The American Pessimist

PESSIMISM is a philosophy greatly in repute just now. Schopenhauer and Hartmann are in the mouths of many people who have not read their works at all, and of some who have read them with very little understanding. Many people who call themselves pessimists, however, hardly go the full length, or are conscious what they are proclaiming. To believe deliberately that the whole universe exists for nothing but evil, misery, and suffering; that there is a power, or an unconscious force, which finds a pleasure, or follows a natural tendency, in the mere causing of destruction, is to believe something very contrary to the natural inclinations of humanity. For this is more, far more, than simple materialism ; more than the mere belief that nature is a vast, inexorable machine, indifferent to the welfare of the sentient world. Materialism is consistent with a philosophy of great calmness and resignation, if not of joy. But to be a pessimist philosophically is to feel one’s self in fierce and deadly antagonism with the universe, to hate with redoubled hatred all that is manifestly pernicious, and to see in all that is apparently alluring nothing but the hollow magic of a snare.

Nor is it easy to think that pessimism has ever been a prevalent system of philosophy, or indeed, until to-day, an elaborated system of philosophy at all, at least among Western peoples, and outside of some vast and shadowy dreamvision of Asia. A theory so enervating could not have flourished among the pushing and practical races of Europe: it is too inconsistent with all action, too blighting to force and vitality of will. But pessimism as a mood, not as a system, is as old as the world, and as lasting as the thinkinganimal itself. We are all optimists and pessimists by turns. We all have our after-dinner moods, when life is suffused with a glow of rose. We all have our moments of dejection and despair, caused perhaps at times by some great grief, but full as often the result of a little over-fatigue, a jarring of the nerves, an indigestion, and we become temporarily as black pessimists as Leopardi.

Yes, it is coeval with the birth of thought itself, the wild and sobbing shriek of overburdened grief, the cold sigh of indifference and ennui. We hear it in Job with a burst of passion : “ Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” We hear it in the terrible verdict of Ecclesiastes: “For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? for who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun ? ” Lucretius overflows with it: —

Nor is this tone less familiar to the Christian than to the antique mind. Religious writers often dwell on the misery of this world to bring out the attractions of the next, but the misery of this seems the prominent feature.

Nor is the cry of agony confined to dark and melancholy souls. It is more frequent with them, but the great master spirits of the world give way at times. Even Shakespeare, bright magician, skilled in loveliness and charm, had his moments of despair, — moments unknown to us except for the sonnets : —

Even Emerson, most optimistic of men, has touches here and there, if one looks for them, of vast discouragement.

When the warm autumn evenings settle down, who can resist this mood ; or in the first days of bursting spring, when the world is flooded, drenched, with vitality, and one asks one’s self in terror, almost. For what is it all, for what, for what ? — so resistless is the flow and tide of nature, so aimless and incomprehensible, so vast. The frail intelligence of man seems diluted in this wider element of semi-nothingness, of unprecipitated being. Again, on some clear October or January morning, it is as if the will of the universe were concentrated in the muscles of one’s own right arm. Strange, uncontrollable shifting of our moods and purposes !

But there is a pessimism which is a matter neither of mood nor of theory, but of temperament. Most men are born with a moderate view, taking things as they come, but some with a natural tendency to see the world all white or all black. Who does not know the constitutional optimist, who is always well, always has been well, or always is going to be well ; who is pleased with the present, satisfied with the past, full of gorgeous hope for the future ; for whom it never rains, or shines, or blows, except for the benefit of some one; who sees what he calls the good side in all events, in all people ; who makes one wish, sometimes, that some misfortune would befall him signal enough to make him “ curse God and die ” ? Who does not know the constitutional pessimist, to whom the opposite of this description applies ; who may not have intelligence or knowledge enough to accept the theories of Schopenhauer and Leopardi, but who carries them out in practice ? Every inauspicious glance of Nature is especially for him. The dust flies for him, the frost bites for him, the whole planetary system revolves with the sole end of frustrating his purposes. One wearies, at times, of the optimist, but, except for those who are obliged to tolerate him, a prolonged cohabitation with such a pessimist becomes simply intolerable.

This is but a crude form of constitutional pessimism, however, — a form of indigestion, perhaps I should rather say, peculiarly attendant on the combination of a vigorous temperament with a lack of occupation. There is another manifestation of the tendency, infinitely finer and more subtle, — the only one, as I think, really worthy of the name. This species of pessimism is found, I suppose, all over the world ; most intellectual maladies are, though this may never have been so highly developed as in our nineteenth century. But it has especially come under my observation here in our own America; and it is as it exists here that I wish to describe it. Not that it is very common. Many of my readers will say they do not know such a person as I am portraying; but some will be able to lay their fingers on one instantly. The disease, too, is important, not from its quantity, but from its quality ; it. attacks some of the very clearest and richest and subtlest minds among us.

This pessimism is wholly different from the crude discontent and lack of harmony with surroundings that I have referred to above. Such a man as we are speaking of has too much philosophy, if I may call it so, too much pride, too large a view, to set himself in a pitiful and petty antagonism with the ample and eternal forces which go to make up what we call Nature. He has a suave indifference to small discomforts that at times leads superficial people to confound him with the optimist; for he has few of those turbulent and fleeting bursts of temper which overcome the serenest of us. He faces great misfortunes and even small annoyances with the same inexplicable, unalterable smile, — a smile more fitted to move the looker-on to tears than to any outbreak of accordant mirth.

No, the modern pessimist, the true, incurable pessimist, is not, perhaps, a pessimist at all. He does not rail, or curse God, or despise man. If his state of mind can be described, it is by saying that he has thought, not himself, but everything besides himself, into a shadow. He is a man who has embarked on the wide sea of intellectual discovery, and has found that for him it is a barren sea, blank, desolate, — a sea shoreless, where the traveler voyages on aimlessly forever in a misty void. He is a man for whom the fevered, passionate whirl of life, so fierce, so intense, so real, to other men, is but a disordered dream, — a dream of which no one knows the beginning, and no one can prophesy the end. He is a man to whom the present is a reality only in comparison with the utter darkness of the future and the past, — a man to whom faith and hope are shadows, and charity is the emptiest and vainest of superstructures, from which all foundation has been eaten away.

But, some one says, this is not pessimism. You are misusing the word, and disguising in flowery rhetoric something which should go by another name. But no other name will quite cover what I mean. Practical Epicureanism is a philosophy very popular among us, as indeed it has been popular at all times and everywhere, though not always so openly proclaimed and without veil as it is today. The practical Epicurean is quite as much without belief as the pessimist I speak of; he is quite as free from prejudices as to morals or religion, quite as ready to disclaim adherence to inherited ideas. But he simply flings all these things aside. From his want of belief, when he reasons at all, he draws a solid and comfortable conclusion: Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die. That conclusion is the basis, conscious or unconscious, of a vast deal of American life to-day, modified only by the fact that the American has not yet really learned how to enjoy himself, and seeks distraction in endless and feverish mental excitement rather than in the subtle and judiciously husbanded pleasures of the senses.

Now, the life of our pessimist is as far from this as possible. It is true that he has lost all faith, if he ever had any. He has long ago recognized that the intellect is a will-o’-the-wisp, kindling its fitful gleam, now here, now there, in the vast plashy meadow of perceptive existence, but leading to no sure and solid foothold, drawing the weary wanderer only deeper and deeper in the mire. Yet, knowing this, he cannot resist the fatal charm. He has tasted the alluring sweets of abstract reverie, and he can never give them up. Once caught in the toil of that enchantress, there is no escape,— she, the true Circe, who, instead of enslaving men to the joys of sense, turns those joys themselves into the shadow of a shade. Yes, even if the pessimist, would shut up the cavern of his mind and strew it over with the roses and the charm of life, he cannot. Still, still he is haunted with the consciousness of the drear abyss beneath. It is true to him, too true, that to-morrow we die, and, in the face of that fact, how can he eat, drink, and be merry ?

But am I not describing an agnostic? To a certain extent, yes. The pessimist, in this sense, does deny the possibility of real knowledge, cognition of the Absolute, as does the agnostic. Yet no ! He does not deny or assert anything. He himself knows nothing about the Absolute, but others may. After all, the agnostic belongs to a sect, a dogmatic sect, a sect ready for the most part to decry what it calls the superstitions of other people. Now, to our pessimist, dogmatism is, of all things, hateful. Just because he believes nothing, he is alive to the possibility of believing anything or everything. The most monstrous superstition, except as it involves intolerance and cruelty, is to him as worthy of respect as the refined abstractions of the Hegelian. As faiths, they mean to him nothing: as phenomena of the human intelligence, they are alike curious objects for the ceaseless play of thought.

It is true that we might fall back on the term “ skeptic.” But that, also, implies a system, bears with it some inference of Pyrrhonism, and a hardened determination to question everything whatever. So natural are theory and a creed to humanity that it erects even its profoundest doubt into a dogma.

Therefore, until something better is suggested, we still must call the subject of our examination a pessimist. He is not a shrieking fanatic, like Leopardi or Schopenhauer, who parades his own despair in the eyes of an unsympathetic world. Such demonstrations seem to him crude and unwarrantable. The deepest mystery of things is too august to be hailed with such abuse as a fretful child showers upon its nurse. But his pessimism is rather an indefinable shade of gray which pervades his whole view of life, — silent, uncomplaining, but profoundly hopeless.

It. is here that the peculiarity of the American type must he taken into account. Men such as I have been describing are to be found all over Europe, all over the civilized world. In France they are very numerous, and the great French literature of to-day is largely built up by them. Indeed, the tradition of the race began long ago in France, in more or less disguised forms; clad in gorgeous rhetoric in Châteaubriand, touched with fevered passion in Sénancour, nursed to his own destruction by Maurice de Guérin. It is the ground tone of the great French realistic novelists, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, the De Goncourts. Zola, the half-French Turgeneff; and, in the younger generation, of such men as Paul Bourget and Guy de Maupassant. But there is an immense distinction between these men and their American fellow. He is as profoundly and completely skeptical as they are; but, owing to a difference of race, or, it may be, to the traditions of Puritanism that still linger in his blood, he is less brutal than they, — is, i n fact, as far as possible from brutality. From their complete disbelief in all moral law, they deduce a profound viciousness and uncleanness of tone and habit, not from any great pleasure in the enjoyments of the senses, but simply from hatred of the conventional, the bourgeois. To him such licentiousness is wholly repulsive, it offends his taste ; he lives and thinks as purely as a fanatic.

Yes, he has inherited many things from his Puritan ancestors, this child of the nineteenth century, whom they would spurn and scorn more even than the fiercest heretic or the most godless debauchee. Their glowing love of a saintly ideal still lingers in his veins, possesses him at times with a wild desire for the beauty of holiness, making the void only blacker and bleaker when it fades away. He has inherited from them a fastidious scrupulosity of conscience, which haunts him in minute details, even when conscience itself has become to him an idle illusion. Vices he has none. Faults he may have, arising from indifference and lack of enthusiasm ; but the more passive virtues, gentleness, tenderness, mildness, infinite toleration,—no one has them more than he. These things make him beloved in spite of the chill which he casts over everything, for he is ready to listen to other people’s joys and woes, and not burden them with his own. Indeed, simply to meet him and talk with him, you would never become aware of the profound darkness at the bottom of his heart. You would think him ready to agree with your own Methodism, or Episcopalianism, or what not. Only rarely, if you are unusually penetrating, there would be a glance that would put you on your guard.

Is he then hypocritical, inconsistent? Inconsistent, yes. I have heard a Philistine described as one " who lives from convention, not from conviction.” If the definition is accurate, our pessimist is a thorough Philistine; for he abhors convictions, and has none of any kind whatever. Yet the poor man must live.

And he does live. If you ask him, he will probably say that life brings him, on the whole, more misery than happiness, by far. Yet he lives, either because he is mistaken, or because the tremendous unreasoning instinct that makes us cry out for life — life, good or bad — predominates over him as over the rest of us. He lives, often, to a gray old age, and sees his children around him. There are bright spots, too, even for him, sunny nooks in an autumn day, where he can fly the cold north and dream that there is something that is not a dream ; something stable, worth grasping, worth loving; something that will not fade away. But, for the rest, he bears his lot as he can, without murmur or complaint; looking on at the vast and varied banquet of the world, from which he alone goes away unsatisfied ; gazing, an idle and yet not an uninterested spectator, at the curious and futile show which the vagaries of language and the traditions of our ancestors have taught us to call life.

Gamaliel Bradford, Jr.