LEOPARDI. (Rest for ever (heart) enough Hast thou throbbed. Nothing is worth The earth. Bitterness and vexation Is life, never aught besides, and mire the world. 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, 27 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.'1 Elsewhere he writes, All around passes away, one thing only is certain, that pain persists;' and in another place he repeats the dreary conclusion of antiquity : 6 Mai non veder la luce Era, credo, il miglior.2 French poetical literature, too, is not wanting in pessimistic complaints of a like character. As an example, I may quote A. de Lamartine, who, while seeking to find an anodyne for life's pain in Christian resignation, here and there breaks out into the bitterest lamentations. In his Seventh Meditation, Le Désespoir, he writes: Quel crime avons-nous fait pour mériter de naître? 1 Epistolario I. pp. 352, 353. Ou l'a-t-il accepté ? 2 For an interesting account of Leopardi's life and writings, see the sketch prefixed to 'Giacomo Leopardi's Dichtungen,' deutsch von Gustav Brandes: Hanover, 1869. Sommes-nous, ô hasard! l'œuvre de tes caprices? Pour ta félicité ? As a last example of what I have called the impulsive form of pessimism, I shall quote the Nachtwachen (‘nightwatches') of Schelling, which, though the production of one of the most abstruse of metaphysicians, is only faintly tinged with philosophic principles, being essentially the immediate utterance of that widely diffused pessimistic impulse which we are now considering. This work, published under the pseudonym Bonaventura, belongs to a critical date in Schelling's intellectual and moral development. It shows the philosopher under a temporary cloud of universal doubt and despair. It gives us a singularly powerful picture of human life as seen through the pessimist's blackened medium. In a series of fantastic images which look like the product of a disordered brain, the writer makes to pass before our eyes a number of typical scenes of human life, accompanying his panorama with the bitterest sarcasms on man and the world. Here the life of mankind is presented as a tragi-comedy, which is not worth the representation, in which the most important parts are assigned to the feeblest actors. We are all said to be masked non-entities. Since everybody, if he would show his ego in puris naturalibus, would run away from his nothingness and uselessness, he bedecks himself with the rags of a stage costume, and holds the masks of joy and love before his face in order to give himself an interesting appearance. And so the And so the ego looks down at last on his tattered robes, and real self. The death's head never fails behind the ogling mask, and life is only the cap and bells which the non-entity has donned just to make a jingle and afterwards to tear it imagines that they make his SCHELLING'S 'NIGHT-WATCHES.' 29 to pieces and cast it away' (p. 148, seq.). It may be added that Mr. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is quite cheerful and flattering when judged by this merciless exposure of human nothingness. At the close of the work, the writer represents himself as standing at the grave, and, with a grim irony which seems to have taken its key from the moody observations of Hamlet, reflecting on the nothingness of all that passes within the brain: 'What is this palace which encloses within itself a whole world and a heaven: this fairy castle in which miracles of love, with enchantments, work their jugglery; this microcosm, in which all that is great and glorious, all that is horrible and terrible, lies in germ side by side, which bore temples, gods, inquisitions, and devils; this tail-piece of creation-the human head? The home of a worm! Oh, what is the world if that which conceived it is nothing and all within only transient fancy! What are the fancies of the earth, spring and flowers, if the breath of fancy passes away in this little globe, if here in the internal pantheon all deities fall from their pedestals, and worms and corruption enter?' (p. 290, seq.). CHAPTER III. REASONED OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM. IN the developments of optimism and pessimism reviewed in the last chapter, there is to be found the minimum of exact observation and rational calculation. The conclusion that the world, in spite of its myriad evils, is fair and good, or that it is smitten to its core with foul disease, presents itself for the most part as a certain and immediate conviction or intuition. Hence I have called this form of the opposing views the impulsive. There is, indeed, in nearly all cases something like an appeal to facts, and in some instances even the semblance of an inductive process. But a moment's reflection shows us that there is nothing truly scientific in these operations. Only a few facts, having one complexion, and fitted to excite the imagination in one particular way, are grouped together without any attempt at exact observation, or at a careful balancing of opposing considerations. Pessimism, however, as well as its opposite, does not always thus stand out in its nakedness as a product of unguided impulse. It seeks to take a scientific or philosophical shape as well, and to give itself the aspect of a reasoned and verified truth. There are two main characteristics which mark off this form of the contrast from that just dealt with. In the first place the problem assumes greater definiteness. The conflicting elements of life, good and evil, REASONED BELIEFS. 31 joy and sorrow, are both recognised, alike by those who incline to a favourable solution and by those who accept an unfavourable one. Not that the question is always distinctly viewed as one of a preponderance of one quantity over another. Exact calculation does not enter into all the reasoned varieties of optimism and pessimism. Still the superiority of one factor is always explicitly or implicitly asserted, even when no attempt is made at exact measurement. Thus, for example, I call that doctrine a reasoned optimism which emphasises an ideal of life that is regarded not only as possible but also as depending on conditions which lie mainly, if not exclusively, within man's own control. The question need not arise whether in the region of present reality happiness exceeds misery; the optimism consists often in the elevation and accentuation of a satisfying ideal, and its definiteness lies in the assertion that this ideal is fitted to become real, and so to give the ruling character to life. So, again, there is a degree of definiteness in that form of optimistic doctrine, which while admitting the evil of present existence makes it evanescent by bringing it under the conception of a perfect state hereafter, whether one of prolonged individual life or one of reabsorption into the central fountain of being. In the second place the optimism and pessimism now to be considered invariably assume the shape of reasoned truths. These beliefs no longer present themselves in the impulsive ejaculatory form, but wear the aspect of calm and studied affirmations. It may, no doubt, be a little difficult to say exactly where the unreasoned form passes into the reasoned, since even an ejaculation may seize and embody some faint rudiment of rational inference. Yet the two orders are sufficiently marked off in the main, and the doc |