Thus his efforts had again ended in failure. His friends had given him a farewell feast, lent him journey money, done all they could to help him, and now he came back without having settled anything. Again he had to hear the old too true accusation that he was unstable. To be unstable in an ordered society is the extreme of unpracticality. There persistent and exclusive cultivation of some special branch of industry or knowledge is necessary in order to outstrip competitors. Every orderly member of society feels a certain discomfort when he sees some one wandering from his proper place. This discomfort does not necessarily spring from excessive egotism, but possibly from a feeling of solidarity and solicitude for others. John saw that his countless changes of plan disquieted his friends; he felt ashamed and suffered on account of it, but could not act otherwise.
So he found himself at home, and spent the long evenings in the "Red Room," asking himself whether he really could find no place in a society which for others opened up so many rich possibilities of a career.
At Christmas time John travelled again to Upsala, for he had been invited thither as one of the contributors to a Literary Calendar which had just appeared. The Calendar, which was received with universal disapprobation, was not without significance as an exponent of the state of literature. The reader who was desired to wade through these elegant extracts, might justifiably ask, "What have I got to do with them?" The poetry they contained, like that of Snoilsky and Björck, might have been written fifty or a hundred years before. It was of indifferent quality, and sometimes even bad,—bad because it gave no sign that the poet had developed any powers of perception, indifferent because it was not rooted in its own period. The date of the book was 1872, but it contained no echo of the Jubilee of 1865, no hint of 1870, not a whiff of the conflagration of 1871. Had these young versifiers been asleep? Yes, certainly. The great mass of students were realists, sceptics, mockers, as befitted the children of the time, but the poets were credulous fools with the ideals of Snoilsky and Björck in their hearts. Their poetry was that of superannuated idealists in form and thought, for the new views of things had not reached these isolated individualists who still lived the Bohemian life of the Romantics. Their poetry consisted of nothing but echoes. In fact it was a question whether Swedish poetry had hitherto been anything else, or could be anything else. Was Tegner's poetry anything but an echo of Schiller, Oehlenschläger, the Eddas and the old Norse sagas? Was Atterbom anything else than a musical box pieced together out of Tieck, Hoffmann, Wieland, Burger? And so on with all the Swedish poets. But this Literary Calendar was composed of echoes of echoes and dreams of dreams. Realism, which had already made a premature entry into Sweden with Kraemer's Diamonds in Coal, and had subsequently triumphed in Snoilsky, had left no trace on these young poets. The poetry of Snoilsky's school had been the careless expression of a careless time, but these poems simply displayed the incapacity of their writers.
John had contributed to the Calendar a free version of "An Basveig's Saga." In this he had glorified himself as a kind of male Cinderella, or ugly duckling of the family. He was moved to do this by the contempt which had been evinced towards him by his patrons and middle-class friends on account of his failure as an author. The language of the piece was marked by a certain bluntness of expression and an attempt to dignify low things, or at least to rub off the dirt from things which were not really so, but were called so. Since the word Naturalism had not yet come into fashion, his language was called coarse and vulgar.
But an acquaintance which John happened to make during his stay in Upsala was of greater importance than the Calendar or Christmas dinner. He lodged with a friend on whose writing-table he found one day a number of the Svensk Tidskrift containing a notice of Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. It was an exposition of Hartmann's system by a Finn, A.V. Bolin, and betrayed throughout a half-concealed admiration of it. But the editor, Hans Forssell, had appended to the essay a note written in his usual style when he came across something that his brain could not take in. Hartmann's doctrine was pessimism. Conscious life is suffering because unconscious will is the motive power of evolution and consciousness obstructs this unconscious will. It was the old myth of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It was the kernel of the Buddhistic faith and the chief doctrine of Christianity,—"Vanitas, vanitatum vanitas."
Most of the greatest and conscious minds had been pessimists, and had seen through and unmasked the illusions of life. Only wild animals, children, and commonplace people could therefore be happy, because they were unconscious of the illusion, or because they held their ears when one wanted to tell them the truth and begged not to be robbed of their illusions.
John found all this quite natural, and had no important objection to make. It was true then, what he had so often dreamt, that everything was nothing! It was the suspicion of this which had governed his point of view and made all the great and all greatness appear on a reduced scale. This consciousness had lurked obscurely in him, when, as a child, although well-formed, healthy and strong, he wept over an unknown grief, the cause of which he could not find within him or without. That was the secret of his life, that he could not admire anything, could not hold to anything, could not live for anything; that he was too wide awake to be subject to illusions. Life was a form of suffering which could only be alleviated by removing as many obstacles as possible from the path of one's will; his own life in particular was so extremely painful because his social and economical position constantly prevented his will from expressing itself.
When he contemplated life and especially the course of history he saw only cycles of errors and mistakes repeating themselves.[1] The men of the present dreamt of a republic, as Greeks and Romans had done two thousand years before; the civilisation of the Egyptians had decayed when they perceived its futility; Asia was wrapped in an eternal sleep after it had been impelled by an unconscious will to conquer the world; all nations had invented narcotics and intoxicants in order to quench consciousness; sleep was blessedness and death the greatest happiness. But why not take the last step and commit suicide? Because the unconscious Will continually enticed men to live through the illusion of hope of a better life. Pessimism, regarded as a view of the world's order, is more consistent than meliorism, which sees in natural development a tendency which makes for men's happiness. This latter view seems to be a disguised relic of belief in divine providence. Can one believe that the mechanical blindly ruling laws of nature have any regard for the development of human society when they produce glacial periods, floods, and volcanic outbreaks? Must an intelligent man be called "conservative" in a contemptuous sense because he has brought under his yoke and rules the laws of nature as Stuart Mill facetiously expresses it? Have men devised any certain preventives against shipwreck, strokes of lightning, economic crises, losses of relatives by death and sickness? Can men control at pleasure the inclination of the earth's axis, and do away with cloud-formations which are likely to injure harvests? In spite of the present advanced state of science, have men been able to put an end to the grape pest, to stop floods, eradicate, superstitions, remove despots, prevent war? Is it not presumptuous or simple-minded to believe that man, himself governed by chemical, physical, and physiological laws of nature, stands above them because he understands how to use some of them to his own advantage, as birds use the wind for their progress or beavers the pressure of the stream in constructing their dams? Are not the wings of the falcon and the fly more perfect means of locomotion than railways and steamers? How can men be so simple as to think that they stand above nature when they are themselves so subordinate to nature that they cannot will or think freely? It looks like a residue of our primitive illusions. If the present development of European society ends in atheism, that has already been the case with the Buddhists; if in religious freedom, that has already been witnessed in the early history of China; if in polygamy, that already exists among the savages of Australia; if in community of goods, this prevailed among primitive peoples. The fact is that Europe has been the last of all the great ethnical groups to wake to consciousness. It is now in the act of waking and turning itself, not like some oriental nations, to torpid quietism, but to removing as far as possible the pains and unpleasantnesses of earthly existence, although the best way of doing so has not been yet discovered. The mistake of the industrial socialists is that they, according to the formula of the ambiguous evolution theory, wish to build upon existing conditions, which they regard as the product of necessity, and tending to the good of all. But existing conditions rather tend to the happiness of the few, and are therefore something abnormal to build on, which means erecting a house on ground from which the water has not been drained off. Probably the form of society which they desire, however absurd it is, is a necessary mistake through which men must pass to reach a better. Both the danger and the hope of progress consist in the fact that the socialistic system already has its programme drawn up and consequently works automatically, i.e. like a blind, irresistible mass. If it reconstitutes society after the pattern of the working-class who are a minority, and makes all men mechanics, one may venture to doubt, without being regarded as quite mad, whether that will be happiness. Socialism as a social reform is inevitable, for Europe in its self-idolatry has not perceived how far backward it is. Provided with an Asiatic form of government, which interferes in details, supporting ancient superstitions, living under the terrible tyranny of capital, which is maintained by force of arms, it sets on foot political and religious persecutions, it venerates embalmed monarchs like mummies of the Pharaohs, it civilises savages with waste goods and Krupp guns; it forgets that its civilisation came from the east, and was better then than it is now. Hartmann and the pessimists believe that the social reform which is called socialism will come, but that afterwards, it will be succeeded by something else.
The bourgeois is an optimist because he cannot see or think outside the narrow circle of everyday occurrences. That is his good fortune, but not his merit, for he has no choice in the matter. Nay, he does not even understand what pessimism is, but thinks it means the opinion that this is the worst of all worlds. How could any one have a well-grounded view on that? Voltaire, who was no pessimist, wrote a whole book to demonstrate that this world, at any rate, was not the best of worlds for us, as Leibnitz imagined. It is naturally the best for itself, although not for us, and the difference between the point of view of the hypochondriac and the pessimist consists in the fact that the former believes that the world is the worst possible for him, while the pessimist disregards what it may be for the individual. Hartmann is no hypochondriac as people have tried to make out, and he seeks to alleviate the pain of life as much as possible by placing himself in a state of unconsciousness.
The men of the younger generation of to-day are sad, because they have awoke to consciousness and lost many illusions. But they are not hypochondriacal, and work at bringing the world forward into the last stage of illusion or a new social system, as though hoping thereby to alleviate their pain, and they work the more fanatically, the deeper they feel it.