MODERN PESSIMISM

The remarks of a lecturer on " Modern Pessimism " the other evening touch a subject that is not without an interest for the airiest of life's bagatelliers, but which must always exercise a singular fascination over the minds of seriously-thinking men. For pessimism has been popularised in these days, and there are cheap text-books and ready-made aphorisms current on the matter, just as there are on popular chemistry and the cultivation of the consciousness of the feminine individual. It is considered chic among certain classes to suspend the judgment when the existence of such things as sentiment and virtue is hinted at, and the Horatian philosophy of the "nil admirari " is become the touchstone of the finished man of the world. Public opinion, as it is so represented on all matters that have to do with the influence on life of disinterested motives, noble ambitions, or the high ideal, has reduced itself to expression in a crude sneer, characteristically devoid of fineness. To sneer with discrimination is a lost art, so far as this type and temperament are concerned, for the very essence of their philosophy is to deny the possibility of shades of difference in demerit where all is stale and profitless. In daily life it throws off a typical product like that which has been arousing Robert BUCHANAN'S healthy scorn—" a saturnine young man, a young man who has never dreamed a dream or been a child, a young man whose days have been shadowed by the upas-tree of modern pessimism, and who is born to the heritage of flash cynicism and cheap science, of literature which is less literature than criticism run to seed. " On literature, it casts the blight of a realism which is only real in so far as it gives us colourless photographs of sheer ugliness, but not real enough to reflect the artistic "feel" and atmosphere of life. Pessimists who make pictures compete with their literary brethren, and excel them. The " shallow sceptic " reads the secret of life's mystery for both, and the shallower he is the more thorough going is his scepticism. Like most other things which are popular, the characteristic of this particular philosophy of life is "shoddy," and the least pessimistic observer could hardly expect any other result from it than aridity.

Popular pessimism, however, is but a vulgar disorder, fit to be treated with some such drastic purgative as a blue pill and a black draught. There is another side of the subject to which Mr Fordyce directed attention, the exponents of which do not profess to have plucked the heart out of the mystery of existence, or discovered it to be as hollow as Mr Bunthorne alleges in his plaintive little poem. Schopenhauer's application of the scientific method to the facts of experience is by no means confined to those who consciously adopt that distinguished philosophers system. The conditions of modern life, with its development of the individual, its enormously increased intellectual activity, and its high-pressure rate of competition, have tacitly impressed on the mind of the age the same set of conclusions as those which the "weary king Ecclesiast" arrived at under conditions that most every day people would probably regard as presenting life at its best and rarest. The "most insolent " of beliefs has this in common with the highest forms, that both rest on the utter inadequacy of this natural life of ours to satisfy that restlessness of the heart of man of which Augustine speaks. The perception of this cardinal fact is the starting-point of heathen and Hebrew philosophies alike. The Stoic in the CÆSAR'S purple and Lawrence on his gridiron were animated by this guiding principle, and the Thebaid was peopled by exactly the same argument that annually decimated the teeming millions of India. It is curiously true that there is no more uncompromising sceptic of the " religion of humanity" or of the capacity of mankind to regenerate itself, than the strictly orthodox believer, to whom a healthy faith in human nature is a heresy against the creed that, Savonarola-like, bids him seek the things that are above. The old mediæval lines
 

Sine tuo numine
Nihil est in homme, 

express the whole sense of the Churches on this matter , and if under the corrosive acid of the spirit of the age—the half educated and superficial spirit which finds its perfect expression in Mr Buchanan's modern young man — the mystics' sensus numinus has been riddled and rendered unserviceable for further use as a buoy in the breakers, it is only the natural logic of the case if the intelligence of the time bruises itself on the rocks of popular pessimism. It would be hard to conceive a more hopeless state than that of a person whose mental habits have been shaped and finally set in the mould of the Churches, but who has lost touch with their inspiring hope. His disgust with the world would be complete, without any redeeming feature; and it is at this point that the extremes of pessimism—that of SCHOPENHAUER on the one hand, and of the modern young man on the other—are seen to approach each other and touch.

But, happily for the race, the vicious circle thus traced does not circumscribe the whole of life and its capabilities. If it did, the choice of a rule of life would lie between the orgie of listlessness that MALLOCK speaks of, and a course of sensual indulgence tempered by narcotics. For the few there would be, perhaps, that cultivated paganism that knew how to counterpoise the recreations of LUCULLUS with the occupations and fare of a Sabine farm, and drown the problem of existence in a cheery optimism after it gave the troublesome conundrum up. These joys would be the refuge of the wealthy, or those who have not their way to make in the world. For the others life would be a scramble of simian cunning and crayfish acquisitiveness, with a promise of the survival of the fittest to encourage the competitors to acquire proficiency in these conditions of the game. There is a kind of pessimism abroad which would have it that the state of things is actually the condition of society to day ; and indeed it would require a hardy objector, or a very ignorant one to dispute the evidences that might be alleged in support of such an argument. But the world has not yet lost its heritage of hope. It may be true, as the poet tells us, that our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought but their very sweetness draws all its colour from hope. Somewhere "beyond these voices," we are assured, lies the key to that riddle of life's mystery of which the every day manifestations sadden the joys of the merry and add to the burden of the afflicted. The puzzle of frustrate possibilities and wasted lives must find its reading somewhere, and humanity would truly be the sport of Schopenhauer's "Unconscious Will" if the future had no explanation to offer of the things that vex the human eye and grieve the human heart. The lesson of the past means this, if it means anything — unless history is a tale told by an idiot, indeed, and " all our yesterday's have lighted fools the way to dusty death." To accept that reading of the enigma would be to commit moral suicide, and make life with its ill-balanced ills and low ambitions, less worth living than SENECA and SOCRATES found it. So lame and impotent a conclusion is foreign to the primary instinct of human nature, and probably if the sense of society were taken to day, it would be better expressed in that Latin line which a thoughtful storyteller quotes as the epitaph of his hero John Inglesant, than by any phrase that has floated down to us from the Pagan world, or any trite flippancy of the mind of our own age.

' full of cares and full of years,

 of neither weary,

but full of hope and of heaven.'

The Sydney Morning Herald 25 July 1891,