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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Was pessimism a significant influence on late nineteenth-century English writing? The conventional answer, suggested by R. H.Goodale's classic article of 1932, is that its effect was marginal. This essay argues that the debate between pessimism and optimism profoundly affected fin de siecle literary culture. The last of three successive waves of European pessimism, prompted by the delayed discovery of Schopenhauer, coincided with a widespread disillusionment with the optimistic claims of positivism. Plays, poems, and novels reflected the assumptions of pessimist thought, and both the cult of artifice and the paradoxical piety of the decadence make more sense in a Schopenhauerian context.
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Ezra Pound's parody of A. E. Housman first appeared in his Canzoni volume in 1911:
O woe, woe, People are born and die, We also shall be dead pretty soon Therefore let us act as if we were dead already. The bird sits on the hawthorn tree But he dies also, presently. Some lads get hung and some get shot. Woeful is this human lot. Woe! woe, etcetera....
The original title, 'Song in the Manner of Housman', suggested that this was a joke about style; but Pound renamed the poem to indicate a concern with matter rather than manner. In the New York edition of Lustra (1917) it became 'Housman's Message to Mankind'; in 1926, for Personae: The Collected Poems, he made a further change and called it 'Mr Housman's Message'. (1) As such, it seems a reasonable summary of what the poems in A Shropshire Lad (1896) had said. Housman's 'message' in Poem VII, for example, was the desirability of death. His vision of 'this human lot' in Poem LX was that 'In all the endless road you tread | There's nothing but the night'. (2) He is, self-evidently, a poet of pain, gloom and stoical resignation. 'Woe! woe, etcetera ...' might indeed seem an appropriate refrain for his work.
But were these views, as Pound's later titles suggest, the distinctive property of an individual writer? Housman's personal distress, though real, does not entirely explain the cosmic disillusionment articulated in these poems. Even 'the best', he insists in Poem LVI, 'is bad'. (3) There are, clearly, philosophical assumptions at work here as well as a sense of private loss. Is this, in other words, only 'Mr Housman's' message? Or is his poetry the expression of a body of contemporary thought--of an intellectual movement or mentalite?
If it is, then the body of contemporary thought in question must be pessimism--the philosophical view, in the words of James Sully's Pessimism of 1877, that 'the world is on the whole bad, or productive of misery, and so worse than nonexistence'. (4) For Sully a key source for such ideas was Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, first published in 1819, enlarged in 1844 (on both occasions without any notice being taken of it), and translated into English by R. B. Haldane and John Kemp between 1883 and 1886 as The World as Will and Idea. The 'misanthropic sage of Frankfurt' whose doctrine is 'the most disheartening, the most repulsive, the most opposed to the aspirations of the present world' had been rescued from obscurity by the English writer John Oxenford in an article published in the Westminster Review in 1853. (5) Richard Wagner, for example, made his discovery of Schopenhauer in 1854, from a German translation of Oxenford's article, and Tristan und Isolde was directly influenced by it.
Despite Schopenhauer's death in 1860, his reputation continued to grow rapidly in Germany, France, and England. Swinburne wrote to his friend George Powell in October 1869 to thank him for the gift of a recent book on modern German music:
I am very much struck by finding in Wagner a disciple in matters of thought of A. Schopenhauer. I read some extracts from his work and a condensed summary of his life and views given in a review of Fouche de Careil's book now years ago, which impressed me unforgettably with their beautiful force, clearness, and fearless depth of truth. (6)
By the 1870s the word 'pessimism', which for Coleridge and Sydney Smith had simply meant 'badness' or 'worstness', had become the antonym for optimism (first established as a philosophical term in French in the 1730s to describe Leibnitz's Theodicee of 1710), and the description of a distinctive intellectual position. (7) Christians, positivists, and Hegelians continued to insist that the world was essentially a good place, and that the pattern of history was progressive. Pessimists responded with a view of existence summed up by one of the aphorisms in Schopenhauer's Parerga und Paralipomena of 1851: 'No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose'. (8) Widely discussed in publications such as the Cornhill Magazine, the Westminster Review, and The Fortnightly, as well as in academic journals such as Mind, the contest between optimism and pessimism was a prominent feature of the intellectual life of the late nineteenth century.
But was this philosophical debate a significant context for the imaginative writing of the period? We do, to some degree, acknowledge the presence of pessimism in late nineteenth-century literary culture. We know about James Thomson's 'The City of Dreadful Night' (first printed in the National Reformer in 1874, and published in volume form in 1880). (9) We know about George Gissing's conversion from Comtean positivism to pessimism in 1882, and about the effects of that conversion on novels like The Unclassed (1884). Gissing's essay 'The Hope of Pessimism' (written in 1882 though unpublished in his lifetime) asserted that 'We shall not escape from the eternal truth that the world is synonymous with evil' and went on to declare, in Schopenhauerian terms, that:
We enter the gates of life with wailing, and anguish to the womb which brings us forth; we pass again into the outer darkness through the valley of ghastly terrors, and leave cold misery upon the lips of those that mourn us. The interval is but a feverish combat [...] Our passions rack us with the unspeakable torment of desire, and fruition is but another name for disillusion. (10)
We may, perhaps, know John Davidson's poem 'The Testament of a Vivisector' of 1901, in which the speaker vivisects a horse in order to discover the underlying principles of existence. This project is articulated in a vocabulary that combines Schopenhauer (the 'will') with his most notable disciple Eduard von Hartmann (the 'unconscious'):
Thought achieved, the unconscious will, Which Matter is, empowered it and enslaved With endless lust of life triumphantly, That knowledge might endure [...] [...] to know [...] Discomfort, pain, affliction, agony. (11)
We certainly know Thomas Hardy's poem 'Hap' of 1866 ('How arrives it joy lies slain, | And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?'), (12) and the second chapter of 'Part Sixth' of Jude the Obscure (1894-95):
The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy;--a brooding, undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silence was broken by his saying: 'Mother, what shall we do to-morrow!'
'I don't know!' said Sue despondently. 'I am afraid this will trouble your father.'
'I wish father was quite well, and there had been room for him! Then it wouldn't matter so much! Poor father!'
'It wouldn't!'
'Can I do anything?'
'No! All is trouble, adversity and suffering!'
'Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?'
'Partly.'
'It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?'
'It would almost, dear.'
When little Father Time discovers...
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