same fashion. It is well if the sufferer and his helper do not begin a quarrel that will last a life¬ time, all because of the meddlesome self-sacrifice of the officious helper. For to the wretched any help is apt to seem officious, because no help is imme¬ diately and unconditionally successful.
So then, if you are tender-hearted, does tender¬ heartedness dictate all this waste of sympathy? Plainly not. Tender-heartedness need not say: My neighbor must be relieved. Tender-heartedness, as a personal affection of yours, says only: Satisfy me. And you can satisfy this affection if you forget about all those degraded wretches that are doomed to suf¬ fer, and associate with those blessed ones whose in¬ nocent joy shall make your tender heart glad of its own tenderness. Let us rejoice with those that do rejoice, and those that weep, let them take care of themselves in everlasting oblivion. Such is the dic¬ tate of tender-hearted selfishness; and our present point is the not at all novel thought, so often elab¬ orated in George Eliot’s novels, the thought that, the tenderer the heart, the more exclusively selfish becomes this dictate of tender-heartedness. Very sensitive people, who cannot overcome their sensi¬ tiveness, are perforce selfish in this world of pain. They must forget that there is suffering. Their pity makes them cruel. They cannot bear the sight of suffering; they must shut the door upon it. If he is a Dives, such a man must first of all insist that the police shall prevent people like Lazarus, covered with sores, from lying in plain sight at the gate. Such men must treat pain as, in these days of plumbing, we treat filth. We get the plumber and the carpenter to hide it so well that even our civ¬ ilized nostrils shall not be offended. That we call modern improvement in house-building. Even so we get the police to hide suffering from us; and, when that help fails, or is inapplicable, we appeal to the natural sense of decency in the sufferers, and demand, on the ground of common courtesy, that they shall not intrude their miseries upon us. Thus we cultivate a tender sympathy for the most delicate emotions of the human heart, as we never could do if we let suffering, as our forefathers used to let filth, lie about in plain sight. Ignore another’s suffering, and then it practically becomes non - existent. So says selfishness.
VIII.
If we ourselves are very happy, our lack of will¬ ingness to consider suffering may become greater and greater as we get happier. Nobody is colder in shutting out the thought of misery than a joyous man in a joyous company. u If there be anywhere any wretched people (which we doubt) let them keep well away from this place.” That is the voice of the spirit of overflowing sympathetic joy, as Schiller so finely expresses it in the hymn an die Freude: — “ He who, proving, hath discovered, What it is a friend to own, O’er whom woman’s love hath hovered. Let him here his bliss make known: Yea, if but one living being, On the earth is his to-day, — And who ne’er has known such, fleeing, Let him weep his grief away.” 1 “Joy,” says the enthusiastic young Schiller in this rhapsody, “ Joy was bestowed on the worm.” “ All beings drink joy at Mother Nature’s breast.” Delightful generosity of the happy man! But what do the crushed worms think about it? “ Whoso hath a friend,” — but what of the poor wretches in the slums of great cities, beaten, starved, imprisoned, cheated, and cheating, starved and imprisoned again, all through their lifetimes? How many souls do these poor Ishmaelites call their own? But of whom shall the joyful man think, of whom does he or can he think? Of these? No, it is the tendency of selfish joy to build up its own pretty world of fancy. Every¬ thing in that world, from cherub to worm, has joy’s sympathy, but only in so far as it is also joyous. Seid umschlungen Millionen! dieser Kuss der ganzen Welt! But in fact dieser Kuss is intended only for the happy world, which in the illusion, beau¬ tiful, but yet cruel, of the innocently joyous man, seems to be the whole world. Much good will such kisses do to the Millionen that groan and writhe! Joy ignores them, cannot believe them real.
Such then are some of the dictates of sympathy, 1 Worn der grosse Wurf gelungen Eines Freundes Freund zu sein, Wer ein boldes Weib errungen Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, — wer auch nur eine Seele Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer ’s nie gekonnt, der steble, Weinend sich aus diesem Bund.
which often bear to our conduct such relation as, in a saying of Emerson’s, the desire to go to Boston bears to the possible ways of getting there. “ When I want to get to Boston,” says in substance Emerson, “ I do not swim the Charles River, but prefer cross¬ ing the bridge.” Emerson’s saying was intended to illustrate his own preference for reading translations of foreign authors rather than the originals. It does illustrate very well the preference that we all have for the shortest way out of our sympathetic troubles. To help your suffering neighbor is hard swimming, perhaps amid ice-blocks; to go on and find elsewhere merry company is to take the bridge direct to Boston. Sympathy leads therefore often to the ignoring of another man’s state as real. And this is the very Illusion of Selfishness itself.
Pity may then turn to selfish hatred of the sight of suffering. It is hardly necessary to dwell at length upon the disheartening reverse aspect of the picture, namely, on the fact that, when pity does not lead us to dread the suffering of others, it may lead us to take such credit for our very power to sympathize with pain, that we come to feel an actual delight in the existence of the events that mean suffering to others. Our hearts may so swell with pride at our own importance as pitiful persons, that we may even long to have somebody of our acquaintance in trou¬ ble, so that we can go and pose, in the presence of the sufferers, as humane commentators on the occur¬ rence, as heroic endurers of sorrows that we do not really share. This is the second stage of selfish pity. It is even more enduring and incurable than the first. The dread of the sight of pain may be made to pass away by enough of inevitable experience.
But the selfish love of the office of comforter grows with the sense of our personal importance, and with the number of times when we are called upon to ex¬ ercise our powers. There are people who are always fretful and disconsolate unless they know of some¬ body who very badly needs consoling. Then they are calm and happy, for they are sure that they are admirable as comforters, they feel themselves the centre of an admiring neighborhood, they are plying their noble avocation in a graceful fashion. This type is surely no very uncommon one. Such people are apt to be intolerable companions for you unless you have a broken leg, or a fever, or a great bereave¬ ment. Then they find you interesting, because you are wretched. They nurse you like saints; they speak comfortably to you like angels. They hate to give the little comfort that can be given from day to day to those who are enduring the ordinary vex¬ ations of healthy and prosaic life. They rejoice to find some one overwhelmed with woe. The happy man is to them a worthless fellow. High tempera¬ ture is needed to soften their hearts. They would be miserable in Paradise, at the sight of so much tedious contentment; but they would leap for joy if they could but hear of a lost soul to whom a drop of water could be carried. To them the most blessed truth of Scripture is found in the passage: “For the poor ye have always with you.” Yea, blessed are the merciful, for they shall never lack work.
They shall be like the sculptor, delighting in the rough blocks of marble that contain his beloved statues. For them the world will doubtless have al¬ ways a plenty of blocks.
These are not the vulgarly malevolent. Yet they would be disconsolate altogether if evil were to cease. They regard misery as their special property; hence they would be very much disappointed to hear that Paradise had come again, and that mis¬ ery had been abolished. And we are speaking now, not of the professional enthusiasm that must make the physician interested in the diseases that he stud¬ ies, but of the pure delight in pity that distinguishes certain unprofessional people whose lives would be almost utterly empty of all joy were their neighbors not subject to serious calamities. Surely it is not this sort of pity that overcomes the illusion of self¬ ishness. Rather does such pity well illustrate that illusion.
IX.
IX.
Sympathy then, as an emotion, is not always altru¬ istic, but frequently very selfish. It does not always overthrow, but often strengthens, selfishness. And so deceitful an emotion cannot be trusted with the office of giving moral insight. In so far as pity ever does involve the detection of an illusion of selfishness, we may have occasion to speak of it hereafter. For on that side, Schopenhauer’s thought still looks at¬ tractive. But if we view pity with reference not to insight but to emotion, if we ask whether a given act was unselfish because it was pitiful, then we can already answer that, in so far as unselfishness constitutes morality, the pitiful character of an act does not insure its unselfishness, and hence not its morality. Schopenhauer’s own typical example, quoted above, is indeed interesting, but not conclusive as to this question. “ I pitied him,” says the lover who has refrained from slaying his rival. “ Had he not re¬ sembled my father as he slept, I had done it,” says Lady Macbeth. Possibly Lady Macbeth’s pity was good in itself, but not quite sufficient in quantity. But her words remind us of what the lover might do, if only pity stood in the way of the murder that he desired to commit. He might get somebody else to take care of the whole business, preparations and all, and so save his own tender emotions. In fact, how¬ ever, Schopenhauer’s young lover has something more than a mere emotion of pity in him.
But so far as we have considered sympathy, we have had but another illustration of the difficulty with which we are dealing. Even if sympathy were always unselfish, never capricious, perfectly clear in its dictates, there would remain the other objection. Sympathy is a mere fact of a man’s emotional nature. To an unsympathetic man, how shall you demonstrate the ideals that you found upon the feeling of sympa¬ thy? And so one returns to the old difficulty. You have an ideal whereby you desire to judge the world. But this ideal you found in its turn on the fact that somebody has a certain sort of emotion. Any one who has not this emotion you declare to be an in¬ competent judge. And so your last foundation for the ideal is something whose worth is to be demon¬ strated solely by the fact that it exists.
Thus in this and in the last chapter, in general and in particular discussions, we have found the one problem recurring. The ideal is to have an ideal foundation, yet we seem always to give it a founda¬ tion in some reality. And if we then look about us, we always find some skeptic saying, either that he does not feel sure of the existence of any such reality, or that he doubts whether it means what we say that it means, or, again, that in any case there are other people, who have found other realities, and whose moral principles, founded on these other real¬ ities, are in deadly opposition to ours. The idealist of our preliminary discussion on the methods of eth¬ ical inquiry has so far met with numerous misfor¬ tunes. He has continually been enticed over to a sort of realistic position, and then just the same arguments that he used against the realist are used against him. If, however, true to himself, he as¬ saults the realism of the modern descendants of Hobbes with the argument that all their physical hypotheses are worthless without ideals, then he hears the challenge to show an ideal that is not his whim, and that is not founded on a physical doc¬ trine. There seems no refuge for him as yet but to turn skeptic himself.
CHAPTER V.
Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law. — Dhammapada.
To turn skeptic himself, we said, seemed the only way open before our idealist. If only he had placed his standard a little lower! If only he had not insisted on getting his ideal by ideal methods! Then he might have remained safe in some one of the positions that he temporarily assumed. But al¬ ways he drove himself out of them. Some stupen¬ dous external reality, some beautiful mental state, would suggest itself to him, and he would say: “ Lo, here is the ideal that I seek.” But forthwith his own doubt would arise, accusing him of faithlessness. “ What hast thou found save that this or that hap¬ pens to exist? ” the doubt would say, and our ideal¬ ist would be constrained to answer, “ Not because it exists, but because I have freely chosen it for my guide, is it the Ideal.” And then would come the repeated accusation that caprice is the sole ground for the choice of this ideal. Skepticism, then, total skepticism as to the foundation of ethics, seems to be the result that threatens us. We must face this skepticism and consider its outcome.
I.
It is in fact in such skepticism as this that one finds the real power and meaning of most genuine modern Pessimism. Not so much in the hopeless¬ ness of our efforts to reach our ideals once chosen as in our perpetual hesitation or unsteadiness in the choice of ideals, we most frequently find the deepest ground for pessimistic despair. Choose an ideal, and you have at least your part to play in the world. The game may seem worth the trouble; for far off as may be what you seek, there is the delight and the earnestness of free self-surrender to a great aim. But pessimism is almost inevitable if you have been long trying to find an ideal to which you can devote yourself, and if you have failed in your quest. Therefore those advocates of pessimism are most formidable who dwell less upon the ills of life, as bare facts, and more upon the aimlessness of life. Von Hartmann, therefore, to whom pessimism is more the supposed result of a process of summation, and thus is a belief that the sum of pains in life overbalances the sum of pleasures, produces little effect upon us by his balance-sheet. But Schopen¬ hauer, who dwelt not only upon the balance-sheet, but still more upon the fundamental fact that life is restless and aimless, — he is nearer to success in his pessimistic efforts. It is here that one finds also the true strength of Schopenhauer’s model, the Buddhistic despair of life. Choose- your aim in life, says in effect Buddhism, let it be wife or* child, wealth or fame or power, and still your aim is only one among many, lost in the eternal strife, at war with all the rest, and never able to prove its right to supremacy in the world. From life to life you pass, now a Brahman, now a king, now a worm, now a tiger, now a beggar, now in hell, now among the demons of the air; your aims alter everlastingly with each new birth, and nowhere do you find life anything but a succession of aims, no one of which is intrinsically more significant than the others. The world of aims is a world of strife, and no life has any real significance. No desire is of any es¬ sential worth. Therefore, seeing all this, give up desire. Have it as your one aim to have no aim.
Such is the outcome of the insight into the eternal warfare of aims. The Buddhist parables try to make plain this insignificance of life both by dwell¬ ing on the fact that men must finally fail to get their aims, and by insisting that, if men temporarily suc¬ ceed, their condition is no less insignificant than it is when they fail. The failure is used to show a man not so much the difficulty of getting his aim in this bad world, as the worthlessness of his aim. The success when it comes is embittered for the success¬ ful man by reminding him that all desire is tran¬ sient, and that what he now loves will come to seem hateful to him. In both cases the lesson, whether of the success or of the failure, is, not that the order of things is diabolical, and therefore an enemy of man¬ kind, but that the desires themselves are hopelessly confused and worthless. If Buddhism dwelt only on the hopelessness of our efforts to get the good things that we want, the doctrine would result in a sort of Promethean defiance of the physical world, our powerful and cruel enemy. But Buddhism in¬ sists upon it that we know not what are the good things that we pretend to want. Our desires being ignorant, and endlessly changeable, we have no right to hope for success. The moral of their stories is not a protest against the physical evils about us, but a general condemnation of the vain aims that are in us.
The same aimlessness of life is the subject of lament in much of our modern romantic poetry. Here is, for the melancholy romantic poet, the great evil of existence, that we know not what is good. Here is the great disappointment of life, that we have no object in life. Here is the great failure, that we cannot make up our minds to undertake anything. Here is the great emptiness, that we have nothing to fill. And thus the ethical skepti¬ cism that has so far beset our path in the present investigation becomes, when we dwell upon it and fully realize its meaning, an ethical pessimism. We shall then illustrate afresh our problem if we con¬ sider how this difficulty of the choice of an ideal has affected the search of certain among our modern romantic poets for what they would call the ideal emotion.
II.
II.
Of all the subjects of reflection in romantic poetry none is more familiar than the question of the mean¬ ing and worth of human life as a whole. The first and natural answer of the modern poet to this question is well known. Human life means for him the emotional side of life. The highest good, when found, must be an emotional good. The romantic poet, criticising life, must aim to make clear what kind of emotional condition is the most satisfactory one. In this view we have no mere truism. Many forms of Hedonism would oppose the doctrine that in the intenser emotions can be found the ideal states of consciousness. The common sense of men of the world sees in the more moderate pleasures of polite leisure, in the attainment of practical knowl¬ edge, in a successful professional or business career, the sources of permanent satisfaction. Several schools of ancient philosophy regarded tranquillity as constituting the essence of a blessed life. But to all this the spirit of modern poetry was from the outset violently opposed. Tranquillity, once ex¬ changed for storm and stress, is not again regarded as the goal. Active emotion, intense in quality, un¬ limited in quantity, is what the poets of the revolu¬ tion desire. One need only mention “Werther,” “ The Robbers,” “ The Revolt of Islam,” “ Man¬ fred,” “Faust,” to suggest what is meant by this spirit of the revolutionary poetry.
Life, then, can be of worth only in so far as it is full of the desirable forms of poetic emotion. But is such fullness of life possible? Is the view that makes it the ideal a tenable view? Must not the consistent following of this view lead ultimately to pessimism? The answer to this problem is the his¬ tory of the whole romantic movement. Here must suffice a sketch of some of the principal results of the movement.
The stir of modern life, then, has awakened sensi¬ bility, quickened desire, aroused the passion for free¬ dom, disturbed old traditions. Above all, the theo¬ logical ideals of life have been, for the romantic poet, disturbed, perhaps shattered. His highest good must be sought in his own soul. What is the consequence? First, of course, a sense of splendid independence, a lofty spiritual pride. The joy of freed emotion is equaled by few delights on earth. The self-worship of poetic genius is surpassed by few forms of conceit. Shelley, rejoicing in his strength, writing “ The Ne¬ cessity of Atheism,” and defending, in all innocence of evil, adultery and incest, is a good example of the expression of this spirit. Lavatar’s account of the nature of genius is another instance: “ As the appa¬ ritions of angels do not come, but are present, do not go away, but are gone, as they strike the innermost marrow, influence by their immortality the immortal in men, vanish and yet still influence, leave behind them sweet shuddering and tears of terror, and on the countenance pale joy, so the operation of genius. Describe genius as you will, — name it fruitfulness of soul, faith, hope, love, — the unlearned, the unlearnable, — the inimitable, the divine, — that is genius.
’T is inspiration, revelation, that may be felt, but not willed or desired; ’t is art above art, its way is the way of the lightning.” 1 We cannot quote a tenth part of this rhapsody, wherein the self-admiration and the mutual admiration of the young men about Goethe, in the years just before and after 1780, re¬ ceive a characteristic expression.
1 See the passage at much greater length iu Koberstein’s Gesch der deutschen. Nationalliteratur, bd. iv., p. 26, of the 5th edit.
This pride leads directly to the effort to build up a wholly new set of ideals. The patience of the statesman, of the student of science, of the business man, is unknown to these forceful young men. They must make a world of their own, and in a day too. At the same time they are without any definite faith. In fact, definite faith would endanger for them the freshness of their emotions. They fear any creed but one self-made. And they can more easily tear down than build up. One of the most interest¬ ing of the young geniuses of the age of the German romantic development 1 is the early lost Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), a representative, like Shelley after him, of the emotional or romantic po¬ etry in its pristine innocence. A truly noble soul, joined to a weak body, oppressed by many troubles, unable to grow to full manly spiritual stature, he shows us the beauty and imperfection of the emotional movement in close union. He writes pages of vague philosophy, which afterwards impressed the young Carlyle as an embodiment of a sense -of the deep mystery of life. You find delight in wandering through the flowery labyrinths of such speculation; you learn much by the way, but you come nowhere. Only this is clear: the young poet persists that the world must in some way conform to the emotional needs of man. And he persists, too, that a harmo¬ nious scheme of life can be formed on a purely ro¬ mantic plan, and only on such a plan. He actually 1 The age in question extends from 1770 to 1830. No special effort is here made to follow chronological order. Our purpose is to cite illustrations, not to give a history explains no reality and completes no scheme of life, lie hints, at length, that the Catholic church is the best expression of the needs of man. With this un¬ satisfactory suggestion, the little career of wander¬ ing ends in death. But in what could it have ended had life continued?
Perhaps in what was called by the close friend of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the romantic irony. This is the next stage in the growth, or, if you like, in the decay of the romantic spirit. Emotion is our guide and our goal. But what is emotion? Some¬ thing changeable and by nature inconsistent. Each emotion sets up a claim to fill the whole of life. For each new one, the earnest poetic soul feels willing to die. Yet each is driven away by its follower. The feet of them that shall bear it out are before the door even while the triumphant emotion is reigning over the heart within. Fullness of such life means fickleness. Novalis, upon the death of his betrothed, made a sort of divinity of the departed, and dated a new era from the day of her death. His diary was for a while full of spiritual exercises, suggested by his affliction. He resolved to follow her to the grave in one year. Within this year he was betrothed anew. If such is Novalis, what will be a lesser spirit? Conscious of this inevitable decay of each emotion, Friedrich Schlegel suggests that one should make a virtue of necessity, and declare that the higher life consists in a sort of enthusiastic fickle¬ ness. The genius must wander like. a humming-bird in the garden of divine emotions. And he must be conscious and proud of his wanderings. Activity, or rather agility, is his highest perfection. The more numerous his emotions, the nobler the man. The fickler the man, the more numerous his emo¬ tions. This conscious union of nobility and fickle¬ ness is the romantic irony, which consists in receiv¬ ing each new enthusiasm with a merry pride. ’T was not the first, and will not be the last. We see through it, even while we submit to it. We are more than it is, and will survive it. Long live King Experience, who showers upon us new feelings!
So much for an ingenious and thoroughly detesta¬ ble view of life, in which there is for an earnest man no rest. This irony, what is it but the laughter of demons over the miserable weakness of human char¬ acter? The emotion was to be our god. It turns out to be a wretched fetich, and we know it as such. ’T was mine, ’t is his, and has been slave to thou¬ sands. It is gone, though we trusted in it. It was our stay, and it has flowed away like water. This is not fullness, but hollowness, of life. And how shall the romantic irony supply the vacancy? This irony is but the word of Mephistopheles about the ruin of Gretchen: Sie ist die erste nicht. Not the first change of emotion is this present one; not the first breaking up of the fountains of the great deep within us; but what misery in that thought! Then there is nothing sure, nothing significant. In our own hearts were we to find life, and there is no true life there; only masks with nothing beneath them; only endless and meaningless change.
The consciousness of this result is present in an¬ other form of the romantic spirit. The consequence is what Hegel, in the Phanomenologie des Geistes, described under the name of Pas Unglucldiche Bewusstsein, and what is more familiarly known to us as the Byronic frame of mind. The very strength of the previous emotion renders this consciousness of the hollowness of emotion the more insupport¬ able: — “ When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead.”
The brighter the lamp, the deeper the darkness that follows its breaking.