This same ethical spirit is shared by realism in art. A painter seeking in the work-house a model for his “job,” an actress visiting the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,—these show the modern appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times’ spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and despair.
Most of our great critics of life,—Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoï, and Ruskin—have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement and despair.
The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly asks in a recent poem:—
“What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps of a meaningless Past?”
Since the time of Goethe, poetry has turned from Hellenic to Hindoo sources. Cultured Europe seizes with a strange eagerness on the sublime, dreamy conceptions that underlie Hindoo pantheism—Sansara, the unabiding pain-world; Nirvana world of rest and re-absorption; the deceptive veil of Maya, the wheel of life, the melting bubbles poured from the bowl of Saki, the Brahma fallen from unity and serenity into multiplicity and pain, the illusion of birth and death, the evil of all individual existence, the retreat from life, the euthanasia of the will and the return to non-existence,—these with their rich train of imagery thrill the jaded and blasé European with a rare and profound emotion. Besides these spoils, the poet of to-day revels in the results of later metaphysics. The naïve balance of pleasure and pain is disturbed. Suffering becomes an almost supernatural fact hid in a halo of mystery, and is not to be blotted out by any quantity of joy. One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the legend of a suffering unconscious.
THE HEART OF THE WOODS.
BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE.