PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.
The Rise and Progress of Buddhism in Europe may possibly form the subject of a long chapter in the hands of a Mosheim of the twentieth century. Hitherto, among all Western nations, not less than among the Jews, there has been a tolerable unanimous consensus that life, on the whole, is good, and that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. Happiness, like health, has been assumed to be the normal condition of sentient beings; and misery, like disease, to be exceptional and abnormal. The dead have been pitied, inasmuch as they had passed away from so pleasant a world; more especially so by those classic peoples who believed that the departed dwelt in an insubstantial realm of shadows. No energetic Northern race, however, contented itself with a twilight Hades, but built up in imagination a Valhalla of feast and war for the worshipper of Odin; and, for the disciple of the Druid, a glorious ascension from the darkness of “Abred” to the light and felicity of “Gwynfyd.” Christianity, in its perverted forms, Catholic ascetic and Calvinist, took away, indeed, much of the joyfulness of the old heathen world, and made divines speak of our earthly abode as a “city of wrath” or “vale of tears.” But they were all the more urgent that men should fight the good fight, of which the crown should be “life everlasting” in the New Jerusalem; and, for the majority of their flocks, even if this sinful planet remained, it would appear at all times, a sufficiently desirable habitation to make departure from it unwelcome.
Brought up in these common views, probably not one of us modern Europeans has perused, for the first time, a philosophical statement of the pessimist principles which underlie the vast religions of the farther East, without a shock of astonishment. Individually, we may have found our particular share of existence painful rather than pleasurable. Disease, poverty, disappointment, bereavement, may have embittered our years. But that any order of men, outside of lunatic asylums, should lay down as a postulate, whereon to build religion and morality, that Life is per se an evil, and that, “whatever we have been, ’tis something better not to be,” and proceed benevolently to point out how we may, by much diligence, shake off not only this mortal coil, but the entire burden of being, and arrive at the consummation of nonentity,—this is an idea revolutionizing the order of our conceptions, and as nearly incredible as any assertion dealing with the vagaries of the human mind may be. Even yet, perhaps, some doubts may legitimately linger as to whether the Buddhist creed, elsewhere than in Nepaul (where it certainly does not teach annihilation), really intends by “Nirvana” to set forth the emptiness, rather than the plenitude, of being. But that both Brahmin and Buddhist teachers have systematically dealt with life as an evil rather than as a good, there is, I apprehend, no question among competent inquirers. Here, then, are two absolutely contrasted, fundamental conceptions of the totality of human existence,—the Western, that life is a blessing; the Eastern, that it is a curse. The European cries,—
“’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,—
More life, and fuller, that we want.”
He “shudders at destruction,” and better endures to face even the tremendous threat of an eternal hell than to relax the tenacity of his belief in an immortal consciousness. The Indian, on the contrary, devoutly hopes that a life (or several lives) of self-abnegation, may bring him to the bourne whence the traveller leaps into the gulf of nothingness. Marvellous to add, as climax, there seems more likelihood that a certain number of highly educated Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, may learn to sigh for Nirvana than that our missionaries will induce an equal number of intelligent Singalese, Chinese, or natives of Siam, to exchange their dreary anticipations for the hope of heaven.
Not to exaggerate the importance of the “School” (if such it can be accounted) of European Buddhists, we may, I think, properly afford to its existence the attention due to a remarkable “fault” in the strata of recent thought, and still more fitly ponder on the significant tokens, scattered through current literature, of pessimist tendencies quite other than the Western world has hitherto exhibited. Our modern owls may be heard responding to each other in their turrets of the Nineteenth Century and the Fortnightly Review,—sometimes solemnly and seriously, as when Mr. Morley wrote of “that droning, piteous chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear like the moaning of a midnight sea”; sometimes with odious pretension and self-conceit when smaller men and foolish women hoot and croak. In the brightest intellectual circles, many of us have learned to listen with well-bred calmness to assertions from smiling gentlemen and beautifully dressed ladies touching the general wrongness of all things, and the particular wretchedness of human nature, which, did we believe them, would cause us to rush from the dinner-table and hang ourselves on the nearest lamp-post. In Germany, matters have proceeded further; and Schopenhauer has been for some time as much the fashionable Philosopher, as Wagner is the Musician, of the age.
Of course there are various degrees and kinds of Pessimism everywhere to be noted. There is the Philanthropic Pessimist who thinks his fellow-creatures are merely wretched; and the Misanthropic Pessimist, who thinks them both wretched and despicable. There is the Theistic Pessimist, who still believes in God, but considers Him either to be a “baffled Ormusd,” or else to look down from such heights on human affairs as to regard them no more than we do the politics and catastrophes of an ant-hill. And, finally, there is the Atheistic Pessimist, who has abandoned the notion of an Intelligence at the helm of the Universe, and believes only in a blind Force, irresponsible for all the misery and crime of which He—or rather It—is the cause. For all these varied kinds of Pessimism there seem to be two quite distinct sources,—a good and noble, and a bad and base one. Each of these sources leads to results having an outward apparent similarity, and accordingly creates an illusory resemblance between the feelings and expressions of persons whose characters and actions are wide as the poles asunder. Let me endeavor to discriminate them.
It is, at the first glance, not a little remarkable that the development of Pessimism to which I have referred should have taken place in an age of almost unparalleled public prosperity. Probably the sufferings caused by disease, by want, and by injustice, are now at their minimum in the settled countries of Europe. And yet it is in our time that men are now beginning formally to pronounce the evil of the world to exceed the good, and to treat what their fathers deemed the “beneficent order of Providence,” as too harsh and unjust a system to be attributed to a benevolent Deity, or indeed to any intelligent Being at all. It was not in the days of old oppression and tyranny, of the great famines or the “Black Death,” that there was any such revolt. When earth was much more like hell than it is at present, few men entertained any doubt that there was a God in heaven. Now that its worst wrongs are in course of alleviation or remedy, and that there opens before our eyes a vista of almost illimitable progress for our race in happiness and virtue, the whole stupendous scheme is not unfrequently pronounced to be nothing better than a huge blunder.
The anomaly is certainly striking, and it may be carried further by noting who are those persons who find the world so bad a place. As it is a prosperous age which has developed Pessimism, so it is almost always prosperous people who are Pessimists. It is the rarest thing possible to hear any expression of such ideas from the lips of the suffering or the dying, or even from those who see their beloved ones suffer and die. A hundred visits to sordid lodgings or miserable hovels, to workhouses, jails, hospitals, asylums for the blind or the incurably diseased, will scarcely afford us the chance of catching a phrase indicating that the inmate of the dreary abode thinks the world awry, and Providence to blame for it. We must pass to pleasanter scenes,—to the haunts of the well-paid lecture-frequenting artisan,—or the houses of the most cultivated and wealthy of the middle and upper classes, palaces which calamity has never visited, and where luxurious food, clothing, furniture, books, flowers, pictures, music, are accepted as matters of course; and there we may, not improbably, be told that “none but bigots who voluntarily close their eyes to the terrible realities of life can dream of calling the world a happy place, or speak of its design as beneficent.” Sometimes there occurs in the experience of a single day a contrast, almost ludicrous, between the patience and gratitude manifested by some poor suffering creature—perhaps dying of cancer on a pauper’s pallet—and the expression of revolt and despair used by a cultivated gentleman who is possessed of nearly every source of human enjoyment.
All this is not so unmeaning and perverse as it at first appears. There is a reason why our generation—the happiest and, we will hope, perhaps, on the whole, the best the world has yet seen—should scan the dread problem of Evil with other eyes than its predecessors; and there are reasons, far from ignoble, why happy men and women should find it harder to justify the ways of God to the miserable than those miserable ones themselves to do so on their own account. In the first place, our generation shrinks from the sight of physical anguish in a way obviously unknown to our progenitors, who could ride gayly on their daily errands under gallows-trees loaded each with its sickening weight, or city gates decorated by decapitated heads; and who could feast and sleep in the chambers of feudal castles while under their floors miserable prisoners were pining in dungeons, or perhaps expiring amid the unutterable horrors of the oubliette. They could stand by as unmoved spectators, or throw fresh fagots on the piles where heretics and witches were burning, and shout applause when half-hanged traitors were cut down from the rope to be drawn and quartered. Oppressions and injustices done by the strong against the weak were matters of every-day experience in every town, almost in every parish and household. If such things seem to us calculated to provoke vehement indignation and rebellion against every Power above or below which sanctioned or permitted them, it must be asked who was there in those days likely to feel any similar indignation? The laws were not more cruel than the men who made them, nor the legislators than the mass of the nation. This being the case, how should those who thought it right and just that their fellows should endure such tortures find anything mysterious in the severest decrees of Providence? The order of nature—harsh to the eyes of a John Stuart Mill or a Shelley—must have been mild enough to those of the habitués of autos-da-fé, or even let us say to the nobles of France under that ancien régime of which M. Taine has given us the picture.
Another difference between our age and all preceding ones, which specially touches this matter, is that in former times men thought so little of the lower animals that their lot scarcely entered as an item into calculation in the purview of the world. It was always the enigmas presented by human inequalities, sufferings, and wrongs, which disturbed the doubter of old. His questions were, “Why do the wicked flourish like a green bay-tree? Why do the righteous perish, and none regardeth it? Why do the good and useful die in the flower of their years, and the evil live long in the land? Why, in short, is not that great justice of heaven (in which man everywhere intuitively believes, though his intuition has assuredly never been evolved by experience), why is this not manifested in all the concerns of human beings?” The Book of Job posed the solemn question of this earlier doubt; and the Book of Revelation, by opening up to the gaze of men a heaven where the poor and the persecuted will be forever blessed and triumphant, afforded it a reply which, if far from complete, has yet practically sufficed to stay the faith of Christendom. By the fresh stress which Christianity laid on the doctrine of Immortality, and the different relative importance which it assigned to the earthly and to the heavenly life, it fulfilled, in a profounder sense, the boast of the English statesman. It “called up a New World to redress the balance of the Old.” The orthodox Catholic doctrine, that sin and suffering are necessarily permitted by the Creator to allow scope for moral freedom, may be made in a loose and general way to cover the larger difficulties presented by the condition of all moral beings, for whose woes, if in any case unmerited, compensation is provided hereafter. So long, then, as the destiny of our own human race alone occupied any appreciable place in philosophy (and this was down to the earlier part of this century) there was not much room for Pessimism to find root among Western races. As to the brutes, few thought of their sufferings at all; and those who did so dismissed them with the doctrine that they shared the consequences of the Fall, which caused “the whole creation” to groan and “travail together in pain.”
“These emmets, how little they are in our eyes!
We tread them to dust, and a troop of them dies,
Without our regard or concern,”
as Dr. Watts cheerfully observed of the poor little insects, even when he was calling us to remark their wondrous forethought and industry. And larger animals more nearly akin to us were little more “regarded” than the ants, till the widening circles of our sympathies at last began to embrace the higher races of the brute creation; and their sufferings then, as a necessary consequence, immediately took a prominent place among the difficulties of theology. Geology first gave a shock to the received explanation of their destiny by proving that animals died painful deaths æons before “man’s first disobedience” could have taken place, or man himself had existence on this planet; and since those, now distant, days of Dean Buckland’s controversies, the questions so opened out have pressed continually more upon the thought of humane and religious men. The faith for which such men yearn in our day is to be assured—
“That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.”
Not one of their grandsires, probably, ever entertained any similar idea, but rather indulged a sublime contempt of the “poor Indian” whose “untutored mind” permitted him to hope that his dog might share his paradise.
These causes, then, I think,—namely, the growth of a finer sense of pity for human woes, and the inclusion of the lower animals in the scope of our sympathies,—suffice to explain in great measure the reasons why some of the best of men in our generation feel the evil and misery of the world, and display a leaning toward Pessimism unexampled in harder times.
Nearly all religious men, looking back upon life, seem disposed to be thankful on their own account, and to acknowledge that goodness and mercy have followed them all the days of their lives. They have not been “dealt with according to their sins,” but have many a time been set free from nets of their own weaving, and helped out of the mire and clay of vice and passion. Viewed from within, such appears to be the common testimony concerning every good man’s career. It is the inexplicable mysteries in the destinies of their neighbors, as viewed from outside, and (as I have just said) the sufferings of the harmless brutes, which causes such men now to doubt God and think the world evil. Satan tempted the old Chaldæan by heaping afflictions on his own person. He tries the modern Job more cunningly,—by giving him, Asmodeus-fashion, a wide bird’s-eye view of the woes and wrongs of other people.
To descend from the general proclivities of our age to those of individuals toward Pessimism, the same paradox may be observed. As it is by no means altogether a bad sign of the times that there is a keener consciousness afloat of the extent to which pain and wrong prevail in the world, so neither is it by any means an indication of a bad disposition when a man takes a dark view of human nature and of life. Timon may be a noble fellow, or very much the reverse. We must study him in both characters.
The noble Timon has started with an unusual share of generosity and sympathy, and has become embittered because he has found other men less good and true than himself. There is a certain average sincerity, average unselfishness, average generosity and gratitude common among men. He who has a little above the average of such fine qualities meets on all sides disappointment. He finds people who display selfishness, where, as a matter of course, he would have sacrificed his own convenience or interest to theirs; people who are mean where he would have been liberal, and suspicious where he was as open as the day; and, finally, people who return his kindness with an ingratitude inexplicable to his generous mind, rich in its own benevolence. What, then, can happen to our Timon but to begin to mistrust those whom he finds so unlike himself, to shut himself from them (and so, perhaps, provoke their mistrust in turn), and very commonly to bestow much of his disappointed affections on animals, on whose fidelity he finds he can more surely depend, and whose wrongs at the hands of cruel men still further deepen his disgust of his own kind? All this time, another man, whose generosity and sincerity were, at starting, a little below rather than above the average, has been passing through life pleasantly astonished to find that his neighbors will show him more kindness than (he is conscious) he would in their places display, and rather more than less honest than he has reckoned to find them. Thus, by a curious contradiction, the nobler-natured man is much more liable than the baser to develop into the misanthrope; and it is the lofty kind of scorn and bitterness properly belonging to him which every Pessimist assumes, whether he truly feel it or not. It is always sous entendu, in all tirades against human nature, that the speaker is quite incapable of the weakness, folly, and wickedness he condemns; and that, if he refers to the “dark side of Providence,” he would have managed the universe on better principles. But it is extremely questionable whether we ought to give unlimited credit to the genuineness of the indignation of those gentlemen who denounce the evils of the world, but never stir a finger to remove them; and whose personal enjoyment of the good things of life—fine houses, clothes, dinners, pictures, bric-à-brac, pleasant conversation, and favorable reviews of their books—has, manifestly, never been clouded by their sombre sense of the dreadful destiny of mankind at large, nor their appetite for applause been impaired by their profound conviction of the folly and contemptibility of the people by whom it is offered.
A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to have been that great light of recent German philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer died childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one if we dissect his character candidly as that of the most prominent Pessimist of the age. It will be instructive, I think, to learn the “notes” of such a character,—to study, in short, of what kind of stuff (so to speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In justice, we must carry in mind that Schopenhauer accomplished a good deal in the philosophic way, besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a metaphysical system of considerable depth and ingenuity,—one of the merits of which, at all events, may be accounted that it is readily applicable to quite other views than those of its author, respecting the nature and destiny of mankind. With this formidable system, elaborated in his great work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, we have, however (happily for me, and probably for my reader), for our present purpose, no concern whatever, but only with his actions and character, such as Miss Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs, sketched in a life-like and transparently truthful manner in her Life of Schopenhauer.
The first “note” of Schopenhauer’s character, I should say, was his Heartlessness. He seems scarcely to have loved anybody—in any sense of the word worth considering—from his cradle to his grave. He made, indeed, after his father’s death, much parade of respect for his memory; but his filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured mother, and treated her with singular insolence. As to friendship, he avowed his opinion that “men of much intellectual worth, more especially if they have genius, can have but few friends”; and he verified his own dictum as a first-rate genius by having, so far as we may judge, no real friends at all, though in later life, when he became celebrated, he had numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was even less in Schopenhauer’s way than friendship, unless we are to call by the title the passion in its coarsest form. His opinion was that “the poetry of love is mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant to mantle the solemnity of the thing as it really is” (p. 222); and his actions were quite in accordance with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer states, “no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to this eminence.... He despised women.... He was only different from ordinary men in that he spoke of what others suppressed; and his over-zealous disciples, who saw the god-like in all his acts, even dragged these to the light of day.” His “careless dallying with beauty” (a euphemism, I presume, for a loose life) but once brought him to wish for a permanent union. The only woman whom he is recorded to have desired to marry was an actress, who, at the time he was “enraptured with her,” was (fit position for the wife of a great moral philosopher!) the recognized mistress of Duke Carl August.
It has sometimes happened that men who have been lacking in those family and friendly affections which are the most beautiful things in human life have yet almost atoned for their deficiency by their fervent “Enthusiasm of Humanity.” It is needless to say that Schopenhauer’s character displayed an impartial negation of both orders of feeling. He neither loved men nor women in particular, nor man in general. He carefully defined himself to be not a misanthrope, only a despiser of men (p. 83). The higher a man stood mentally, he thought, the lower must his fellow-men appear. That it was the divine part of the greatest to serve the least was the very last suggestion which would have occurred to his mind. “I read,” he observed, “in the face of the Apollo Belvidere, the just and deep displeasure felt by the god of the Muses for the wretched obstinacy of the Philistines”; and, doubtless, Arthur Schopenhauer figuratively drew himself up, and felt as like the Apollo Belvidere as the corporeal circumstances of a German philosopher might permit.
He was “penetrated with the conviction that he had been placed in a world peopled with beings morally and intellectually contemptible, from whom he must keep apart.” In his note-book (of rather a different cast from that of Marcus Aurelius), he wrote this piece of self-counsel: “Study to acquire an accurate and connected view of the utter despicability of mankind in general, then of your contemporaries, and of German scholars in particular.”
The second “note” in Schopenhauer’s character was his exceeding Cowardice. The modern Socrates would have deserted Athens at the plague, and run away at Potidæa. With what poltroonery he would have behaved, when required to drink the hemlock, it is impossible to imagine. When his country was in the throes of war and political crises, Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the way. When there was any kind of infectious disease prevalent, he fled to another city, so that half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left Berlin for fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of the small-pox, and Verona because he took it into his head that his snuff was poisoned. He slept with loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at the slightest noise. When the postman brought him a letter, he started. He used a cup of his own to avoid the contagion which might lurk in a glass at a public table. He labelled his valuables with deceptive names, and wrote his business memoranda in Greek. As we have seen, he was not bellicose. Only once in his life is it recorded that he struck a blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an acquaintance of his landlady presumptuous enough to hold a coffee-party in his anteroom, Schopenhauer knocked her down with such violence that her right arm was permanently disabled. Any other man, who had committed an act of similar brutality in a moment of passion, would probably have hastened to offer some compensation to his victim; but our philosopher, on the contrary, hotly contested the poor woman’s suit for legal redress, and quitted the town in disgust when he found himself compelled to maintain her for life,—a period which (the non-sympathetic reader will rejoice to learn) was extremely prolonged. The writer of an exceedingly able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the Contemporary Review, some years ago, observed that his unamiable traits are best excused by his own candid avowal that he liked his own mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not at all. The unalterableness of the natural character was one of his favorite dogmas. Certainly, the self-training by which many a naturally nervous temperament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish one into generosity, and a morose or peevish temper into gentleness, was as far as possible from Schopenhauer’s plan of life; and it opens to us a rather alarming idea of the society of the future, if his followers generally should resolve to adopt his facile principle, and assume that their “natural characters,” whatever they may chance to be,—selfish, false, dissolute, or cruel,—are “unalterable.” Such liberty, however, is probably reserved for those who may claim to be “men of genius” like their master, since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a theory which we may call the Philosopher’s Anti-nomianism. “He weighed his duties toward the world,” we are told, “in the balance with the weight and intensity of his natural gifts, and he came to the conclusion that a man gifted with genius, by merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation of sacrificing himself in particular individually. On this account, he may ignore claims which others are bound to fulfil.”[14]
But the third “note” was, I venture to think, the true key of Schopenhauer’s character. It was Arrogance. The philosophers whom the world has hitherto honored have been generally noted for the opposite quality. As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. His mother (described as a woman of “modest, pleasing manners” and amiable character, who received habitually in her house such men as Goethe, the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts him thus, when a lad yet engaged in collegiate studies: “Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter like oracles which none may presume to contradict,—all this depresses me. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams.”[15] This little preliminary glance at the youth of twenty enables us to judge what value should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf, that his arrogance and bitterness were but the natural results of the neglect with which his great book was received by an unappreciative public and a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the “necessary armor of scorn and self-defence” which enabled him to hold his ground. The boy at college, it seems, long before he had written a work to instruct the world, or had experienced anything but kindness and prosperity, the healthy, rich, gifted, and independent young lad, was already habitually “lamenting over the stupid world and human misery,” and uttering, with “sullen looks,” “oracles which none may presume to contradict.”
As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion of himself and his works with serenest equanimity. No more naïf expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned than this gentleman’s eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he writes to the publisher of his work that its “worth and importance are so great that I do not venture to express it even toward you, because you could not believe me,” and proceeds to quote a review “which speaks of me with the highest praise, and says that I am plainly the greatest philosopher of the age, which is really saying much less than the good man thinks.” “Sir,” he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him across a table d’hôte (where he habitually acted the part of local “lion”), “sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three times as much as you, but, then, I have three times as much mind!” (p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been spoken except in jest and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet studied Schopenhauer’s saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his own expense must have been quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps, such barbarous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable reaction from the tone of self-depreciation (often exceedingly insincere) which modern manners have enforced. But the old classic pride was a very different thing from Schopenhauer’s aggressive arrogance, wherewith he managed to blend gross and egregious vanity in quite a novel combination. On a les défauts de ses qualités, but not usually together two apparently contradictory defects. In our simplicity, we should have anticipated that the man who considered himself the greatest philosopher of his age, and talked about the “loneliness of the heights” of intellectual grandeur, would have disdained to trouble himself about such miserable things as common newspaper reviews. We should have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess. “Schopenhauer (we are told) began to read German newspapers, now that they wrote about him. He caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to be sent to him. He looked through all philosophical works for a mention of himself. His intense contempt for women wavered, when he saw they could feel interest in his works.” What would Aristotle’s “Magnanimous Man” have said to this kind of littleness? “Honor, from any other person” (than the good), “or on the score of trifles, he will utterly despise, and likewise he will despise dishonor.”[16]
Let it be remembered, too, that this was in Schopenhauer’s old age. For a young author to be nervously excited about the reception of his works is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking for the confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers of his own consciousness of ability, or to the extinction of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot apply to a man advanced in life and of established literary reputation, whose opinion of his own exalted gifts had been fully expanded while he was yet a lad at college.
Is it too much to say that in this inordinate opinion of his own powers and merits lies the secret of this man’s Pessimism, of his contempt of other men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt against Providence? It is not wonderful that a man who looks on his fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying them with the arrows of his scorn, should find them wretched and unlovable; for no man, however humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks down on him, and thus lacks all the insight of love and sympathy, and all the charity of one who forgives as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and condones his own faults on the score of the unalterableness of natural character, should survey the world and find it a godless desert. Probably no human heart ever yet bloomed out into gratitude even under the brightest sunshine of prosperity, which had not once been ploughed up by self-reproach and softened by tears of repentance. In truth, any kind of religious sense is well-nigh incompatible with such pride as we are discussing. The doors whereby other men enter the Temple,—the tender guidance of human affection, the awful strife of the higher self against passion and sin, the sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity and goodness,—all these are closed to him. Schopenhauer’s religious history is a confirmation of the truth that it is not the marble-palace mind of the philosopher which God will visit so often as the humble heart which lies sheltered from the storms of passion, and all trailed over by the sweet blossoms of human affections.
It is actually ludicrous to compare this man’s intensely selfish, vain, cowardly character with the magnificent compliments which he paid to virtue in the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the perfect man, or “ascetic,” in whom the very sense of individuality, not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated: “He will no longer regard himself as a real existence, comprised within the rigid line of personality, and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest of the universe. He will regard his separate being as a mere transitory phenomenon, a temporary objectivation of the sole real existence; and this recognition of his true position must necessarily destroy selfishness.... When a man ceases to draw an egotistic distinction between himself and others, and takes as much part in their sorrows as in his own, it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs of all beings as his own, and thus appropriate to himself the sorrows of the whole world.”[17] The modern “Man of Sorrows” (if we may venture on so irreverent a comparison for the sake of the contrast) had, for his own use, an easy method of “appropriating” the griefs of his kind. “We gather,” says his keen-sighted critic of the Contemporary Review, “from the accounts of his disciples, that he had arranged for himself an existence more than tolerable; for, while free from positive annoyance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate source of pleasure in the disinterested contemplation of the idea of the world’s sorrows.”[18] A more easy form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine.
Is it not somewhat surprising that a man like this, who, to do him justice, made no pretence of practising what he taught, but said openly, with cynical effrontery, “I preach sanctity, but I am no saint,”[19] should have exercised any influence over his generation? We read, however, that “his little band of disciples grew, and their fanaticism reached a ludicrous point. One entreated him to found a trust for the purpose of keeping watch that no syllable of his works should ever be altered; another had his portrait painted and placed in a room like a chapel,”[20] etc.
This particular hero-worship is, to my thinking, so portentous that I have been tempted thus to study it at some length. For thousands of years, the human race has gone on adding one noble type to another in its Pantheon,—the old heathen patriotism and heroism of a Theseus, a Codrus, a Curtius, a Regulus, the modest wisdom of a Socrates, and the stoic grandeur of a Marcus Aurelius. Christianity added yet saintlier virtues to the ideal,—the charity, the purity, the religious fervor, and martyr devotion of a whole army of saints. Yet all these “stars of our mortal night” can, it seems, be obscured and forgotten; and men who might have known and honored and followed them, like the Magi of old, prefer to dance after such a flaring link-light as Schopenhauer lifted over his own head! Observing this, and how his desolate doctrine is gaining ground, and recognizing not a few of his personal characteristics (more especially his arrogance) among other thinkers nearer home, we are tempted to turn back fondly and regretfully to the humblest old-fashioned goodness. Many of us had confidently trusted that, when knowledge increased, wisdom and love would grow along with it; that, without losing the sacred lessons of the past, mankind would obtain still deeper insight into moral truth, and that phases of character would appear more beautiful, more joyous, more perfectly rounded in all the gifts and graces of humanity than the world yet has seen,—the long-severed virtues of the hero and the saint combined at last.
Alas! if Schopenhauers are to increase and multiply among us, these hopes have been visionary, indeed! As his character emerges from his biography, and stands clearly revealed to sight, memories of many a man and woman of small account in the world rise up and range themselves in our thoughts for comparison opposite to this great philosopher. We remember those who, instead of flying from the terrors of pestilence or war, have freely gone to meet them at the call of benevolence or patriotism. We remember those who, instead of finding their fellow-men “despicable,” have been lifelong loving friends, faithful and tender husbands, devoted parents and children, ardent philanthropists, sacrificing wealth and health and every enjoyment that they might relieve and bless the most miserable of mankind,—the criminal, the diseased, the vicious, and abandoned. We remember those who, instead of resting self-satisfied with the “unalterableness” of their own moral defects, have striven day and night, like the Pilgrim fighting on his knees against Apollyon, to purify their hearts of every stain, and, instead of arraigning Providence because their merits were insufficiently rewarded, have blessed God most of all for their afflictions. We remember all these, and also we remember the glory of peace and patience on their pain-worn faces; and from the depths of our souls comes the verdict that the dullest “Philistine” of them all was, in the scale of true nobleness, worth a thousand pessimist philosophers.
Schopenhauer was, in truth, the best illustration which could be found of the fallacy of the modern intellect-worship, the idolatry of mere mental force, which is scarcely less stupid and ignoble than the idolatry of the physical force of winds or waters. As baseness is more contemptible in a king, and miserliness in a millionnaire, so are all moral faults and littlenesses only more despicable when set on the pedestal of genius. There are minds—and Schopenhauer’s was one of them—whose brilliancy is that of a light-house. Its best use is to disclose the cold and troubled sea, and the dreary rocks whereon the unwary might make shipwreck.
The question, “How far is Pessimism true, and how far does the actual state of the world justify us in pronouncing life to be an evil?” is far too vast and too solemn to be treated in this brief paper. One remark only must be made in abatement of the wide-sweeping denunciations of the present order of things in which Pessimists habitually indulge. If we take count of their arguments, we shall find that at least one-third are built on the assumption (which nothing in genuine philosophy warrants) that the “hypothesis of a God” involves the attribution to him not only of supreme but of absolute power, and generally of a power which includes self-contradictions. We should sweep away no inconsiderable number of difficulties, if we could get fairly out of reach of this ever-recurring fallacy, and hear no more that God ought to make every creature absolutely happy, and also absolutely virtuous; and illume the martyr’s glory, while invariably extinguishing the martyr’s pile. And, again, another third of the arguments of Pessimists rests on the yet more egregious and fundamental mistake that suffering is always to be accounted an evil, and may be lawfully weighed by them as such in holding the scales of the world. The truth that it is “good to have been afflicted,” that out of pain and grief and disappointment arise the purest virtues, the tenderest sympathies, the loftiest courage, the divinest faith,—this thrice-blessed truth, the very alphabet of spiritual experience, is, as a rule, quite overlooked by great philosophers of the order of Schopenhauer.
When all corrections and deductions are made, a residue of profound, awful, inexplicable misery—misery of sinful man and misery of sinless brutes—remains, alas! to form, doubtless, in time to come, as in the ages which are past, the dread “Riddle of the painful Earth.” We must expect it to press upon us ever more and more in proportion as our sense of justice and love rises higher, and our sympathies with unmerited suffering grow more acute. Whether the shadow which that mystery casts on religion will hereafter be in any degree relieved by fresh lights obtained through sounder theories of Nature, it were idle to guess. One thing seems clear enough; namely, that the spirit wherewith some modern Pessimists approach the tremendous problem is one which can never lead to its solution, and which in itself is calculated to form no inconsiderable addition to the gloom of human existence. The world, to all who enter it, is very much what their anticipations make of it,—full of matter for joy and gratitude, or for repining and discontent. It appears beautiful or dreary, according as they regard it through the cloudless, childlike eyes of cheerful trust or through the dim and distorting spectacles of doubt and despair. No generation so miserable has yet seen the light as one which should be trained to expect neither justice nor love from God, and to “cultivate a connected view of the general despicability of mankind.”
After all, as Schopenhauer himself confessed (though he cared so little to practise the lesson), character—or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say, conduct—is the great matter to which all theories are subordinate. “Moral goodness belongs to an order of things which is above this life, and is incommensurable with any other perfection.” There is a certain value in the old test whereby a tree is known by its fruits. To such of us as have kept any foundations of faith still standing, the presumption is surely enormous that the intellectual system which naturally produces courage, trustfulness, and loving-kindness, must be nearer to the Eternal Verities than the blighting theory which brings forth such thorns and thistles as deformed the character of the great Pessimist Philosopher of the nineteenth century.