The Open Question: A Tale of Two Temperaments

by Elizabeth Robins

Through a young painter from Basle, these two were among the first outside of the German circle to have some realization of the magnitude of Friedrich Nietzsche as a force to be reckoned with. But Gano shrank from the sound and fury of the iconoclast as much as from his more coherently expressed doctrines. It was as abhorrent to his new doubts as it was to his old faiths to hear that Nietzsche had said (speaking of Germany), "Nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two great European narcotics—alcohol and Christianity." Driscoll, knowing a good deal more about the first than he did about the last, professed his withers to be unwrung. What was there in the utterance that Gano should gibe at?

Almost from the beginning they wore their rue with a difference. Driscoll raged at concrete mistakes and injustices in the scheme of things as presented to Richard Driscoll. The other, seeming to think he had fewer personal wrongs to complain of, capable of too keen a self-criticism to imagine himself a genius to whom the world owed special privileges, was coming rapidly to a more serious indictment of life on the basis of "the dread irrationality of the whole affair."

It is not a happy subject for contemplation, perhaps, but it is possible to ignore too absolutely that this is the attitude of mind of a vast number of the young people of the time. No one with his classics in his mind, no one even who has not forgotten Montaigne and Shakespeare, thinks that this desperate guessing at "the riddle of the painful earth" is an exercise peculiar to our day. What is perhaps new is the commonness of the interrogation among young men, rich and poor, industrious and idle, who have not genius wherewith to clothe and deck their failure to produce the answer. Such men have not the distractions and rewards of genius to take their minds off the fact of failure.

What does it matter if you, in common with all the laboring earth, are feeling in every fibre the force of the Duke's bitter exhortation to Claudio? what does it matter if you can turn life's discords into music such as this? Even a less lofty strain is reward sufficient for the singer, reason enough to reconcile the monstrous egoism of genius to the presence in the world of great sorrows that can be transmuted into little songs. But to those whose music is shut up within them all their days, what shall help them bear the deafening discord of the jangling on and on of things that hurries them towards silence? There is an answer to this question, but it is not found among those usually given, which are for the most part variations of the philosophy of the ostrich.

Gano used to tell, laughing, of the way a great English lady met her son's shrinking confession of some deep, intellectual difficulty: "Do rouse yourself, St. John. Low spirits are such bad form."

"What was cultivated society?" Gano demanded of the Irishman. "A device for preventing people from serious thinking. Acceptance of this view was implicit in the very roots of language. You had to 'divert,' to 'distract' a man from the peril of looking facts in the face before you could expect him to be moderately happy. Games for grown-up children, the puerilities of country-house parties, what are they? Sage devices for preventing people from thinking, traps to snare and cage the intelligence—civilization's harmless anæsthetics. Oh yes, no mistake about our diversions being more wisely chosen in these 'scientific' times than in the days when the one escape was into the wine-cup's cul-de-sac. What were they all—drinking, opium-eating, and the rest—but simply forms of that protest most thinking creatures find themselves making at some stage of their too-conscious life?"

Driscoll accepted this view of his excesses with equanimity, reminding Ethan in turn that there are in all ages bystanders at the board while the cup goes round—old ladies of both sexes ready to ask, "What pleasure can men take in making beasts of themselves?" and there is not always a philosopher at the objector's elbow to answer, "He, madam, who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The great moralist knew from personal experience what he was talking about. He had the sincerity to admit that his own long-abandoned drinking had not at any time been from love of good-fellowship. Away with the genial lie, "I drank to be rid of myself!"

But Gano's point was that these old childish ways of hiding the head under the bedclothes to keep out of the dark no longer comfort so many of the grown-up children of the world. "They are afraid," he said, "not only of the night, but, with a surer wisdom, of the morning. It is not so easy to keep to-morrow at bay. Men need less and less the warning of the taverner's wife: 'They one and all regret it in the morning.'"

Said Gano to himself, summing up his survey: "We should not depend on, but keep in reserve, some draught with no such menace in the dregs. What one surer than that which brings a good-night and no morrow at all forever any more?"

Not, he felt, as a result of his own hard knocks, but out of unbiassed observation of the common lot, again and again, without personal resentment and without passion, he found himself reverting to the thought of the unlivableness of life, unless a man should carry about a conviction of freedom in his soul—a freedom that should be not a phrase but a potent fact, conferring sovereignty over life and death, and so lifting men above the meaner tricks of chance.