all other
ethics) is held simply in the recommendation that virtue and
self-esteem be preserved. "To thine own self be true," Polonius had
said long before, and to this Leopardi had nothing to add.
The illusions which hamper life have been so clearly and thoroughly
analyzed by other thinkers, whose conclusions will be found to
constitute the groundwork of the subsequent part of this monograph,
that it will be unnecessary at this stage to examine any of Leopardi's
theories on this subject, save such, perhaps, as may seem to contain
original views. He had, as has been intimated, a thorough contempt for
life: "It is," he said, "fit but to be despised." _Nostra vita a che
val, sola a spregiarla._ He was, in consequence, well equipped to
combat the illusion which leads so many to imagine that were their
circumstances different, they would then be thoroughly content. This
idea is presented with vivacious ingenuity in a dialogue between a man
peddling calendars and a passer-by.
It runs somewhat as follows:--
"Calendars! New calendars!"
"For the coming year?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you think the year will be a good one?"
"Yes, indeed, sir."
"As good as last year?"
"Better, sir,--better."
"As year before last?"
"Much better, sir."
"But wouldn't you care to have the next year like any of the
past years?"
"No, sir, I would not."
"For how long have you been selling calendars?"
"Nearly twenty years, sir."
"Well, which of these twenty years would you wish to have
like the coming one?"
"I? I really don't know, sir."
"Can't you remember any one year that seemed particularly
attractive?"
"I cannot, indeed, I cannot."
"And yet life is very pleasant, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, sir, we all know that."
"Would you not be glad to live these twenty years over
again?"
"God forbid, sir."
"But supposing you had to live your life over again?"
"I would not do it."
"But what life would you care to live? mine, for instance, or
that of a prince, or of some other person?"
"Ah, sir, what a question!"
"And yet, do you not see that I, or the prince, or any one
else, would answer precisely as you do, and that no one would
consent to live his life over again?"
"Yes, sir, I suppose so."
"Am I to understand, then, that you would not live your life
over again?"
"No, sir, truly, I would not."
"What life would you care for, then?"
"I would like, without any other condition, such a life as
God might be pleased to give me."
"In other words, one which would be happy-go-lucky, and of
which you would know no more than you do of the coming year."
"Exactly."
"Well, then, that is what I would like too; it is what every
one would like, and for the simple reason that up to this
time there is no one whom chance has not badly treated. Every
one agrees that the misery of life outbalances its pleasure,
and I have yet to meet the man who would care to live his
old life over. The life which is so pleasant is not the life
with which we are personally acquainted; it is another life,
not the life that we have lived, but the life which is to
come. Next year will treat us all better; it will be the
beginning of a happy existence. Do you not think it will?"
"Indeed, I hope so, sir."
"Show me your best calendar."
"This one, sir; it is thirty soldi."
"Here they are."
"Thank you, sir, long life to you, sir. Calendars! new
calendars!"
There are few scenes as clever as this, and fewer still in which irony
and humor are so delicately blended; and yet, notwithstanding its
studied bitterness, there is little doubt that its author clearly
perceived that life does hold one or two incontestable charms.
In speaking of glory, Pascal noted in his "Pensées" that even
philosophers seek it, and those who wrote it down wished the reputation
of having written it down well. To this rule Leopardi was no exception;
he admitted as much on several occasions; and even if he had not done
so, the fact would have been none the less evident from the burnish of
his verse and the purity of his prose, which was not that of a writer
to whom the opinion of others was indifferent. In the essay, therefore,
in which he attacks the illusion of literary renown, he reminds one
forcibly of Byron hurrying about in search of the visible isolation
which that simple-minded poet so seriously pursued; and yet while no
other writer, perhaps, has been more thoroughly given to _pose_ than
the author of "Childe Harold," there are few who have been so entirely
devoid of affectation as Leopardi. The comparative non-success of his
writings, however, was hardly calculated to make him view with any
great enthusiasm the subject of literary fame; and as, moreover, he
considered it his mission to besiege all illusions, he held up this one
in particular as a seductive chimera and attacked it accordingly.
In the "Ovvero della Gloria," he says reflectively: "Before an author
can reach the public with any chance of being judged without prejudice,
think of the amount of labor which he expends in learning how to write,
the difficulties which he has to overcome, and the envious voices which
he must silence. And even then, what does the public amount to? The
majority of readers yawn over a book, or admire it because some one
else has admired it before them. It is the style that makes a book
immortal; and as it requires a certain education to be a judge of
style, the number of connoisseurs is necessarily restricted. But beyond
mere form there must also be depth, and as each class of work
presupposes a special competence on the part of the critic, it is easy
to see how narrow the tribunal is which decides an author's reputation.
And even then, is it one which is thoroughly just? In the first place,
the critic, even when competent, judges--and in that he is but
human--according to the impression of the moment, and according to the
tastes which age or circumstances have created. If he is young, he
likes brilliance; old, he is unimpressionable. Great reputations are
made in great cities, and it is there that heart and mind are more or
less fatigued. A first impression, warped in this way, may often become
final; for if it be true that valuable works should be re-read, and are
only appreciated with time, it is also true that at the present time
very few books are read at all. Supposing, however, the most favorable
case: supposing that a writer, through the suffrage of a few of his
contemporaries, is certain of descending to posterity as a great
man,--what is a great man? Simply a name, which in a short time will
represent nothing. The opinion of the beautiful changes with the days,
and literary reputations are at the mercy of their variations; as to
scientific works, they are invariably surpassed or forgotten. Nowadays,
any second-rate mathematician knows more than Galileo or Newton."
Genius, then, is a sinister gift, and its attendant glory but a vain
and empty shadow.
The life of Leopardi, as told by his biographers, is poetically
suggestive of the story of the pale Armide, who burned the palace that
enchanted her; and the similarity becomes still more noticeable when he
is found hacking and hewing at the illusion of love. Personally
considered, Leopardi was not attractive; he was undersized, slightly
deformed, near-sighted, prematurely bald, nervous, and weak; and though
physical disadvantages are often disregarded by women, and not
infrequently inspire a compassion which, properly tended, may warm into
love, yet when the body, weak and infirm as was his, incases the
strength and lurid vitality of genius, the unlovable monstrosity is
complete. Indeed, in this respect, it may be noted that while the love
of a delicate-minded woman for a coarse and stupid ruffian is an
anomaly of daily repetition, there are yet few instances in which
genius, even when strong of limb, has succeeded in inspiring a great
and enduring affection.
Against Leopardi, then, the house of love was doubly barred. When he
was about nineteen, he watched the usual young girl who lives over the
way, and with a _naïveté_ which seems exquisitely pathetic he made no
sign, but simply watched and loved. The young lady does not appear to
have been in any way conscious of the mutely shy adoration which her
beauty had fanned into flame, and at any rate paid no attention to the
sickly dwarf across the street. She sat very placidly at her window, or
else fluttered about the room humming some old-fashioned air. This went
on for a year or more, until finally she was carried away in a rumbling
coach, to become the willing bride of another.
This, of course, was very terrible to Leopardi. Through some inductive
process, which ought to have been brought about by the electric
currents which he was establishing from behind the curtain, he had in
his lawless fancy made quite sure that his love would sooner or later
be felt and reciprocated. When, therefore, from his hiding place he saw
the bride depart in maiden ignorance of her conquest, and entirely
unconscious of the sonnets which had been written in her praise, the
poet's one sweet hope faded slowly with her.
This pure and sedate affection remained vibrant in his memory for many
years, and formed the theme of so many reveries and songs that love
finally appeared to him as but another form of suffering. In after
life, when much of the lustre of youthful candor had become dull and
tarnished, he besieged the heart of another lady, but this time in a
bolder and more enterprising fashion. His suit, however, was
unsuccessful. It may be that he was too eloquent; for eloquence is
rarely captivating save to the inexperienced, and the man who makes
love in rounded phrases seems to the practised eye to be more artistic
than sincere. At all events, his affection was not returned. The
phantom had passed very close, but all he had clutched was the air. He
was soon conscious, however, that he had made that mistake which is
common to all imaginative people: it was not the woman he loved, it was
beauty; not woman herself, but the ideal. It was a conception that he
had fallen in love with; a conception which the woman, like so many
others, had the power to inspire, and yet lacked the ability to
understand. This time Leopardi was done with love, and forthwith
attacked it as the last, yet most tenacious, of all illusions. "It is,"
he said, "an error like the others, but one which is more deeply
rooted, because, when all else is gone, men think they clutch therein
the last shadow of departing happiness. Error beato," he adds, and so
it may be, yet is he not well answered by that sage saying of Voltaire,
"L'erreur aussi a son mérite"?
It was in this way that Leopardi devastated the palace from whose
feasts he had been excluded. At every step he had taken he had left
some hope behind; he had been dying piecemeal all his life; he was
confessedly miserable, and this not alone on account of his poverty and
wretched health, but chiefly because of his lack of harmony with the
realities of existence. The world was to him the worst one possible,
and he would have been glad to adorn the gate of life with the
simplicity of Dante's insistent line,--
"Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate."
"There was a time," he said, "when I envied the ignorant and those who
thought well of themselves. To-day, I envy neither the ignorant nor the
wise, neither the great nor the weak; I envy the dead, and I would only
change with them."
This, of course, was purely personal. Toward the close of his life he
recognized that his judgment had been in a measure warped by the
peculiar misfortunes of his own position, but in so doing he seemed
almost to be depriving himself of a last, if sad, consolation. Nor did
he ever wholly recant, and it is in the conception of the universality
of misery which stamped all his writings, and which, even had he
wished, he was then powerless to alter, that his relation to the
theoretic pessimism of to-day chiefly rests.
As a creed, the birthplace of pessimism is to be sought on the banks of
the Ganges, or far back in the flower-lands of Nepaul, where the
initiate, with every desire lulled, awaits Nirvâna, and murmurs only,
"Life is evil."
Now, as is well known, in every religion there is a certain
metaphysical basis which is designed to supply an answer to man's first
question; for while the animal lives in undismayed repose, man of all
created things alone marvels at his own existence and at the
destruction of his fellows. To his first question, then, What is life
and death? each system attempts to offer a perfect reply; indeed, the
temples, cathedrals, and pagodas clearly attest that man at all times
and in all lands has continually demanded that some reply should be
given, and it is perhaps for this very reason that where other beliefs
have found fervent adherents, neither materialism nor skepticism have
been ever able to acquire a durable influence. It is, however, curious
to note that in attempting the answer, nearly every creed has given an
unfavorable interpretation to life. Aside from the glorious lessons of
Christianity, its teaching, in brief, is that the world is a vale of
tears, that nothing here can yield any real satisfaction, and that
happiness, which is not for mortals, is solely the recompense of the
ransomed soul. To the Brahmin, while there is always the hope of
absorption in the Universal Spirit, life meanwhile is a regrettable
accident. But in Buddhism, which is perhaps the most naïve and yet the
most sublime of all religions, and which through its very combination
of simplicity and grandeur appeals to a larger number of adherents than
any other, pessimism is the beginning, as it is the end.
To the Buddhist there is reality neither in the future nor in the past.
To him true knowledge consists in the perception of the nothingness of
all things, in the consciousness of--
"The vastness of the agony of earth,
The vainness of its joys, the mockery
Of all its best, the anguish of its worst;"
and in the desire to escape from the evil of existence into the entire
affranchisement of the intelligence. To the Buddhist,--
... "Sorrow is
Shadow to life, moving where life doth move."
The Buddhist believes that the soul migrates until Nirvâna is attained,
and that in the preparation for this state, which is the death of
Death, the nothingness of a flame extinguished, there are four degrees.
In the first, the novitiate learns to be implacable to himself, yet
charitable and compassionate to others. He then acquires an
understanding into the nature of all things, until he has suppressed
every desire save that of attaining Nirvâna, when he passes initiate
into the second degree, in which judgment ceases. In the next stage,
the vague sentiment of satisfaction, which had been derived from
intellectual perfection, is lost, and in the last, the confused
consciousness of identity disappears. It is at this point that Nirvâna
begins, but only begins and stretches to vertiginous heights through
four higher degrees of ecstasy, of which the first is the region of
infinity in space, the next, the realm of infinity in intelligence,
then the sphere in which nothing is, and, finally, the loss of even the
perception of nothing. When Death is dead, when all have attained
Nirvâna, then, according to the Buddhist, the universe will rock
forevermore in unconscious rest.
In brief, then, life to the Christian is a probation, to the Brahmin a
burden, to the Buddhist a dream, and to the pessimist a nightmare.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Zeller, _Philosophie der Griechen_.]
[Footnote 2: _Werke_, _v._ p. 408, _et seq._]