Besides the philosophical theories of the last century, those of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann and Mailaender, which I discussed sufficiently in The Nature of Man, poets have formulated a pessimistic view of life. Even Voltaire was a pessimist in the following lines:
Alas! what are the course and the goal of life?
Only follies and then the darkness.
Oh Jupiter! in creating us you made
A heartless jest.
In The Nature of Man I described Byron’s expression of his conception of the evils of human life. Soon after the death of the great English poet, a celebrated Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi, sounded a note of abandoned pessimism.
Here are words which he addressed to his own heart[178]: “Be quiet for ever, you have beaten enough, nothing is worthy of your beating and the earth is not worthy of your sighs. Life is nothing but bitterness and weariness, there is nothing else in it. The world is nothing but mire. Repose from now onwards. Be in despair for ever. Destiny has given us nothing but death. Despise henceforth yourself and nature, and the shameful concealed power which decrees the ruin of all and the infinite variety of all.”
Leopardi makes his readers witnesses of his distraction and his grief: “I shall study the blind truth”—he wrote in a poem dedicated to Charles Pépoli—“I shall study the blind fates of things mortal and immortal. Why humanity came into existence, and was burdened with pain and sorrow, to what final end destiny and nature are driving it, for whose pleasure or advantage is our great pain, what order, what laws rule this mysterious universe which wise men cover with praise, and I am content to wonder at” (ibid., p. 15).
Quite a school of poets has been developed, singing the pain of the world, the “Weltschmerz” of German authors, amongst whom Heine and Nicolas Lenau are specially distinguished.
Russian poetry was born under the influence of Byronism, and its best exponents, Poushkin and Lermontoff, often laboured over the problem of the object of human existence, finding only sad answers. Poushkin, who is justly regarded as the father of lyric poetry in Russia, stated his pessimistic conception in the following lines:—