THIN PESSLYISM.
MR. HENRY JAMES, Junior, in his very interesting paper on "The Correspondence between Carlyle and Emerson," published in the June number of the Century, re- marks that Emerson was by nature an optimist, with a high and noble conception of good, but without any definite concep- tion of evil; while Carlyle was a pessimist of' pessimists, with a vivid conception of evil, but no corresponding perception of good. Farther, he remarks that Emerson's genius, like the genius of the whole of the New-England literature of his day, had "a singular thinness, an almost touching light- ness, sparseness, transparency, about it ;" while Carlyle's was full of the dense, warm life of his London atmosphere. Emer- son's mind was full of ghostly hopefulness, Carlyle's of passion- ate and wrathful despondency. " No one," says Mr. Henry James, "maintained a more hospitable attitude than Emerson towards anything that any one might have to say. There was no presumption against even the humblest, and the earof the uni- verse was open to any articulate voice. In this respect, the oppo- sition to Carlyle was complete. The great Scotchman thought all talk a jabbering of apes, whereas Emerson, who was the per- fection of a listener, stood always in a position of hopeful ex- pectancy, and regarded each delivery of a personal view as a new fact to be estimated on its merits." Mr. Henry James regards both the eminent correspondents as eccentric to the verge of madness, Emerson in a gentle fashion, with a mild and moonlight madness of his own ; Carlyle with a moody madness as exemplified in the fierce and violent gesticula- tions with which he made his mock at the universe, and flouted "the Dead-sea apes" of whom be conceived the human race to consist. Mr. Henry James himself evidently stands between the two men. He is struck by the whimsical spec- tacle of Emerson's transcendental hopefulness and optimism. It amuses him to think that so clear-minded and painstaking a man should have been so sanguine and so deferential to the fellow- creatures with whom he lived. On the other hand, Carlyle's con- vulsive agony under the spectacle of human folly and misdoing seems to him profoundly irrational. If all the world is out of joint, what is the good of trying to set the innumerable disloca- tions of limb? " Pessimism, cynicism," says Mr. Henry James, "usually imply a certain amount of indifference and resignation, but in Carlyle these forces were nothing if not querulous and vocal." " Other persons have enjoyed life as little as Carlyle, other men have been pessimists and cynics ; but few men have rioted so in their disenchantments, or thumped so perpetually
on the hollowness of things, with the view of making it re- sound." Mr. Henry James hardly knows which of the two makes him smile most, Emerson's mild and urbane infatuation of hope, or Carlyle's fury of despair. One can well understand his embarrassment. All his own works breathe, not Emerson's thin optimism, nor Carlyle's murky and chaotic pessimism, but, on the contrary, a this pessimism of his own, as mild, quiet, and observant as Emerson's optimism, but as free from anything like satisfaction in what he observes as Carlyle's pessimism. He does not toss his arms about, and fret or fume, like the imprisoned Scotch Titan under his pile of mountains,—that would only be consistent, he thinks, with some substantial hope of making the world the better for these gigantic struggles,—but he com- bines the twilight calm of Emerson's impassibility with the "current contempt," as he calls it, of Carlyle's attitude towards the universe in which he lived.
What Mr. Henry James would regard as the most defensible attitude towards the universe is a smiling acquiescence in the shallowness and poverty of things, from which nothing short of Emerson's moon-struck exaltation could expect in- finite good ; while to wrestle furiously and wildly with its evil seems to him, no doubt, to imply a great deal more bottom of belief than is consistent with the " Dead- sea ape " view of human life and action. The genuine optimist mast be gifted with a singular reticence and self-dis- trust, if he does not fling himself into the most conspicuous movements of his day, if he does not adore the Zeit-geist as a sort of divine oracle. The genuine pessimist must be overborne by a singular sense of fatality, if he takes any very great trouble to row against a stream which he believes to be irresistible. But what can be more suitable than for a pessimist who is a pessimist in truth, to be quiet and acquiescent, to smile, when it is possible, at the inevitable mishaps which overtake men, and to dry his tears as soon as may be when smiling is not possible ; to offer no vain resistance to the confusion in which he sees human affairs more and more inextricably involved, but to avail himself of every little opportunity of saving what may be saved from the abyss, and to ignore, as far as possible, the cries of help- lessness and terror proceeding from the various wrecks which sink into it. This, or something like this, we should gather from Mr. Henry James's various books, is the attitude which
he would take, in preference to either the thin optimism of Emerson, or the yeasty fury of Carlyle ; for he cannot really understand either the modest infatuation of hope with which Emerson watches for the oracles that he cannot himself hear, or the convulsive wrath with which Carlyle rages against the Destinies which he himself recognises as wholly uncon- trolled and uncontrollable, when he declares God's creatures to be mostly fools or Dead-sea apes, for whom he finds no salvation in their theoretically divine origin. Mr. James blames Emerson for being deficient in the salt of " current contempt " for the manifest tendencies about him. He blames Carlyle for sighing after " so crude an occurrence " as the return of Oliver Cromwell's Iron- sides to authority in any modern realm. Despise the present, and hope nothing from the future, but, above all, don't hanker after the past,' appears to be the sort of attitude of mind which Mr. Henry James would inculcate in the reader alike of his novels and his criticisms. The world is getting into a hopeless tangle,' he seems to say, but at least you cannot use the old- world shears to divide the threads. Probably the tangle cannot be disentangled at all, but whether it can or cannot, it is but a mad aspiration to yearn after anachronisms in the hope of severing the knot.' With the equanimity of Emerson, Mr. James would combine a good-deal of the pessimism of Carlyle, and blend the two into a principle of calm acquiescence even in a destiny that merits little except to be seasoned with what he calls " the salt of current contempt."
We believe that the fierce pessimism of Carlyle, the thin optimism of Emerson, and the thin pessimism of Mr. Henry James, represent in a descending scale the creed inherited from the old Puritanism, as it comes out after the dropping of all faith in revelation. Carlyle's Puritanism was not quite emptied of all its faith. It is perfectly true that he was, as we may say, always virtually quarrelling with God, find- ing fault with him, just as Mr. Buskin also does, for not having created a very different being from man ; finding' fault with him for making man so disposed as he is to fall into mechanical habits ; to vegetate with but a small share of spiritual life ; to drone out the thoughts of his ancestors in- stead of thinking fresh thoughts. for himself ; to interest him-
self so much in commerce, and to attach so much importance as modern man does to what he calls freedom. Against all these con- ditions, concerning which Carlyle knew as well as any one that they arise from the constitution of human nature, and not from any abuse of human nature, he raged as if he were raging against mere mendacity and wickedness, and, indeed, was never weary of calling all language that did not please him " jabber," • and all laws and constitutional customs that did not please him mere formulas. But, with all this fury against the constitution of the universe, Carlyle had at heart a belief that honest and true men might find power in God to alter things for the better, and this was the one living ember of the old Puritanism which still burnt vividly in his mind. Emerson snatched eagerly at Carlyle's transcendentalism, which was in Carlyle rather the product of his wonderfully vivid imagination than due to any deep intellectual conviction, but at once separated it from Carlyle's belief that God forms true heroes, and does not care for the "dim, common populations," except so far as they can be stirred by true heroes into giving them a loyal and passionate sup- port; and in Emerson's hands, this transcendentalism became, as he himself remarked, a mild optimism, that was disposed to accept almost anything as divine, and to treat almost all ills, physical, spiritual, or moral, with an almost ignoble patience,— the one exception being in Emerson's case the evil which seemed to Carlyle almost a positive good, slavery. For the rest, Carlyle's deep belief that in some true sense God does bring to naught all insincerities and consumes them with his wrath, hardly reappears in Emerson at all, who regards the great source of life as too sublime for any share in the passions of the prophet. Prac- tically, Emerson's transcendental optimism, which shows little sympathy with Carlyle's view of God as a God of battles, was, we think, a very inferior form of Puritanism even to Carlyle's,—a form which held fast to the purity of Puritan- ism, but not to its internecine war with evil. No doubt, it took up the divine benevolence which Carlyle almost re- jected, but it dropped altogether that potent belief in the spiritual interventions of God in human affairs, which gave to the old Puritanism all its power,—a power which can never long survive the faith in divine revelation, but which did sur- vive that faith in Carlyle. In Mr. Henry James's view of life, if we may trust his melancholy though wonderfully subtle novels, and the hints thrown out in this delicate criticism, we have the lowest form of the rapidly dwindling Puritanic faith, a thin sort of pessimism which recognises the taint in human things without recognising any divine remedy for that taint, which believes in no real power to fight against the inevitable evolution of things, which believes in nothing, indeed, except the importance of critical lucidity in contem- plating the facts of life, and in the mild despondency which that contemplation is apt to inspire. He likes Emerson's tranquil- lity, but he would base it on a gentle pessimism rather than a gentle optimism. Optimism might lead to enthusiasm, pessim- ism never can ; and yet pessimism, unless it is profound enough to make the world unendurable, and an exit from the world imperative, ought to extinguish the fiercer passions. If evil, and especially a growing confusion of evil, is inevitable, a spirit of toleration, and of ever-growing toleration, is necessary, too. You cannot train yourself too soon to be amused with the evils which no one can uproot. Adapt your eye, then, to the twilight; learn to smile at that which it is useless, and therefore unbecoming, to storm at ; teach yourself to look for nothing excellent, but to recognise that which is not excellent, —which is, indeed, even less and less excellent, as probably our lot in life. Such is, we should say, Mr. Henry James's inner creed. Such, at least, is the temper of his many delicately painted pictures of life, and of his criticism of the two great men whose correspondence be so well describes. Most life is superficial, all life is a tangle ; nothing, then, should put us out ; but it is an intellectual duty to expect little, and not to fret, even when we get less than we expect.' The duty of lucid observation and of a. low tone of expectation, is almost the only duty which, so far as we can see, Mr. Henry James thoroughly and universally approves. A sadder remnant of the old Puritanism it is not easy to conceive.
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