But I must stop now. When I begin to write to you, I scarcely know when to cease. Adieu, tout mon bien!
Alma.
VI.
Ambrose Bradley to Alma Craik
‘A Alma, sa bien-aimée épouse et sour en Jésus-Christ, Ambrose son époux et frère en Jésus-Christ!’ Shall I begin thus, dearest, in the very words of the great man to whom, despite my undeserving, you have lovingly compared me? You see I remember them well. But alas! Abelard was thrown on different days, when at least faith was possible. What would he have become, I wonder, had he been born when the faith was shipwrecked, and when the trumpet of Euroclydon was sounding the destruction of all the creeds? Yonder, in France, one began to doubt everything, even the divinity of love; so I fled from the Parisian Sodom, trusting to find hope and comfort among the conquerors of Sedan. Alas! I begin to think that I am a sort of modern Diogenes, seeking in vain for a people with a Soul. I went first to Berlin, and found there all the vice of Paris without its beauty, all the infidelity of Frenchmen without their fitful enthusiasm in forlorn causes. The people of Germany, it appears to me, put God and Bismarck in the same category; they accept both as a solution of the political difficulty, but they truly reverence neither. The typical German is a monstrosity, a living-contradiction: intellectually an atheist, he assents to the conventional uses of Deity; politically a freethinker, he is a slave to the idea of nationality and a staunch upholder of the divine right of kings. Long ago, the philosophers, armed with the jargon of an insincere idealism, demolished Deism with one hand and set it up with the other; what they proved by elaborate treatises not to exist, they established as the only order of things worth believing; till at last the culmination of philosophic inconsistency was reached in Hegel, who began by the destruction of all religion and ended in the totem-worship of second childhood. In the course of a very short experience, I have learned cordially to dislike the Germans, and to perceive that, in spite of their tall talk and their splendid organisation, they are completely without ideas. In proportion as they have advanced politically, they have retrograded intellectually. They have no literature now and no philosophy; in one word, no spiritual zeal. They have stuck up as their leader a man with the moral outlook of Brander in ‘Faust,’ a swashbuckler politician, who swaggers up and down Europe and frowns down liberalism wherever it appears. Upon my word, I even preferred the Sullen Talent which he defeated at Sedan.
I think I see you smiling at my seeming anger; but I am not angry at all—only woefully disenchanted.
This muddy nation stupefies me like its own beer. Its morality is a sham, oscillating between female slavery in the kitchen and male drunkenness in the beer-garden. The horrible military element predominates everywhere; every shopkeeper is a martinet, every philosopher a dull sergeant. And just in time to reap the fruit of the predominant materialism or realism, has arisen the new Buddha Gautama without his beneficence, his beauty, his tenderness, or his love for the species.
Here in Frankfort (which I came to eagerly, thinking of its famous Judenstrasse, and eager to find the idea of the ‘one God’ at least among the Jews), I walk in the new Buddha’s footsteps wherever I go.
His name was Arthur Schopenhauer, a German of Germans, with the one non-national merit, that he threw aside the mask of religion and morality. He was a piggish, selfish, conceited, honest scoundrel, fond of gormandising, in love with his own shadow, miserable, and a money-grubber like all his race. One anecdote they tell of him is worth a thousand, as expressing the character of the man. Seated at the table d’hôte here one day, and observing a stranger’s astonishment at the amount he was consuming, Schopenhauer said, ‘I see you are astonished, sir, that I eat twice as much as you, but the explanation is simple—I have twice as much brains!’
The idea of this Heliogabalus of pessimism was that life is altogether an unmixed evil; that all things are miserable of necessity, even the birds when they sing on the green boughs, and the babes when they crow upon the breast; and that the only happiness, to be secured by every man as soon as possible, and the sooner the better, was in Nirwâna, or total extinction. A cheerful creed, without a God of any kind—nay, without a single godlike sentiment! There are pessimists and pessimists. Gautama Buddha himself, facile princeps, based his creed upon infinite pity; his sense of the sorrows of his fellow-creatures was so terrible as to make existence practically unbearable. John Calvin was a Christian pessimist; his whole nature was warped by the sense of infinite sin and overclouded by the shadow of infinite justice. But this Buddha of the Teutons is a different being; neither love nor pity, only a predominating selfishness complicated with constitutional suspicion.