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.