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| Percy Shelley |
In spite of the optimistic influences which belong to Christianity we find individual writers entertaining the gloomiest conceptions of existence. Much of this complaint takes the shape of antagonism to some optimistic idea put forth in the name of theology or of philosophy.
As a striking example of this, we may refer to the letters of Diderot to his lover, Sophie Voland. At the time the writer penned these letters he was passing through a curious mental experience, the outcome of which was an utterly joyless view of life. “To be,”he says, “amid pain and weeping : the plaything of uncertainty, of error, of want, of sickness, of wickedness, and of passions — every step from the moment when we learn to lisp to the time of departure when our voice falters ; to live among rogues and charlatans of every kind ; to pass away between one who feels our pulse, and another who terrifies us ; not to know whence we come, why we are come, whither we go ; this is called the most important gift of our parents and of nature — life.”
Just a reference must be made in this place to those writers of the last century, who, less from reasoned conviction than from temperament and instinctive impulse, recoiled from the dominant theological optimism of the time. As an illustration of this temper of mind I might select Mandeville, who is a striking example of the lighter cynical variety of the pessimism which fastens on human nature as its special object.
Very different is the deep, bitter misanthropy of another opponent of the dominant optimism, namely, Jonathan Swift. This optimism, resting on an assumption that human reason is adequate to solve the problem of existence, roused Swift's deepest abhorrence. To quote from Leslie Stephen's admirable history of the period: “Swift says, with unrivalled intensity, that the natural man is not, as theorists would maintain, a reasonable and virtuous animal; but for the most part a knave and a fool.”
Hardly would it be possible, one supposes, to express contempt for mankind in language more caustic than is to be found in Jove's address in the Day of Judgment, beginning:
“Offending race of human kind,
By nature, learning, reason, blind;
You, who through frailty stept aside,
And you who never fell — from pride.”
In English literature of XIX century instinctive pessimism appears as a quiet, yet pervading influence in the writings of Shelley, who, though he clung to a remote spiritual ideal of life, tends now and again to sink to a hopeless view of things. His thoughts on religion, as expounded in Queen Mab have the deep bitterness of the pessimistic temper, and this is not much relieved by the intrusion of an image of “a spirit of nature, an “all-sufficing Power” called “Necessity,” which regards all that the wide world contains as its “passive instruments,” whose joy or pain its nature cannot feel, because it has not human sense.
The strains of pessimism are heard with unmistakeable clearness, too, in such poems as Misery and Mutability. Hardly could the pessimist's sad message be conveyed in more impressive language than in the lines:
“The flower that smiles to-day
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts, and then flies:
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.”
In Byron t he vein of pessimism has a yet darker hue, being but little relieved by that irrepressible aspiration towards a worshipful ideal of beauty and a spirit of order in the world which shows itself in Shelley. The pessimist's conclusion utters itself without any reservation in the well-known lines:
“Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be.”
In bitter protest against the conditions of life he writes in another place:
“Our life is a false nature: 'tis not in
The harmony of things, — this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin.
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be
The skies, which rain their plagues on men like dew —
Disease, death, bondage, — all the woes we see,
And worse, the woes we see not — which throb through
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.”
In German poetry this spirit is best represented by Heinrich Heine and Nikolaus Lenau, Through the works of each there sighs, so to speak, a breath of intense melancholy. Heine is known as the singer of the world-pain (Weltschmerz), the intense sadness which arises on viewing the fleeting and unsatisfying nature of all earthly good.
Although there is to be seen in his poetry a fountain of ideal hope, the outflow of this is constantly crossed and checked by the turbid torrent of doubt and despair. Hence the fantastic and contradictory character of his writings, the Mephistophelian satisfaction in building up only to pull down again as illusory and insubstantial.
Commonly Heine represents the simpler form of pessimism in which the individual life, namely, that of a sensitive poetic nature, is shown to be discord and anguish, yet in some places he extends his view to human life in general.
As a last illustration of the instinctive pessimistic roots, one may name the writings of a great Italian Giacomo Leopardi. In this poet, the despair of life, both of the individual pursuit of happiness and of social endeavour, seems to rise to its highest pitch, uttering itself in piercing cries. One of the most striking examples of Leopardi’s mood may be found in the lines headed “A se stesso” (To himself),
“....Posa per sempre. Assai
Palpitasti. Non val cosa nessuna
I moti tuoi, nè di sospiri è degna
La terra. Amaro e noia
La vita, altro mai nulla; e fango è il mondo
T'acqueta omai. Dispera
L'ultima volta. Al gener nostro il fato
Non donò che il morire. Omai disprezza
Te, la natura, il brutto
Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera
E l'infinita vanità del tutto.”
(Rest for ever (heart) enough
Hast thou throbbed. Nothing is worth
Thy agitations, nor of sighs is worthy
The earth. Bitterness and vexation
Is life, never aught besides, and mire the world.
Quiet thyself henceforth. Despair
For the last time. To our race fate
Has given but death. Henceforth despise
Thyself, nature, the foul
Power which, hidden, rules to the common bane,
And the infinite vanity of the whole.)
In a letter to Giordani this poet tells us that he finds a positive gratification in his pessimism : “I rejoice to discover more and more the misery of men and things, to touch them with the hand, and to be seized with a cold shudder as I search through the unblessed and terrible secret of life.” Elsewhere he writes, “All around passes away, one thing only is certain, that pain persists.”
In this review, it is impossible to mention all the writers and poets who intuitively understood that life, to put it mildly, is a difficult, ambiguous and unpredictable thing. It is very possible that without the influence of such writers it would not be possible the emergence of philosophical pessimism, which has shaken by reason the foundations of many illusory views of the world around us.
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