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.