Friday, September 2, 2011
'Lane, you're a perfect pessimist': pessimism and the English Fin de siecle.
'Lane, you're a perfect pessimist': pessimism and the English Fin de siecle. ABSTRACT Was pessimism a significant influence on late nineteenth-centuryEnglish writing? The conventional answer, suggested by R.H.Goodale's classic article of 1932, is that its effect wasmarginal. This essay argues that the debate between pessimism andoptimism profoundly affected fin de siecle Fin` de sie´cle1. Lit., end of the century; - mostly used adjectively in English to signify: belonging to, or characteristic of, the close of the 19th century. literary culture. The last ofthree successive waves of European pessimism, prompted by the delayeddiscovery of Schopenhauer, coincided with a widespread disillusionment DisillusionmentAdams, Nickloses innocence through WWI experience. [Am. Lit.: “The Killers”]Angry Young Mendisillusioned postwar writers of Britain, such as Osborne and Amis. [Br. Lit. with the optimistic claims of positivism positivism(pŏ`zĭtĭvĭzəm), philosophical doctrine that denies any validity to speculation or metaphysics. Sometimes associated with empiricism, positivism maintains that metaphysical questions are unanswerable and that the only . Plays, poems, and novelsreflected the assumptions of pessimist thought, and both the cult ofartifice and the paradoxical piety of the decadence make more sense in aSchopenhauerian context. ********** Ezra Pound's parody of A. E. Housman Noun 1. A. E. Housman - English poet (1859-1936)Alfred Edward Housman, Housman first appeared in hisCanzoni 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 poemto indicate a concern with matter rather than manner. In the New Yorkedition The New York Edition of Henry James' fiction was a 24-volume collection of the Anglo-American writer's novels, novellas and short stories, originally published in the U.S. and the UK in 1907-1909. of Lustra Lustra®Hydroquinone Dermatology A topical agent used to manage UV-induced skin discoloration and hyperpigmentation due to trauma, pregnancy, OCs, HRT. See Tanning. (1917) it became 'Housman's Message toMankind'; in 1926, for Personae: The Collected Poems Among the numerous literary works titled Collected Poems are the following: Collected Poems by Chinua Achebe Collected Poems by Conrad Aiken Collected Poems by Kay Boyle Collected Poems by Robert Browning , he made afurther change and called it 'Mr Housman's Message'. (1)As such, it seems a reasonable summary of what the poems in A ShropshireLad A Shropshire Lad (1896) is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman. ReceptionA Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at Housman's own expense after several publishers had turned it down, much to the surprise of his (1896) had said. Housman's 'message' in Poem VII, forexample, was the desirability of death. His vision of 'this humanlot' in Poem LX was that 'In all the endless road you tread |There's nothing but the night'. (2) He is, self-evidently, apoet of pain, gloom and stoical sto��ic?n.1. One who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain.2. Stoic A member of an originally Greek school of philosophy, founded by Zeno about 308 resignation. 'Woe! woe, etcetera...' might indeed seem an appropriate refrain for his work. But were these views, as Pound's later titles suggest, thedistinctive property of an individual writer? Housman's personaldistress, though real, does not entirely explain the cosmicdisillusionment 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 privateloss. Is this, in other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , only 'Mr Housman's'message? Or is his poetry the expression of a body of contemporarythought--of an intellectual movement or mentalite? If it is, then the body of contemporary thought in question must bepessimism--the philosophical view To take the philosophical view in common speech means to observe without passion.Philosophers are fond of describing the stands they take on particular philosophical disputes as views. They also call them theories. , in the words of James Sully'sPessimism of 1877, that 'the world is on the whole bad, orproductive of misery, and so worse than nonexistence'. (4) ForSully a key source for such ideas was Arthur Schopenhauer's DieWelt "Die Welt" is also the name of a weekly publication founded in 1897 by Theodor Herzl in Vienna as organ of the Zionist movement.Die Welt (English: The World) is a German national daily newspaper published by the Axel Springer AG company. als Wille und Vorstellung, first published in 1819, enlarged in1844 (on both occasions without any notice being taken of it), andtranslated into English by R. B. Haldane and John Kemp John Kemp (c. 1380 – March 22 1454) was an English cardinal, archbishop of Canterbury, and chancellor. BiographyHe was son of Thomas Kemp, a gentleman of Ollantigh, in the parish of Wye near Ashford, Kent. between 1883 and1886 as The World as Will and Idea. The 'misanthropic sage ofFrankfurt' whose doctrine is 'the most disheartening dis��heart��en?tr.v. dis��heart��ened, dis��heart��en��ing, dis��heart��ensTo shake or destroy the courage or resolution of; dispirit. See Synonyms at discourage. , the mostrepulsive, the most opposed to the aspirations of the presentworld' had been rescued from obscurity by the English writer JohnOxenford John Oxenford (August 12, 1812 - February 21, 1877), English dramatist, was born at Camberwell.He began his literary career by writing on finance. He was an excellent linguist, and the author of many translations from German, notably of Goethe's in an article published in the Westminster Review The Westminster Review was founded in 1823 by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as a journal for philosophical radicals, and was published from 1824 to 1914.In 1851 the journal was acquired by John Chapman based at 142 the Strand, London, a publisher who originally had medical in 1853. (5)Richard Wagner, for example, made his discovery of Schopenhauer in 1854,from a German translation of Oxenford's article, and Tristan undIsolde Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde) is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Stra?burg. was directly influenced by it. Despite Schopenhauer's death in 1860, his reputation continuedto grow rapidly in Germany, France, and England. Swinburne wrote to hisfriend George Powell George Powell (1668? - 1714) was a 17th century London actor and playwright who was a member of the United Company.He wrote a misogynistic play called The Imposture Defeated; or, A Trick to Cheat the Devil, first performed in September, 1697. in October 1869 to thank him for the gift of arecent book on modern German music: I am very much struck by finding in Wagner a disciple in matters ofthought of A. Schopenhauer. I read some extracts from his work and acondensed con��dense?v. con��densed, con��dens��ing, con��dens��esv.tr.1. To reduce the volume or compass of.2. To make more concise; abridge or shorten.3. Physicsa. summary of his life and views given in a review of Fouche deCareil's book now years ago, which impressed me unforgettably withtheir beautiful force, clearness, and fearless depth of truth. (6) By the 1870s the word 'pessimism', which for Coleridgeand Sydney Smith This article is about the English writer Sydney Smith. For other uses of the name, see Sydney Smith (disambiguation). See also Sidney Smith for a list of individuals by that name. had simply meant 'badness' or'worstness', had become the antonym for optimism (firstestablished as a philosophical term in French in the 1730s to describeLeibnitz's Theodicee of 1710), and the description of a distinctiveintellectual position. (7) Christians, positivists, and Hegelianscontinued to insist that the world was essentially a good place, andthat the pattern of history was progressive. Pessimists responded with aview of existence summed up by one of the aphorisms inSchopenhauer's Parerga und Paralipomena paralipomenaa supplement to a book or other work containing material previously omitted.See also: Books of 1851: 'No rosewithout a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose'. (8) Widelydiscussed in publications such as the Cornhill Magazine The Cornhill Magazine was a Victorian magazine and literary journal named after Cornhill, a street in London.Cornhill was founded by George Murray Smith in 1860 and was published until 1975. , the WestminsterReview, and The Fortnightly fort��night��ly?adj.Happening or appearing once in or every two weeks.adv.Once in a fortnight.n. pl. fort��night��liesA publication issued once every two weeks. , as well as in academic journals such asMind, the contest between optimism and pessimism was a prominent featureof the intellectual life of the late nineteenth century. But was this philosophical debate a significant context for theimaginative writing of the period? We do, to some degree, acknowledgethe presence of pessimism in late nineteenth-century literary culture.We know about James Thomson's 'The City of DreadfulNight' (first printed in the National Reformer in 1874, andpublished in volume form in 1880). (9) We know about GeorgeGissing'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' (writtenin 1882 though unpublished in his lifetime) asserted that 'We shallnot escape from the eternal truth that the world is synonymous with synonymous withadjective equivalent to, the same as, identical to, similar to, identified with, equal to, tantamount to, interchangeable with, one and the same as evil' and went on to declare, in Schopenhauerian terms, that: We enter the gates of life with wailing, and anguish to the wombwhich brings us forth; we pass again into the outer darkness In Christianity, the outer darkness is a place referred to three times in the Gospel of Matthew (8:12, 22:13, and 25:30) into which a person may be "cast out", and where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth". through thevalley of ghastly terrors, and leave cold misery upon the lips of thosethat mourn us. The interval is but a feverish combat [...] Our passionsrack us with the unspeakable torment of desire, and fruition is butanother name for disillusion dis��il��lu��sion?tr.v. dis��il��lu��sioned, dis��il��lu��sion��ing, dis��il��lu��sionsTo free or deprive of illusion.n.1. The act of disenchanting.2. The condition or fact of being disenchanted. . (10) We may, perhaps, know John Davidson's poem 'The Testamentof a Vivisector' of 1901, in which the speaker vivisects a horse inorder to discover the underlying principles of existence. This projectis 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 hopeever 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 thishouse for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy;--abrooding, undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silencewas broken by his saying: 'Mother, what shall we doto-morrow!' 'I don't know Don't know (DK, DKed)"Don't know the trade." A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party. !' said Sue despondently de��spon��dent?adj.Feeling or expressing despondency; dejected.de��spondent��ly adv. . 'I amafraid this will trouble your father.' 'I wish father was quite well, and there had been room forhim! 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'the?' '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 that Sue is pregnant ('However could you, mother, be so wicked and cruel as this, when youneedn't have done it'), he responds by hanging his twohalf-siblings and himself. 'It was', says Jude, after theevent, [...] in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boysspringing up amongst us--boys of a sort unknown in the lastgeneration--the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all itsterrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.He's an advanced man, the doctor.' (13) We acknowledge the existence of writing like this, yet we make verylittle of Hardy's suggestion (made via Jude and the anonymousOxford 'doctor') that these are 'new views of life'characteristic of 'advanced' thinkers, and still less of theclaim that this event is an early expression (the action of Jude theObscure is set in the 1860s) of a coming 'universal' attitude.Instead, we see such writing as marginal, occasional, and eccentric.Pessimism does not feature, for example, in Sally Ledger and RogerLuckhurst's The Fin de siecle: A Reader in Cultural History(2000)--not even in the index, let alone as one of the major sectionheadings. Imperialism, socialism, anarchism anarchism(ăn`ərkĭzəm)[Gr.,=having no government], theory that equality and justice are to be sought through the abolition of the state and the substitution of free agreements between individuals. , and scientific naturalismall receive extensive attention. Pessimism does not appear, even inpassing. Critics of Housman have, similarly, tended to avoid the word,describing his views instead as 'fatalism'. (14) Is this soundscholarly judgement? Or is it neglect? There is, of course, a great deal of fin de siecle writing that isinformed by other philosophical assumptions. Symbolism has been seen (byGuy Michaud, for example) as a positive reaction against the pessimismof French decadent writing of the 1870s and 1880s. (15) Latenineteenth-century Marxist and feminist writers, with their strenuouslyreformist purposes, were optimistic about the possibility of socialamelioration a��me��lio��ra��tion?n.1. The act or an instance of ameliorating.2. The state of being ameliorated; improvement.Noun 1. . Even the melancholy of 1890s pastoralism PastoralismArcadiamountainous region of ancient Greece; legendary for pastoral innocence of people. [Gk. Hist.: NCE, 136; Rom. Lit.: Eclogues; Span. Lit. and CelticTwilightism is not the same thing as the gloom of systematic pessimism. Jean Pierrot asserts that the French decadence was shaped by'a fundamentally pessimistic conception of life', pointing tothe articles that Paul Bourget Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (September 2, 1852–December 25, 1935), was a French novelist and critic.He was born in Amiens in the Somme d��partement of Picardie, France. published in magazines between 1879 and1883 and collected as Essais de psychologie contemporaine. (16) But wasthe English decadence similarly pessimistic? Holbrook Jackson George Holbrook Jackson (1874 - 1948) was a British journalist, writer and publisher. He was recognised as one of the leading bibliophiles of his time.He was born in Liverpool, England. He worked as a clerk, while freelancing as a writer. scarcelymentioned pessimism in his survey The Eighteen Nineties (1913). Hisfamous list of the four characteristics of the English decadence goes:'(1) Perversity per��ver��si��ty?n. pl. per��ver��si��ties1. The quality or state of being perverse.2. An instance of being perverse.Noun 1. , (2) Artificiality, (3) Egoism egoism(ē`gōĭzəm), in ethics, the doctrine that the ends and motives of human conduct are, or should be, the good of the individual agent. It is opposed to altruism, which holds the criterion of morality to be the welfare of others. and (4)Curiosity'. (17) No pessimism there. So is this not a minor, marginal, inessential phenomenon of the finde siecle, peculiar to certain authors, and no more than incidental tothe broader cultural history of the period? There is some strongevidence to the contrary. Comic writers clearly felt that pessimism wasa sufficiently familiar phenomenon to be worth making jokes about, evenin the theatre, where humour has to be understood immediately. HenryArthur Henry Arthur (1801 - 9 June 1848) was nephew to the fourth Lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land, George Arthur. He was an original investor in the Port Phillip Association and was the first European to settle in the area now known as Arthurs Creek, Victoria. Jones's play The Crusaders (1891) has as one of itscharacters Mr Burge Jawle, 'the Great Pessimist Philosopher'.His views serve to discourage the schemes of social reform adopted bythe 'crusading' characters of the title, and hisSchopenhauerian hostility to human reproduction (an opinion shared, ofcourse, with Hardy's little Father Time) cuts across the romanticcomedy of the play's action: JAWLE (faintly rouses himself, speaks very sententiously sen��ten��tious?adj.1. Terse and energetic in expression; pithy.2. a. Abounding in aphorisms.b. Given to aphoristic utterances.3. a. Abounding in pompous moralizing. andauthoritatively) There being an immense balance of misery and sufferingin every human lot, it necessarily follows that marriage, as the chiefmeans of increasing that misery and suffering, is a criminal andanti-social action. (Relapses into his self-absorption, takes no noticewhatever of what is going on.) (DICK and LORD BURNHAM are amused.) CYNTHIA (puzzled) But--if nobody married-- FIGG FIGG Federazione Italiana Giuoco Go (addresses himself to PALSAM) I'm sure you agree with us,Mr. Palsam, that the rapid increase of the human herd is a matter forthe gravest alarm-- PALSAM (moodily) I've always thought that there was far toogreat a propensity--I can't understand it! FIGG Jawle calculates that at the present rate the human race willinfallibly exhaust every possible means of subsistence in sixgenerations! PALSAM Dear me! Dear me! What can be done? Jawle's disciple provides an appropriately pessimistic answer: FIGG (in a low, reverential rev��er��en��tial?adj.1. Expressing reverence; reverent.2. Inspiring reverence.rev tone) Jawle advocates the forcible andabrupt extinction of human life in certain cases--his own included. CYNTHIA (alarmed) Not suicide? FIGG (reverently rev��er��ent?adj.Marked by, feeling, or expressing reverence.[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin rever ) We trust he won't consider it necessary tillhe has completed his social philosophy. To the horror of his hostess, Mrs Campion-Blake, who is afraid thathe will drown himself, Jawle spends most of the play in a garden chairwith a view of the lake. His final exit, in Act 3, is, however, ratherdifferently motivated: MRS. CAMPION campion:see pink. campionAny of the ornamental rock-garden or border plants that make up the genus Silene, of the pink family, consisting of about 500 species of herbaceous plants found throughout the world. BLAKE I trust there is no immediate dangerof--of--your-- JAWLE No; (rises). I shall school myself to endure the vastspectacle of human imbecility imbecility:see mental retardation. , selfishness, and emptiness for some shorttime longer. The word 'emptiness' reminds me I have had nobreakfast. MRS. CAMPION BLAKE (takes his hand, and gradually gets him upstage. To WORRELL) Some breakfast for Mr. Figg and Mr. Jawle. (18) Wilde, two years later, is making a joke about the sameintellectual phenomenon--in a line that is capable of being read in twovery different ways: ALGERNON I hope tomorrow will be a fine day, Lane. LANE It never is, sir. ALGERNON Lane, you're a perfect pessimist. LANE I do my best to give satisfaction, sir. (19) The reading indicated by my italics is, I think, the usual one. ButAlgernon's remark can also be rendered as 'Lane, you're aperfect pessimist'. Spoken thus, the line is a philosophicaljoke--the perfect gentleman's gentleman, for a gentleman ofadvanced views, is in 1895 a pessimist. He is, in other words,philosophically up-to-date. Earlier the same year (1895) Wilde had made the point moreseriously in the first act of An Ideal Husband. Speaking to MrsCheveley, Sir Robert Chiltern observes: 'But may I ask, at heart,are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only twofashionable religions left to us nowadays.' (20) This claimcorresponds with a number of statements, from other sources, about theprevalence--and serious intellectual status--of pessimism in thisperiod. George Eliot, for example, in her poem 'A CollegeBreakfast-Party' (based on a visit to Cambridge in 1868, written inApril 1874, and published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1878),includes Schopenhauer in her list of the topics in the minds of modernintellectuals: The will supreme, the individual claim, The social Ought, the lyrist's liberty, Democritus, Pythagoras, in talk With Anselm, Darwin, Comte, and Schopenhauer [...] (21) Henry James, in his essay on 'The Art of Fiction' in1884, seeking to guide would-be novelists away from abstraction andtowards 'the impression of life', specifically identifiedoptimism and pessimism as the fashionable philosophies by which a writerof fiction might be beguiled be��guile?tr.v. be��guiled, be��guil��ing, be��guiles1. To deceive by guile; delude. See Synonyms at deceive.2. : Do not think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catchthe colour of life itself. In France to-day we see a prodigious effort(that of Emile Zola [...]), [...] vitiated vi��ti��ate?tr.v. vi��ti��at��ed, vi��ti��at��ing, vi��ti��ates1. To reduce the value or impair the quality of.2. To corrupt morally; debase.3. To make ineffective; invalidate. by a spirit of pessimism on anarrow basis [...] Remember that your first duty is to be as complete aspossible--to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate and pursuethe prize. (22) This might seem to suggest something more extensive than a merelylocal interest, peculiar to the work of a few individual writers. Yetthis apparently significant planet has disappeared from the discursiveconstellation (in Foucault's phrase) of the 1890s. Or, to changethe metaphor, this is now the 1890s 'ism' that dare not speakits name. Why are we so reluctant to put pessimism at the centre of our viewof the English fin de siecle? There are, I think, three obvious reasons.One is the simple fact that, as a philosophy, pessimism has long beendismissed. Together with the rest of post-Kantian idealism, it was left(in the Anglo-Saxon world at least) dead in the water when Russell andWhitehead published their work on mathematical logic mathematical logic:see symbolic logic. in 1910. Russellexplained the consequences for pessimism of this turn away frommetaphysics thirty-six years later in his History of Western Philosophy: From a scientific point of view optimism and pessimism alike areobjectionable: optimism assumes, or attempts to prove, that the universeexists to please us, and pessimism that it exists to displease dis��please?v. dis��pleased, dis��pleas��ing, dis��pleas��esv.tr.To cause annoyance or vexation to.v.intr.To cause annoyance or displeasure. us [...]The belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament,not of reason [...]. (23) Unlike realism or feminism or scientific materialism, and to aneven greater extent than Marxism and Freudianism, pessimism hascollapsed. It is unverifiable, metaphysical, and therefore irrelevant;and because it is not interesting to us we assume that it was not asignificant body of ideas in the nineteenth century. Russell's remark also points to the second reason why we havestopped talking about pessimism: the existence, in this as in previouscenturies, of a sub-philosophical sense of the term. Pessimism can beseen as a tendency to grumble, a mere quality of temperament. Trollope,in The Warden (1855), caricatured Carlyle as 'Mr PessimistAnticant'. (24) Carlyle was often gloomy, and had been particularlymorose mo��rose?adj.Sullenly melancholy; gloomy.[Latin mr in his recent Latter-Day Pamphlets Latter-Day Pamphlets was a series of "pamphlets" published by Thomas Carlyle in 1850, in vehement denunciation of what he believed to be the political, social, and religious imbecilities and injustices of the period. (1850). But his philosophicalviews were always closer to those of Fichte and Hegel than to those ofSchopenhauer, and he was never in the technical sense a pessimist. R. H.Goodale, in his celebrated article 'Schopenhauer and Pessimism inNineteenth-Century English Literature', argued that pessimisticexpression in late nineteenth-century English writing wascharacteristically more loose-sense, temperamental, and traditional thanit was systematic, Schopenhauerian, and of its age. (25) And there we have the third reason for the eclipse of pessimism inaccounts of late nineteenth-century English literature English literature,literature written in English since c.1450 by the inhabitants of the British Isles; it was during the 15th cent. that the English language acquired much of its modern form. : the existence ofan authoritative article that had the unintended effect of closing down,rather than opening up, a topic. Goodale's work (originally athesis) was wonderfully assiduous as��sid��u��ous?adj.1. Constant in application or attention; diligent: an assiduous worker who strove for perfection.See Synonyms at busy.2. and acute. He charted the reception ofSchopenhauer and von Hartmann in the English-speaking world. He trawled,with impressive thoroughness, through late nineteenth-century literature Nineteenth-Century Literature is a literary journal published by University of California Press, in Berkeley, California, dealing with British and American literature of the 19th Century. in search of examples. He found some more or less explicitSchopenhauereanism in James Thomson James Thomson may be James Thomson (engineer) (1822-1892), engineer and professor, brother of William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin James Thomson (architect), Scottish architect, City Architect of Dundee , in Gissing, in Hardy (who, likeGissing, actually declared himself to have been influenced bySchopenhauer, and certainly read von Hartmann), in W. E. Henley, in JohnDavidson John Davidson can refer to more than one person: John Andrew Davidson (1852–1903) Canadian politician. John Davidson (poet) (1857–1909), Scottish poet and playwright. John Davidson (general) (1824–1881), Major General in the United States Army. , in Oliver Madox Brown, Edward Lord Lytton, and Robert LouisStevenson. But he insisted that much 'death-of-God' and'blind-nature' pessimism was present in English writing beforethe earliest possible date at which the influence of Schopenhauer couldhave been felt. 'It is very doubtful', Goodale concluded,'whether his teachings influenced to any great extent the course ofits development'. Even in the 1890s, he believed, 'one seesrather a continuation of the perplexities of Byron, Carlyle, Tennysonand Arnold'. Goodale's most striking evidence arose from thefact that he was conducting his research at a time when it was stillpossible to consult some of the writers whose work he was discussing:two authors have kindly written to me on the subject: Miss EllenGlasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 - November 21, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist from Richmond, Virginia. Life and careerBeginning in 1897, Glasgow wrote 20 novels and many short stories, mainly about life in Virginia. , saying that she had read Schopenhauer when she wrote her firstnovels but that she does not consider herself indebted to him; andProfessor A. E. Housman, saying that he has not read Schopenhauer. (26) The customary assumption was thereby established: there are a fewhighly individual instances of systematic pessimism in latenineteenth-century English literature. The rest is merely emotive ortemperamental--an echo of non-philosophical feelings from earlier in thecentury. There is no room here for Wilde's sense that we have (in1895) 'only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays [...] areyou an optimist or a pessimist?'. But who is right--Wilde or Goodale? Much as I admire it,Goodale's work had both the virtues and the defects of a gooddoctoral thesis. The virtues are its thoroughness and rigour rig��our?n. Chiefly BritishVariant of rigor.rigouror US rigorNoun1. . Thedefects are its excessive prudence and its tendency to set its standardof proof too high. Very few English writers List of English writers is an incomplete alphabetical list of writers from England. It includes writers in all genres and in any language. This is a subsidiary list to the List of English people. were, in Goodale'sstrict sense, Schopenhauerian. But very many more of them weresignificantly touched by Schopenhauerianism. And Goodale's tendencyto see pessimistic literary statements in the pre-Schopenhauerian era astemperamental rather than intellectual obscures the fact that what weare looking at here is a cumulative intellectual process. English writers in the late nineteenth century were feeling theeffects of the third of three great--and increasingly powerful--waves ofmodern philosophical pessimism. Although there had, of course, been whatwe would now call pessimism in the Ancient World (the Chorus'sremark in Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus at Colonus (also Oedipus Coloneus, and in Greek Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ) is one of the three Theban plays of the Athenian tragedian Sophocles. that 'Not to be bornat all | Is best' is often taken as its classic statement), (27) itwas hard for such a philosophy to find voice in the Christian era Christian eran.The period beginning with the birth of Jesus.Christian EraNounthe period beginning with the year of Christ's birthNoun 1. . Butfrom the mid-eighteenth century onwards we witness a series ofpessimisms, each of them arising in circumstances that suggest areaction against a previous optimism. The first occurs as a response toLeibnitz, with his claim (derived from the ontological argument ontological argumentArgument that proceeds from the idea of God to the reality of God. It was first clearly formulated by St. Anselm in his Proslogion (1077–78); a later famous version is given by René Descartes. for theexistence of God) that this was 'the best of all possibleworlds'. The pessimistic riposte ri��poste?n.1. Sports A quick thrust given after parrying an opponent's lunge in fencing.2. A retaliatory action, maneuver, or retort.intr.v. to this was most famouslydelivered by Voltaire's Candide in 1759, although it was moreelaborately developed in David Hume's Dialogues Concerning NaturalReligion Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical work written by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Through dialogue, three fictional characters named Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes debate the nature of God's existence. (begun in the early 1750s but published posthumously in 1779).Hume's Philo gives a famous list of 'four Circumstances'that seem incompatible with the existence of a benign deity, beforegoing on to describe 'a blind Nature, impregnated im��preg��nate?tr.v. im��preg��nat��ed, im��preg��nat��ing, im��preg��nates1. To make pregnant; inseminate.2. To fertilize (an ovum, for example).3. by a greatvivifying Principle, and pouring forth from her Lap, without Discernmentor parental Care, her maim'd and abortive abortive/abor��tive/ (ah-bor��tiv)1. incompletely developed.2. abortifacient (1).3. cutting short the course of a disease.a��bor��tiveadj.1. Children'. (28) Hume's pessimism was lost in the rising tide Noun 1. rising tide - the occurrence of incoming water (between a low tide and the following high tide); "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" -Shakespeareflood tide, flood of Romanticoptimism, with its belief that the world was capable of imaginativetransformation into an ideal condition. A neo-Kantian or Platonic senseof a gap between the 'phenomenal' world of experientialperception and an ideal or 'noumenal' world ofthings-as-in-themselves-they-really-are was used to assert the reality,superiority, and accessibility of the latter. 'The paintedveil,' Shelley declared in Prometheus Unbound This article is about the plays. For the episode of the television show Stargate SG-1, see "Prometheus Unbound".There are two plays named Prometheus Unbound. (1820), 'bythose who were, called life', Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread, All men believed or hoped, is torn aside; The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, [...] (29) Emerson, in Nature in 1836, echoed this confident belief in thePromethean act of unbinding the human imagination: As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind,that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution inthings will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeableappearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons,enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen. Thesordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the wind exhale exhale/ex��hale/ (eks��hal) to breathe out. ex��halev.1. To breathe out.2. To emit a gas, vapor, or odor. .(30) The optimisms of Shelley's disciple Robert Browning andEmerson's disciple Walt Whitman would have their roots inassertions of this kind. But even within the Romantic period a reaction against such viewscan be seen. If Leopardi was the most notable Romantic anti-optimist inItaly, and Heine in Germany, Byron struck the clearest note of pessimismin early nineteenth-century English poetry The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in European culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. . The world, he declared incanto 4 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem written by the British poet George Gordon, Lord Byron when at Kinsham. It was published between 1812 and 1818. , is: This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew-- Disease, death, bondage--all the woes we see, And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new. (31) Byron's business in Don Juan Don Juan(dŏn wän, j`ən, Span. dōn hwän), legendary profligate. was, he declared, 'holdingup the nothingness noth��ing��ness?n.1. The condition or quality of being nothing; nonexistence.2. Empty space; a void.3. Lack of consequence; insignificance.4. Something inconsequential or insignificant. of life', (32) and in his early poem'Euthanasia' he restated the views of Sophocles's Chorus: Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be. (33) Shelley dramatized his disagreement with Byron about this issue inhis poem Julian and Maddalo (written in autumn 1818 but publishedposthumously in 1824). Julian (the Shelley figure) insists 'wemight be all | We dream of happy, high, majestical'. Maddalo, inthe spirit of Byron, soberly responds: '[...] my judgement will not bend To your opinion, though I think you might Make such a system refutation-tight As far as words go. I knew one like you Who to this city came some months ago, With whom I argued in this sort, and he Is now gone mad' (34) The world of things-in-themselves that supposedly lies behind the'painted veil' of everyday experience is, in this analysis, amere fiction. It was an economist rather than a poet, however, who provided themost influentially pessimistic statement of the Romantic period. ThomasRobert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1793) was anempirical study of the way in which population outstrips food supply.Yet even this scientific text was, in part, prompted by a reactionagainst Romantic optimism. As the son of England's leading discipleof Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Malthus conceived his Essay as a riposte tothe Rousseauesque vision of perfect human societies. Without conflict,disease, and poverty to keep their numbers in check, human beings would,in the Malthusian analysis, rapidly breed themselves into starvation.Far from being, in Shelley's words, a mere 'veil' or'loathsome mask' hiding a superior reality, the features ofexperience that prompted pessimism were necessary for human survival. The pessimism of Byron and Malthus and Heine and Leopardi persistedinto the Victorian era The Victorian era of the United Kingdom marked the height of the British Industrial Revolution and the apex of the British Empire. Although commonly used to refer to the period of Queen Victoria's rule between 1837 and 1901, scholars debate whether the Victorian period—as . Matthew Arnold, in his essay on Byron (1881),may have suggested that 'Leopardi's pessimism' was not'healthful and true'. (35) But in his own best rememberedpoem, 'Dover Beach' (1867), Arnold had given expression tosomething very like it: [...] the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (36) One particular strand of this anti-Romantic pessimism prompted thatthird great phase of the theory which is, strictly speaking Adv. 1. strictly speaking - in actual fact; "properly speaking, they are not husband and wife"properly speaking, to be precise , thepessimism of the fin de siecle. Schopenhauer actually wrote The World asWill and Idea between 1814 and 1818, the years in which Byron waswriting the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold Childe Haroldmakes pilgrimage throughout Europe for liberty and personal revelation. [Br. Lit.: “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in Magill IV, 127–129]See : Journey and, in itsearliest stages, Don Juan. He published it in 1819, in consciousopposition to the ideas of Hegel, and incorporated two quotations fromChilde Harold into its final text. (37) The World as Will and Idea is,as this might suggest, distinctively a product of the Romantic era.Unlike the sceptical or empirical pessimists who rejected Romanticoptimism because they dismissed the concept of a world ofthings-in-themselves, Schopenhauer was an idealist and acceptedKant's distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal nou��me��non?n. pl. nou��me��naIn the philosophy of Kant, an object as it is in itself independent of the mind, as opposed to a phenomenon. Also called thing-in-itself. . Theworld of experience was indeed a mere 'idea', a set ofperceptions conditioned by our apprehensive faculties. Reality, the Dingan sich, was something different. And, unlike Kant himself but like manyRomantic neo-Kantians, Schopenhauer believed that we could discern the'noumenal' world of reality, or things-in-themselves. Where hediffered from his idealist contemporaries was in his evaluation of thatother reality. They had always seen it as superior to the world ofeveryday experience. Schopenhauer saw it as worse. This unlikeable noumenal reality Schopenhauer calls the'will', and he identifies it by a process of argument thatdraws on both Kant and Hume. The world and everything in it, includingone's own body, is, as it is apprehended in the mind, merely an'idea' or representation ('The world is my idea' arethe opening words of Schopenhauer's book). (38) But in the case ofone's own body one is also, simultaneously, conscious in adifferent way. This is because one senses or intuits there themotivation (a word coined by Schopenhauer) for actions that one wouldotherwise perceive in the same, merely external manner in which oneperceives the actions of other people and things. In the world as ideaeven the link between cause and effect, as Hume had demonstrated, cannotbe established because it cannot be perceived: the motivation of orreason for an event remains mysterious. But within one's own body,Schopenhauer argues, there is no such disjunction disjunction/dis��junc��tion/ (-junk��shun)1. the act or state of being disjoined.2. in genetics, the moving apart of bivalent chromosomes at the first anaphase of meiosis. : His body is, for the pure knowing subject, an idea like every otheridea, an object among objects. Its movements and actions are so farknown to him in precisely the same way as the changes of all otherperceived objects, and would be just as strange and incomprehensible tohim if their meaning were not explained for him in an entirely differentway [...] the answer is will. This and this alone gives him the key tohis own existence, reveals to him the significance, shows him the innermechanism of his being, of his action, of his movements [...] Every trueact of his will is also at once and without exception a movement of hisbody. The act of will and the movement of the body are not two differentthings objectively known which the bond of causality unites; they do notstand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same,but they are given in entirely different ways,--immediately, and againin perception of the understanding. The action of the body is nothingbut the act of the will objectified, i.e., passed into perception. (1,129-30 ([section]18)) Within one's own body, in other words, phenomenon and noumenon noumenon(n`mənŏn'), in the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant, a "thing-in-itself"; it is opposed to phenomenon, the thing that appears to us. are united and, as a consequence, the noumenal can be apprehended. Thatnoumenon, or reality, or thing-in-itself, is the 'will' or'will to live' (1, 354 ([section]54)): It is the inmost in��most?adj.Farthest within; innermost.inmostAdjectivesame as innermostAdj. 1. nature, the kernel, of every particular thing, andalso of the whole. It appears in every blind force of nature and also inthe preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between thesetwo is merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature ofwhat manifests itself. (1, 143 ([section]21)) Though sometimes described as the 'life-force',Schopenhauer's 'will' is neither merely biological (itincludes physical forces such as gravity) nor benign. 'Everywherein nature,' he argues, 'we see strife, conflict and thefickleness of victory, and in that we shall recognize more clearly thediscord which is essential to the will'. (39) It is a 'blindstriving, an obscure inarticulate inarticulate/in��ar��tic��u��late/ (in?ahr-tik��u-lat)1. not having joints; disjointed.2. uttered so as to be unintelligible; incapable of articulate speech. impulse' (1, 195 ([section]27)).'Eternal becoming, endless flux, characterises the revelation ofthe inner nature of will' (1, 214 ([section]29)), which manifestsitself in human life in the futile cycle A Futile cycle is when two metabolic pathways run simultaneously in opposite directions and have no overall effect other than wasting energy.[1] For example, if glycolysis and gluconeogenesis were to be active at the same time, glucose would be converted to pyruvate by of painful desire, followed bymomentary satisfaction, followed by boredom, followed by a return topainful desire. If this seems gloomy, it becomes still more so in the fourth andfinal book of The World as Will and Idea as Schopenhauer turns frommetaphysics to ethics. How should one live in a world thus understood?'I cannot here avoid the statement', he writes, 'that, tome, optimism [...] appears not merely an absurd, but also as a reallywicked way of thinking, as a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferingof humanity' (1, 420 ([section]59)). If we were to conduct, the most confirmed optimist through the hospitals, infirmaries, andsurgical operating-rooms, through the prisons, torture-chambers, andslave-kennels, over battle-fields and places of execution; if we were toopen to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it hides itself fromthe glance of cold curiosity, and, finally, allow him to glance into thestarving dungeon Dungeon - Zork of Ugolino, he, too, would understand at last thenature of this 'best of possible worlds.' For whence did Dantetake the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yethe made a very proper hell of it. (1, 419 ([section]59)) Wittily reversing the 'veil' or 'mask' imageryused by optimistic transcendentalists such as Shelley (Schopenhauer,like Housman, often combines gloomy views with comic expression), henotes that 'human life, like all bad ware, is covered over with afalse lustre' (1, 419 ([section]59)). Beneath that false lustre lustreIn mineralogy, the appearance of a mineral surface in terms of its light-reflecting qualities. Lustre depends on a mineral's refractivity (see refraction), transparency, and structure. itis apparent that 'suffering is essential to life, and [...] doesnot flow in upon us from without [...] every one carries about with himits perennial source in his own heart' (1, 410-11 ([section]57)).In these circumstances the only answers are 'either the aestheticdemand for contemplation or the ethical demand for renunciation',both of which are 'independent of the service of the will' (1,422 ([section]60)). One can escape the will, in other words, in'the momentary cessation of all volition' (1, 469([section]65)) that occurs in the disinterested experience of a work ofart. Or one can escape it in physical asceticism--a choice (partlysuggested to Schopenhauer by his knowledge of Buddhism) (40) that hasthe additional advantage of thwarting the reproductive process by whichthe will prolongs human suffering from generation to generation. If this is, in one sense, simply another, more philosophicallyelaborate branch of the reaction against Romantic optimism expressed byByron and Leopardi, it became generally available at a convenientmoment. By the 1870s Comtean positivism was well established. But thisconfident sense of scientific and social progress, to which so manyintellectuals had turned after their loss of religious faith, wasbeginning to falter, in part because of developments within scienceitself. Darwin, with his Malthusian sense of the struggle for survivalthat drove the process of natural selection, was one cause of this.Physicists working in the field of thermodynamics thermodynamics,branch of science concerned with the nature of heat and its conversion to mechanical, electric, and chemical energy. Historically, it grew out of efforts to construct more efficient heat engines—devices for extracting useful work from expanding were another. WilliamThomson's article 'On a Universal Tendency in Nature to theDissipation of Mechanical Energy' appeared in 1853. James ClerkMaxwell published his Theory of Heat in 1870. Balfour Stewart'spopularizing textbook on The Conservation of Energy appeared in 1873. Itwas not easy to be positivist pos��i��tiv��ism?n.1. Philosophya. A doctrine contending that sense perceptions are the only admissible basis of human knowledge and precise thought.b. about entropy. Schopenhauer's ideas,with their suggestion that not just empiricists but idealists as wellshould feel that 'the world is on the whole bad', becamewidely available in the English-speaking world at just this time. GeorgeEliot began writing 'A College Breakfast Party' in 1874 inresponse to a request from Frederick Harrison for a Comtean poem. Whatshe actually produced was a list of undergraduate interests thatcounterpoised coun��ter��poise?n.1. A counterbalancing weight.2. A force or influence that balances or equally counteracts another.3. The state of being in equilibrium.tr.v. 'Comte, and Schopenhauer'. Like Swinburne, some English intellectuals gained their firstsubstantial knowledge of Schopenhauer from foreign sources. MatthewArnold's 1876 commonplace-book contains ten passages copied outfrom the French translations of Schopenhauer published inChallemel-Lacour's article 'Un Bouddhiste contemporain enAllemagne' in the Revue des deux mondes The Revue des Deux Mondes (English: Review of the Two Worlds) is a monthly literary and cultural affairs magazine published in the French language. of 15 March 1870. Theseinclude the proposition that 'La volonte [...] est l'aveuglegeneratrice des choses, anterieure a toute intelligence', and theview that 'la souffrance est la loi du monde', on which Arnoldcommented, adversely, in the Preface to Last Essays on Church andReligion (1877). Here the author argued for Jesus's'superiority to Schopenhauer' because he 'hits the plainnatural truth that human life is a blessing and a benefit,' a viewthat is offered 'with due deference to the many persons for whomSchopenhauer is just now in fashion'. (41) But, as that sense of a'fashion' suggests, it was easy to find discussions ofSchopenhauer in English journals. Goodale would identify 235 essays onSchopenhauer or pessimism in British and American publications between1871 and 1900. Helen Zimmern's biography, Arthur Schopenhauer: HisLife and his Philosophy was published in 1876; James Sully'sPessimism: A History and a Criticism, in the following year. Meanwhile, a new generation of German pessimist philosophers wasbeginning to establish itself, most notably Eduard von Hartmann, whoseDie Philosophie des Unbewussten was published in 1868 (and translated byWilliam Coupland as The Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1884).Hartmann's 'unconscious', a more Hegelian andevolutionary version of Schopenhauer's blind will, was criticizedby Sully and attacked by Samuel Butler Noun 1. Samuel Butler - English novelist who described a fictitious land he called Erewhon (1835-1902)Butler2. Samuel Butler - English poet (1612-1680)Butler in his Unconscious Memory (1880).(42) But it was useful for Hardy, who is recorded in WilliamArcher's Real Conversations (1904) as saying that it suggested to me what seems almost like a workable theory of thegreat problem of the origin of evil--though this, of course, is notHartmann's own theory--namely, that there may be a consciousness,infinitely far off, at the other end of the chain of phenomena, alwaysstriving to express itself, and always baffled and blundering. (43) In 1902 Hardy wrote a letter to the editor of The Academy thatshows very clearly how, in these years and without being a dogmaticSchopenhauerian, one might respond nonetheless to issues in a broadlypessimist way. A reviewer had praised the 'vindication ofNature's ways' in Maeterlinck's Apology for Nature, abook that argued (in Hardy's summary) that nature 'maypractise a scheme of morality unknown to us, in which she is just'.Hardy had no patience with such views: Far be it from my wish to distrust any comforting fantasy, if itcan be barely tenable ten��a��ble?adj.1. Capable of being maintained in argument; rationally defensible: a tenable theory.2. . But alas, no profound reflection can be needed todetect the sophistry soph��is��try?n. pl. soph��is��tries1. Plausible but fallacious argumentation.2. A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument.sophistryNoun1. in M. Maeterlinck's argument, and to see thatthe original difficulty recognized by thinkers like Schopenhauer,Hartmann, Haeckel, etc., and by most of the persons called pessimists,remains unsurmounted. Pain has been, and pain is: no new sort of morals in Nature canremove pain from the past and make it pleasure for those who are itsinfallible estimators, the bearers thereof. And no injustice, howeverslight, can be atoned for by her future generosity, however ample, solong as we consider Nature to be, or to stand for, unlimited power. (44) One could be on the same side as Schopenhauer, in other words,without assenting, in detail, to his metaphysics. 'Persons calledpessimists' were, in these terms, very numerous in the 1880s and1890s. When Housman wrote to Goodale to say that he had 'not readSchopenhauer', he was speaking in his professional voice asProfessor of Latin. He had not 'read' Schopenhauer as he hadread, say, Manilius or Juvenal--that is, minutely, comprehensively, andin the original language. But it would be a misunderstanding to concludefrom that remark that he was unconscious of the growing body ofpessimist thought, or wholly unaware of the ways in whichSchopenhauer's influence had augmented and stimulated it. It is true that when Housman wrote his remarkably explicit letterto Maurice Pollet in February 1933, in response to an enquiry about hisviews, he specifically denied that he was a pessimist: I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she wasnot an optimist but a meliorist); and that is owing to my observation ofthe world, not to personal circumstances [...] I respect the Epicureansmore than the Stoics, but I am myself a Cyrenaic. (45) But this statement, paradoxically, reinforces our sense of theimportance of the debate between optimism and pessimism in the laternineteenth century. So pervasive was the issue that minute subdivisionswere required within the spectrum of possible views. At one extremestood the optimism of Leibnitz or Browning: this was the best of allpossible worlds The phrase "the best of all possible worlds" (French: le meilleur des mondes possibles) was coined by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Th��odic��e sur la bont�� de Dieu, la libert�� de l'homme et l'origine du mal (Theodicy). . Then there were what one might call'deteriorationists', for whom the world was good but in dangerof degeneration (Tennyson, in the anxious mood of The Idylls of theKing The Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, are a cycle of twelve narrative poems by Great Britain's poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1850) that retell the British legend of King Arthur, his knights, and his love for Guinevere, following the rise and fall of , or Max Nordau would be examples of this). Meliorists like GeorgeEliot, or James Sully, or (in his own account) Hardy took the view thatthe world was bad but capable, in some respects, of improvement. Apejorist like Housman believed that the world was both bad anddeteriorating. This is only one step away from the full pessimism ofSchopenhauer, for whom this world was the worst possible. If, despitethis, critics continue to see the views expressed in Housman'spejorist poems as mere 'fatalism', it may be because theyallow too little for his narrative method. Housman was speaking throughthe persona of 'a Shropshire lad' (originally identified as'Terence Hearsay') who must, for the purposes of this pastoralfiction, be supposed to utter an instinctual in��stinc��tu��al?adj.Of, relating to, or derived from instinct. See Synonyms at instinctive.in��stinctu��al��ly adv. or immemorial IMMEMORIAL. That which commences beyond the time of memory. Vide Memory, time of. wisdom ratherthan a fashionable German philosophy. Although different authors took different views of that philosophy,it was hard not to take a view at all. Ernest Dowson, for example,without explicitly mentioning Schopenhauer, suggested, in poems like'Dregs' and 'A Last Word', that the world was worsethan non-existence. Edith Nesbit, on the other hand, published twosonnets in her Lays and Legends volume of 1886 that anticipated T. S.Eliot in their sense that spring was the cruellest season but lookedback to Keats in their wish to find some paradoxical 'hope' inautumn, when 'leaden skies weep their exhaustless ex��haust��less?adj.Impossible to exhaust; inexhaustible.ex��haustless��ly adv. grief '. Thesonnets were jointly entitled 'Pessimism'. (46) If not quite,in Hardy's words, a 'universal' attitude, it wasnonetheless a position against which you were obliged to defineyourself. There are also some positive ways in which pessimism functions asan informing or facilitating context for more generally acknowledged finde siecle attitudes. The first two characteristics of the Englishdecadence on Holbrook Jackson's list, for example, are'Perversity' and 'Artificiality'. Taking perversityin its most literal but also most immediately controversial sense--thatis, as the celebration of sterile modes of sexuality--one sees at oncethat this was easier to assert in the context of Schopenhauer'sattacks on procreative pro��cre��a��tiveadj.1. Capable of reproducing; generative.2. Of or directed to procreation. marital sex. It is 'marriage,' in BurgeJawle's words, that is the 'criminal and anti-socialaction'. In a larger sense that links perversity to artificiality, pessimismintensified the aesthetic and decadent turn against nature. What mightotherwise be merely a disillusionment with the Romantic enthusiasm forthe natural, a weariness with Wordsworth, becomes an active dislike oncenature is understood to be, in Schopenhauerian terms, the objective formof a cruel and blundering 'will to live'. There can be nodoubt that artifice is preferable to that. And, finally, Schopenhauer's answers can help us with the oldparadox of the fin de siecle's curious combination of aestheticism AestheticismLate 19th-century European arts movement that centred on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone. It began in reaction to prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to the perceived ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age. and piety. Schopenhauer's two practical solutions to the problem oflife in this worst of all possible worlds are aestheticism andasceticism asceticism(əsĕt`ĭsĭzəm), rejection of bodily pleasures through sustained self-denial and self-mortification, with the objective of strengthening spiritual life. : in art and in neo-Buddhist renunciation The Abandonment of a right; repudiation; rejection.The renunciation of a right, power, or privilege involves a total divestment thereof; the right, power, or privilege cannot be transferred to anyone else. we can escape therelentless processes of the will to live. Those decadent artists wholive for art but die in the odour of sanctity The Odour of Sanctity, according to the Catholic Church, is commonly understood to mean a specific scent (often compared to flowers) that emanates from the bodies of saints, especially from the wounds of stigmata. make much more sense if weare conscious that both attitudes, though superficially incompatible,have roots in the same intellectual soil. 'Lane,' asWilde's fictitious decadent Algernon Moncrieff remarks in TheImportance of Being Earnest, 'you're a perfectpessimist'. It is time, I think, to allow pessimism a more amplepresence in our understanding of the English fin de siecle. (1) See Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. by Michael JohnKing (London: Faber, 1977), pp. 163, 309. (2) The Poems of A. E. Housman, ed. by Archie Burnett (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 61. (3) Poems of A. E. Housman, p. 59. (4) James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism (London:King, 1877), p. 156. (5) John Oxenford, 'Iconoclasm in German Philosophy',Westminster Review, n.s. 3, 1 April 1853, pp. 407, 394. (6) The Swinburne Letters, ed. by Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols (New Haven:Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1959-62), 11:1869.1875 (1959), p. 38. Swinburne would publish an elegy elegy,in Greek and Roman poetry, a poem written in elegiac verse (i.e., couplets consisting of a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line). The form dates back to 7th cent. B.C. in Greece and poets such as Archilochus, Mimnermus, and Tytraeus. for Wagner inA Century of Roundels (1883). The review referred to in the extract isof Alexandre Foucher de Careil, Hegel et Schopenhauer: Etudes sur laphilosophie allemande allemandeProcessional couple dance with stately flowing steps, fashionable in the 16th century, especially in France. A line of couples extended their paired hands forward and paraded back and forth the length of the ballroom. depuis Kant jusqu'a nos jours (Paris:Hachette, 1862). (7) Oxenford used quotation marks to indicate an unusual usage whenhe said of Schopenhauer that 'In a word he is a professed"Pessimist"', but described his philosophy as'ultra-pessimism' (pp. 394, 407). John Brown, in the 1858Preface to his three-volume Horae subsecivae (Edinburgh: Edmonston andDouglas, 1861), wrote, 'I am not however a pessimist, I am I trusta rational optimist, or at least a meliorist' (1, p. xxii), thoughwith specific reference to views on the development of medicine. (8) Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. by R. J.Hollingdale Reginald John Hollingdale (October 20 1930 - September 28 2001) was best known as a biographer and a translator of German philosophy and literature, especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffman, G. C. Lichtenberg, and Schopenhauer. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 235. (9) See Kenneth Hugh Byron, The Pessimism of James Thomson (B.V.)in Relation to his Times (The Hague: Mouton moutonlamb pelt made to resemble seal or beaver. , 1965). (10) George Gissing, Essays and Fiction, ed. with an introductionby Pierre Coustillas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University,mainly at Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins in 1867 had a group of his associates incorporated as the trustees of a university and a hospital, endowing each with $3.5 million. Daniel C. Press,1970), pp. 91-92. (11) The Poems of John Davidson, ed. by Andrew Turnbull, 2 vols(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 11, 325. (12) The Complete Poetical po��et��i��cal?adj.1. Poetic.2. Fancifully depicted or embellished; idealized.po��eti��cal��ly adv. Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. by SamuelHynes, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 1, 10. (13) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Osgood, McIlvaine,1896), pp. 419-20, 421, 424. On Hardy and pessimism see the article byMary Ann Kelly, 'Schopenhauer's Influence on Hardy's Judethe Obscure', in Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his 200thBirthday, ed. by Eric von der Luft (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter: Mellon,1988), pp. 232-48. (14) See, for example, John Bayley, Housman's Poems (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 62; and Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: MaleHomosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 49. (15) See Guy Michaud, Message poetique du symbolisme (Paris: Nizet,1961), pp. 298, 324. (16) See Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900, trans.by Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including , 1981), pp. 8,12-16. (17) Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1950), p. 62. (18) Henry Arthur Jones Henry Arthur Jones (September 20, 1851 – January 7, 1929) was an English dramatist. BiographyJones was born at Granborough, Buckinghamshire to Silvanus Jones, a farmer. He began to earn his living early, his spare time being given to literary pursuits. , The Crusaders: An Original Comedy ofModern London Life (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. xiii, 32, 33, 96. (19) Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. by RussellJackson (London: Black, 1980), p. 40. (20) Oscar Wilde, Two Society Comedies, ed. by Ian Small andRussell Jackson (London: Benn, 1983), p. 142. In 'The Decay ofLying' (collected in Intentions, 1891) Wilde remarks that'Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modernthought'. (21) George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy and Other Poems (Edinburgh:Blackwood, 1906), p. 642. (22) Henry James, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. by MorrisShapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). , 1981), p. 67; originallypubd in Longman's Magazine, 4 (September 1884) and repr. inJames's Partial Portraits (1888). (23) Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen& Unwin, 1946), pp. 786-87. (24) Anthony Trollope, The Warden (London: Bell, 1913), p. 186. (25) R. H. Goodale, 'Schopenhauer and Pessimism inNineteenth-Century English Literature', Publications of the ModernLanguages Association, 47.1 (1932), 241-61. (26) Goodale, pp. 260-61, 244, 260. (27) Sophocles, ed. and trans. F. Storr, 2 vols, Loeb ClassicalLibrary (London: Heinemann, 1912), 1, 261. (28) David Hume, The Natural History of Religion and Dialoguesconcerning Natural Religion, ed. by A. Wayne Colver and John ValdimirPrice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 234-39, 241. Sully (p. 61)cites this passage without acknowledging that Philo's views areidentified in Hume's preface as those of 'carelessScepticism'. Although they are 'more probable' than the'Orthodoxy' of Demea, the views of Cleanthes 'approachstill nearer to the truth' (see pp. 145 and 261). (29) Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, 2nd edn(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 253. (30) The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Alfred R.Ferguson, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press The Harvard University Press is a publishing house, a division of Harvard University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. It was established on January 13, 1913. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. , 1971), 1, 45. (31) The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. by Humphrey Milford(London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 236. (32) Byron, Poetical Works, p. 731. (33) Byron, Poetical Works, p. 64. (34) Shelley, Poetical Works, pp. 193-94. (35) The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. by R. H.Super, II vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan (body, education) University of Michigan - A large cosmopolitan university in the Midwest USA. Over 50000 students are enrolled at the University of Michigan's three campuses. The students come from 50 states and over 100 foreign countries. Press, 1960-77), IX:English Literature and Irish Politics (1973), p. 231. (36) Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works, ed. by C. B. Tinker and H. F.Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 211-12. Alan Grob, inA Longing Like Despair: Arnold's Poetry of Pessimism (Newark, NJ:University of Delaware [3] The student body at the University of Delaware is largely an undergraduate population. Delaware students have a great deal of access to work and internship opportunities. Press, 2002), suggests a similarity betweenSchopenhauer's thought and Arnold's verse, based 'not onany claims of direct influence but on the demonstration of a sharedweltanschauung' (p. 29). Arnold's pessimistic views might,however, be better described as Byronism. (37) Schopenhauer spoke and read English fluently and quotes linesfrom Childe Harold (canto 3, stanzas 72 and 75 (1816)) in The World asWill and Idea, Pt 3, [section][section]51 and 34 (see note 38 below forpublication details). (38) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols, 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,Trubner, 1896), 1, 3. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent referenceswill be to this edition and will be given in the text. Schopenhauerdivided his text into numbered sections; the section ([section]) numberwill appear in parentheses See parenthesis. parentheses - See left parenthesis, right parenthesis. after the page number(s). (39) Jill Berman's translation for David Berman'sabridged Everyman Library edition (London: Dent, 1995, p. 73) is usedhere because her 'fickleness of victory' is clearer thanHaldane and Kemp's 'alternation of victory'([section]27). (40) Schopenhauer read the Upanishads in Anquetil-Duperron'sLatin translation (1801-02), and knew Friedrich Majer whose Brahma, orthe Religion of the Hindus was published in 1819. (41) See The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. by Howard FosterLowry, Karl Young, and Waldo Hilary Dunn (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1952), pp. 253-54; and Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold,VIII, 160. (42) See Sully, pp. 454-57; and Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory,3rd edn (London: Cape, 1920), pp. 87-145. (43) William Archer, Real Conversations (London: Heinemann, 1904),pp. 45-46. (44) Letter to The Academy and Literature, 17 May 1902, quoted inFlorence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928 (London:Macmillan, 1962), pp. 314-15. Ernst Haeckel is the German zoologist(1834-1919) whose venture into philosophy Die Weltratsel (translated asThe Riddle of the Universe) was published in 1899. (45) The Letters of A. E. Housman, ed. by Henry Maas (London:Hart-Davis, 1971), p. 329. (46) E. Nesbit, Lays and Legends (London: Longmans, Green, 1886),pp. 64-65. NICHOLAS SHRIMPTON Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
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