POETRY AND PESSIMISM.

MR. LESLIE STEPHEN has told us that "nothing is less poetical than optimism," and assuredly pessimism has taken a strong hold on the minor poets of our day. Thus, in a series of sonnets, intended to convey "the portrait of a mind,"* and as we gather from the preface, the portrait not so much of an individual mind as of the mind most characteristic

of the intellectual attitude of our own day, Mr. John Addington Symonds has brought what he terms "the soul's debate upon the fundamental question of man's place in the Universe " to a conclusion with the following cheering Promethean allegory :-

" 0 thou who sole 'neath Heaven's impiteons stars,

Chained to thy crucifix on those fierce fells, Pierced by the pendent spikes of icicles, Quailest beneath the world-wind's scimitars; Thou, on whose wrinkling forehead, delved with soars Unnumbered ages score time's parallels, Deep in whose heart sin's deathless nature dwells ; Who on the low earth's limitary bars Seest suns rise, suns set, ascending signs And signs descending through aeonian years ; Still uncompanioned save by dreams and fears, Still stayed by hope deferred that ne'er declines ; 0 thou, Prometheus, protomartyr, thus Teach men to dree life's doom on Caucasus."

That is certainly quite in the spirit of the pessimist poet Leopardi, much more in that spirit, indeed, than in that of the other pair in the trio of pessimist poets,—Leopardi, Byron,

Heine,—whom Mr. James Sully, in his book on Pessimism, regards as the great poetical progenitors of this school of

thought in modern Europe; for Byron mingled so much of personal passion with his pessimism, and Heine shrieked it out

in so ironic a scream of almost hysterical laughter, that they rendered it impossible for us to judge with any accuracy how far their beliefs were real beliefs, and not merely effective forms of indictment against an age which it suited their characters and their genius to condemn.

But Leopardi, at all events, believed in the irremediable and inevitable evil of existence as much as he believed in anything, —far more truly, for instance, than Sophocles ever believed what he puts into the month of one of his choruses, that "not to be born is much the best, but having seen the light, the next best is to go as soon as may be whence one came." In the play of Sophocles, that is the natural sentiment of the moment on the lips of overawed and trembling old men, but it is hardly his own. Leopardi, however, dilates on this as the leading truth of this world, not only in his poems, but in essay after essay intended to illustrate this creed. No one can

tell for certain that either Byron or Heine, scoff as both of them would at the evils of life and the selfishness and pettiness of man, held existence to be an evil. But so soon as Leopardi became popular, a school of philosophy grew up which tried to

carry Pessimism to the same recognised position as one of the

great intellectual creeds of Europe, which it had long occupied among the creeds of Asia. Of the tendencies which favoured this attempt Mr. James Sully, in the interesting book on " Pessimism " to which we have already referred, gives us the

following explanation :-

" In its earliest manifestations, it was the apparent failure of a social and political ideal which brought about this state of despond- ency. In more recent years, the collapse of the extravagant ex- pectations and endeavours of certain aesthetic schools, has probably perpetuated, if it has not deepened, the pessimistic mood. So far

• Animi Figura. By John Addington Symonds. London ; Smith, Elder, and 00. as we can judge of the dominant features of our own age, there seems much just now to bend the sensitive mind in the pessimistic direction. The critical attrition of revered traditions is, and will be for a long time yet, keenly resented as a denudation of life of its crowning beauty and worth. Science, it is true, flourishes and pro- gresses ; yet it has not so far presented to the mass of mankind any new inspiring ideas, any noble imaginative forms for their emotional aspirations. Then, too, the absence of new creative vigour in Art, which is possibly more than a passing phenomenon, leaves men's propensities to enthusiasm unsatisfied in an aesthetic direction. To this, one may add that the single art which seems to preserve suffi- cient vitality for new developments, namely, music, is one which lends itself in a peculiar way as an expression to the pessimistic temper. Once more the age is vocal with social plaint, the cry of thwarted or postponed political aims. The masses of the leading European communities seem to be learning to ask whether the monstrous in- equalities with respect to the material conditions of well-being are, after all, an eternal and immutable ordinance of Nature, though they have not yet arrived at the hopeful point of a distinct perception of the means of amelioration. On the other band, the characteristic trait of our age, rapid material growth, tends to set up a coarse and limited ideal of life, which only makes the absence of loftier aims the more keenly felt by the more discerning order of mind. How can men, who have had visions of universal equality and fraternity find consolation in the spectacle of a plethora of material prosperity con- fined to a mere handful in the crowd, and serving only to throw out into bolder relief the prevailing emptiness?"

We have no doubt at all that the gorgeous political dream and the profound political disappointment or disillusionment of the French Revolution, had, and still has, an enormous influence in confounding the aspirations of our Western poets, at least of all those—and they are likely to be among the most numerous of the poets for generations to come,—who find the thought of suffering multitudes, of misery on a large scale, intolerable ; and who, when once they have realised that this is the inevitable result of the existing law of society, feel as if their imagination had grasped the conception of something like an evil law of nature, or, still more terrible, an evil God. Poets naturally dwell with more passion than any other class of men on the disappointed desires of human life, and dwell on these disappointed desires all the more, when they have satisfied themselves that theirs are not selfish desires, but are, like the Utopian visions of Shelley, passionate aspirations for the renovation of that suffering humanity, which, in its present condition, is, when you get to the dregs of it, as hideous as it is miserable. We do not doubt at all that modern pessimism does really owe a great deal of its ardour to the poets, especially to voluptuous poets, not so much because they are voluptuous, as because the same characteristic which makes them dwell so con- stantly on the gratified or suffering senses of men, blinds them to that aspect of life in which it is seen that disappointment becomes the condition of the truest vision, and that suffering is transmuted into the rarest power. For this is the point of view which modern poets,—and especially poets whose imagination dwells habitually on pleasure as it so often does,—seldom seize.

It was because Wordsworth seized it, that the great social cata- strophe which drove so many poets into pessimism, raised him to the highest point of his visionary power. No poet of mere desire ever felt, as Wordsworth felt, the true significance of desire,—the world of power that is secured to man by the con- trol and defiance and defeat of desire, or the higher uses and secrets of cravings that are never satisfied. He alone loved to dwell upon the

"Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight ; And miserable love that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds

Therefrom to human kind, and what we are."

Rare and, as a rule, hard and passionless are those poets who can dwell on the sufferings of mankind without shrinking from the belief that these sufferings are amongst the highest and most necessary part of man's destiny, who can dwell with any true poetical rapture on the thought that,—

" Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills The generations are prepared ; the pangs, The internal pangs, are ready,—the dread strife Of poor Humanity's afflicted will."

But of those who can dwell on this, not only without shrink- ing, but with a certain exaltation, Wordsworth was the chief. For the most part, the modern poet no sooner realises this necessity of human suffering on a large scale than he sinks into pessimism. The mere conception of the physical evils of the various climates of the world fills Leopardi, for instance, with such horror that he finds in it one of the main grounds of his pessimism, as his dialogue between an Icelander and Nature sufficiently shows. Yet even the commonest and most super- ficial philosophy has admitted that the necessity for strife with natural evils has been the root of progress to the savage and the barbarian, and is, in a more refined form, a principal stimu- lus to progress still. But this the Southern poet, the poet to whom the evils of physical suffering seem intolerable, cannot realise; and it is because so many of our own modern poets seem to have moulded themselves in the same school, to have taken upon themselves to bewail every mass of human suffering as a final evil which they see no way to mitigate,—just as if there could be nothing indirectly ennobling and tempering in the suffering itself,—that there is such a tendency to pessimism in the poetry of our own day. We have quoted Mr. Symonds's picture of humanity, like the protomartyr Prome- theus, "dreeing life's doom on Caucasus," because we suppose that, as this sonnet stands last in his series of pictures of the soul of man, he regards that as the outcome of the whole. But surely a poet who could conceive of this as the noblest outcome of human idealism, should have reflected that while the fabled Prometheus had no power of suicide, man has such a power, and no need at all to "dree " a frightful doom, unless there be something noble, something grand, some ultimate and final conquest over evil, to be gained by dreeing this doom,—and that if this be so, there clearly must be a God over all the changes and chances of this world, both to prophesy to the soul, and to elicit, the final issue. Mr. Symonds himself has put this very finely in another sonnet, intended, however, to image only that phase of credulous hope which he ultimately merges in his very dismal conclusion. We will quote Mr. Symonds himself, as the best antidote to Mr. Symonds :—

"Pathos of piety ! Poor human brain,

In thine own image moulding God, to be Victim and victor of sin's curse like thee, Like thee submissive to the laws of pain !

Rising not up in anger to arraign Heaven's justice, thou, with proud humility, Didst own thy guileless guilt the cause why He Who made Man's soul thus faulty, wrought in vain !

Sad, tender thought, that God himself should bow Under the doom he graved on Adam's brow !

Logic illogical, that He who framed Man thrall of sin, death's slave, for suffering born, Should on his own head wear that crown of thorn, And dying prove man's soul from death reclaimed."

Why "pathos of piety P" If the suffering of man is to answer its purpose, as Mr. Symonds appears to expect,— or he would hardly urge man to take up voluntarily the part which Prometheus played involuntarily,—he must believe that there is a Power overruling that will of man which always strives to fly from anguish, a Power inspiring him " to dree his doom on Caucasus." If it were not so, what is to prevent him from taking his fate into his

own hands, and dispatching himself, as Carlyle so often sug- gested that it would be an excellent thing for man to do P Yet

if there be this overruling power which keeps us suffering while we need not suffer, which makes us feel how much better it is to " dree our doom " than to fly from it, what can that power be except one which loves a crown of thorns, which knows how much the crown of thorns adds to the power of him who wears it, and that the true conquest of pain is obtained by wholly submitting to its grasp, not in shrinking fearfully from that grasp ?