Mind your language
My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. I’d been reading the very good new biography of the young G.K. Chesterton by William Oddie. My husband, having found my book more interesting than his, looked up from it and said: ‘What does he mean by pessimism?’ Certainly, a revolt against pessimism was the central event of Chesterton’s life. In 1894, when he was 20, he went through a crisis at the Slade school of art. He saw, among the decadents of the day and in writers such as Hardy and Henley, a ‘pessimism’ leading to the deepest abyss of all: the denial that anything had any purpose, indeed that anything existed at all. It was philosophical nihilism (and psychological nihilism avant la lettre, since nihilism only came to be used psychopathologically in the 1920s). After Chesterton climbed from the pit into which he felt himself slipping, he wrote in a notebook a couplet under the title ‘A Pessimist’: ‘So you criticise the cosmos/ And borrow a skull and a tongue to do it with.’ Chesterton’s use of pessimism fits the remark in the Oxford English Dictionary that ‘from the 1870s it became popular as a term for the doctrine associated with Schopenhauer’. Before that it had served as a contrary to optimism in the sense ‘propounded by Leibniz (1710) that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds’.
To disagree with Leibniz on this need not make anyone a pessimist. Chesterton did not argue that this is the best of all possible worlds. The existence of anything at all was enough to leave him with an enduring sense of wonder. He even wrote a poem in which he imagined ‘the uncreated creature crying out for existence’. As he wrote to his friend Edmund Clerihew Bentley: ‘We can at least rest on the eternal natural ground of belief in the world, from which all religions spring.’ When Chesterton used the word pessimism, it had not been around in English for very long. Coleridge, who read German philosophy, used it as early as 1794 to describe, in a light way, a very bad house ‘a thousand fathoms deep in the Dead Sea of Pessimism’. By the end of the 19th century pessimism was being used widely, both by writers who embraced it and those who opposed it (such as Stevenson and Whitman), to describe a dominant outlook of the age. Perhaps that outlook has returned in our own day unrecognised. Dot Wordsworth
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