Part 6

All this is not so unmeaning and perverse as it at first appears. There is a reason why our generation--the happiest and, we will hope, perhaps, on the whole, the best the world has yet seen--should scan the dread problem of Evil with other eyes than its predecessors; and there are reasons, far from ignoble, why happy men and women should find it harder to justify the ways of God to the miserable than those miserable ones themselves to do so on their own account. In the first place, our generation shrinks from the sight of physical anguish in a way obviously unknown to our progenitors, who could ride gayly on their daily errands under gallows-trees loaded each with its sickening weight, or city gates decorated by decapitated heads; and who could feast and sleep in the chambers of feudal castles while under their floors miserable prisoners were pining in dungeons, or perhaps expiring amid the unutterable horrors of the _oubliette_. They could stand by as unmoved spectators, or throw fresh fagots on the piles where heretics and witches were burning, and shout applause when half-hanged traitors were cut down from the rope to be drawn and quartered. Oppressions and injustices done by the strong against the weak were matters of every-day experience in every town, almost in every parish and household. If such things seem to us calculated to provoke vehement indignation and rebellion against every Power above or below which sanctioned or permitted them, it must be asked _who_ was there in those days likely to feel any similar indignation? The laws were not more cruel than the men who made them, nor the legislators than the mass of the nation. This being the case, how should those who thought it right and just that their fellows should endure such tortures find anything mysterious in the severest decrees of Providence? The order of nature--harsh to the eyes of a John Stuart Mill or a Shelley--must have been mild enough to those of the _habitués_ of autos-da-fé, or even let us say to the nobles of France under that _ancien régime_ of which M. Taine has given us the picture.

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.

A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to have been that great light of recent German philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer died childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one if we dissect his character candidly as that of the most prominent Pessimist of the age. It will be instructive, I think, to learn the “notes” of such a character,--to study, in short, of what kind of stuff (so to speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In justice, we must carry in mind that Schopenhauer accomplished a good deal in the philosophic way, besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a metaphysical system of considerable depth and ingenuity,--one of the merits of which, at all events, may be accounted that it is readily applicable to quite other views than those of its author, respecting the nature and destiny of mankind. With this formidable system, elaborated in his great work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, we have, however (happily for me, and probably for my reader), for our present purpose, no concern whatever, but only with his actions and character, such as Miss Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs, sketched in a life-like and transparently truthful manner in her Life of Schopenhauer.

The first “note” of Schopenhauer’s character, I should say, was his HEARTLESSNESS. He seems scarcely to have loved anybody--in any sense of the word worth considering--from his cradle to his grave. He made, indeed, after his father’s death, much parade of respect for his memory; but his filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured mother, and treated her with singular insolence. As to friendship, he avowed his opinion that “men of much intellectual worth, more especially if they have genius, can have but few friends”; and he verified his own dictum as a first-rate genius by having, so far as we may judge, no real friends at all, though in later life, when he became celebrated, he had numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was even less in Schopenhauer’s way than friendship, unless we are to call by the title the passion in its coarsest form. His opinion was that “the poetry of love is mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant to mantle the solemnity of the thing as it really is” (p. 222); and his actions were quite in accordance with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer states, “no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to this eminence.... He despised women.... He was only different from ordinary men in that he spoke of what others suppressed; and his over-zealous disciples, who saw the god-like in all his acts, even dragged these to the light of day.” His “careless dallying with beauty” (a euphemism, I presume, for a loose life) but once brought him to wish for a permanent union. The only woman whom he is recorded to have desired to marry was an actress, who, at the time he was “enraptured with her,” was (fit position for the wife of a great moral philosopher!) the recognized mistress of Duke Carl August.

It has sometimes happened that men who have been lacking in those family and friendly affections which are the most beautiful things in human life have yet almost atoned for their deficiency by their fervent “Enthusiasm of Humanity.” It is needless to say that Schopenhauer’s character displayed an impartial negation of both orders of feeling. He neither loved men nor women in particular, nor man in general. He carefully defined himself to be not a misanthrope, only a despiser of men (p. 83). The higher a man stood mentally, he thought, the lower must his fellow-men appear. That it was the divine part of the greatest to serve the least was the very last suggestion which would have occurred to his mind. “I read,” he observed, “in the face of the Apollo Belvidere, the just and deep displeasure felt by the god of the Muses for the wretched obstinacy of the Philistines”; and, doubtless, Arthur Schopenhauer figuratively drew himself up, and felt as like the Apollo Belvidere as the corporeal circumstances of a German philosopher might permit.

He was “penetrated with the conviction that he had been placed in a world peopled with beings morally and intellectually contemptible, from whom he must keep apart.” In his note-book (of rather a different cast from that of Marcus Aurelius), he wrote this piece of self-counsel: “Study to acquire an accurate and connected view of the utter despicability of mankind in general, then of your contemporaries, and of German scholars in particular.”

The second “note” in Schopenhauer’s character was his exceeding COWARDICE. The modern Socrates would have deserted Athens at the plague, and run away at Potidæa. With what poltroonery he would have behaved, when required to drink the hemlock, it is impossible to imagine. When his country was in the throes of war and political crises, Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the way. When there was any kind of infectious disease prevalent, he fled to another city, so that half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left Berlin for fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of the small-pox, and Verona because he took it into his head that his snuff was poisoned. He slept with loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at the slightest noise. When the postman brought him a letter, he started. He used a cup of his own to avoid the contagion which might lurk in a glass at a public table. He labelled his valuables with deceptive names, and wrote his business memoranda in Greek. As we have seen, he was not bellicose. Only once in his life is it recorded that he struck a blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an acquaintance of his landlady presumptuous enough to hold a coffee-party in his anteroom, Schopenhauer knocked her down with such violence that her right arm was permanently disabled. Any other man, who had committed an act of similar brutality in a moment of passion, would probably have hastened to offer some compensation to his victim; but our philosopher, on the contrary, hotly contested the poor woman’s suit for legal redress, and quitted the town in disgust when he found himself compelled to maintain her for life,--a period which (the non-sympathetic reader will rejoice to learn) was extremely prolonged. The writer of an exceedingly able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the _Contemporary Review_, some years ago, observed that his unamiable traits are best excused by his own candid avowal that he liked his own mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not at all. The _unalterableness of the natural character_ was one of his favorite dogmas. Certainly, the self-training by which many a naturally nervous temperament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish one into generosity, and a morose or peevish temper into gentleness, was as far as possible from Schopenhauer’s plan of life; and it opens to us a rather alarming idea of the society of the future, if his followers generally should resolve to adopt his facile principle, and assume that their “natural characters,” whatever they may chance to be,--selfish, false, dissolute, or cruel,--are “unalterable.” Such liberty, however, is probably reserved for those who may claim to be “men of genius” like their master, since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a theory which we may call the Philosopher’s Anti-nomianism. “He weighed his duties toward the world,” we are told, “in the balance with the weight and intensity of his natural gifts, and he came to the conclusion that a man gifted with genius, by merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation of sacrificing himself in particular individually. On this account, he may ignore claims which others are bound to fulfil.”[14]

But the third “note” was, I venture to think, the true key of Schopenhauer’s character. It was ARROGANCE. The philosophers whom the world has hitherto honored have been generally noted for the opposite quality. As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. His mother (described as a woman of “modest, pleasing manners” and amiable character, who received habitually in her house such men as Goethe, the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts him thus, when a lad yet engaged in collegiate studies: “Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter _like oracles which none may presume to contradict_,--all this depresses me. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams.”[15] This little preliminary glance at the youth of twenty enables us to judge what value should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf, that his arrogance and bitterness were but the natural results of the neglect with which his great book was received by an unappreciative public and a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the “necessary armor of scorn and self-defence” which enabled him to hold his ground. The boy at college, it seems, long before he had written a work to instruct the world, or had experienced anything but kindness and prosperity, the healthy, rich, gifted, and independent young lad, was already habitually “lamenting over the stupid world and human misery,” and uttering, with “sullen looks,” “oracles which none may presume to contradict.”

As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion of himself and his works with serenest equanimity. No more _naïf_ expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned than this gentleman’s eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he writes to the publisher of his work that its “worth and importance are so great that _I do not venture to express it_ even toward you, because you could not believe me,” and proceeds to quote a review “which speaks of me with the highest praise, and says that I am plainly the greatest philosopher of the age, which is really _saying much less than the good man thinks_.” “Sir,” he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him across a _table d’hôte_ (where he habitually acted the part of local “lion”), “sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three times as much as you, but, then, _I have three times as much mind_!” (p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been spoken except in jest and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet studied Schopenhauer’s saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his own expense must have been quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps, such barbarous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable reaction from the tone of self-depreciation (often exceedingly insincere) which modern manners have enforced. But the old classic pride was a very different thing from Schopenhauer’s aggressive arrogance, wherewith he managed to blend gross and egregious vanity in quite a novel combination. _On a les défauts de ses qualités_, but not usually together two apparently contradictory defects. In our simplicity, we should have anticipated that the man who considered himself the greatest philosopher of his age, and talked about the “loneliness of the heights” of intellectual grandeur, would have disdained to trouble himself about such miserable things as common newspaper reviews. We should have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess. “Schopenhauer (we are told) began to read German newspapers, now that they wrote about him. He caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to be sent to him. He looked through all philosophical works for a mention of himself. His intense contempt for women wavered, when he saw they could feel interest in his works.” What would Aristotle’s “Magnanimous Man” have said to this kind of littleness? “Honor, from any other person” (than the good), “or on the score of trifles, he will utterly despise, and likewise he will despise dishonor.”[16]

Let it be remembered, too, that this was in Schopenhauer’s old age. For a _young_ author to be nervously excited about the reception of his works is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking for the confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers of his own consciousness of ability, or to the extinction of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot apply to a man advanced in life and of established literary reputation, whose opinion of his own exalted gifts had been fully expanded while he was yet a lad at college.