The romantic despair thus described took many forms in the poetry of the early part of the century. To describe them all were to go far beyond our lim¬ its. A few forms suggest themselves. If we are condemned to fleeting emotions, we are still not de¬ prived of the hope that some day we may by chance find an abiding emotion. Thus, then, we find many poets living in a wholly problematic state of mind, expecting the god stronger than they, who, coming, shall rule over them. Such a man is the dramatist and writer of tales, Heinrich von Kleist. “ It can be,” writes this poet to a friend, December, 1806, “ it can be no evil spirit that rules the world, only a spirit not understood.” In such a tone of restless search for the ideal of action, Kleist remains through¬ out his life. No poet of the romantic school had a keener love of life-problems purely as problems. Each of his works is the statement of a question.
In so far Kleist resembles that mor.e recent repre¬ sentative of the problematic school of poetry,. Ar¬ thur Hugh Clough. Kleist answered his own questions at last by suicide. Others have other ways of fleeing misery. Ludwig Tieek, after running through the whole round of romantic questions, rids himself of his demons by turning his attention to other lit¬ erary work, and lets most of the old romantic ideals alone, or playfully writes amusing stories about them. Friedrich Schlegel finally escapes from him¬ self by means of a scholarly toil and Catholic faith, ilolderlin takes refuge in a mad-house. Shelley manages to endure his brief life, by dint of childlike submissiveness to his emotions, joined with earnest hope for yet better things. Schiller had joined with Goethe in a search for perfection in the ancient Greek world. There are many fashions of quieting the restlessness that belonged to the time, yet what one of them really answers the problems of the ro¬ mantic spirit? There is still the great question: How may mankind live the harmonious emotional life, when men are driven for their ideals back upon themselves, when traditional faith is removed, when the age is full of wretchedness and of blind striving, when the very strength of poetic emotion implies that it is transient and changeable? The conscious failure to answer this question is more or less de¬ cided pessimism.
Could modern poetry free itself from that reflective tendency in which we have found its most prominent characteristic, the pessimism could disappear with the criticism of life. But this is impossible. Omit part of our lyric poetry, some of our comedy and of our satire, and the rest of our best nineteenth cen¬ tury poetic work is a more or less conscious struggle with pessimism. The grounds and the nature of this struggle have been set forth in the foregoing. The poet once for all accepts the emotional criterion of the worth of life. Determining to see in the harmo¬ nious emotional life the best life, feeling as the most certain of principles that “ there is a lower and a higher,” the poet seeks to picture the perfect exist¬ ence thus defined. Failure means for him pessi¬ mism; not von Hartmann’s really quite harmless “ eudamonologischer Pessimismns,” but the true pessimism of the broken will, that has tried all and failed. The life that ought to be, cannot be; the life that is, is hollow and futile: such will be the result of disappointed idealism. In our time, the idealistic poets that are not pessimists have all fought more or less consciously the same battle with pessimism. Think only of the “ Excursion,” or of the “In Memoriam,” or again of “Faust,” that epitome of the thought of our century.
But before we allow ourselves a word on the rela¬ tion of “ Faust ” to our problem, let us look a little more closely at Byron. “ Faust ” is the crown of modern poetic effort. If that fails as a solution, all in this field has thus far been lost. But in Byron there is a confessed, one may add a professed, moral imperfection, whose nature throws light, not so much on the solution of the problem of pessimism, as on the problem itself.
The development of Byron’s poetry has two very marked periods, the sentimental and the critical. The sentimental Byron of the years before 1816 is not of very great present interest. The Byron of “ Manfred,” “Cain,” and “ Don Juan,” represents an independent phase of the romantic movement, whose faults are as instructive as its beauties. This pe¬ riod of Byron’s poetry is of course but very roughly described by the word critical, yet that word is at any rate suggestive. A sensitive man, and yet he¬ roic, strong in spirit, but without fixed ideals of life, a rebel by nature who yet finds no greater soul to lead him, no faithful band to follow him in any defi¬ nite effort for mankind, Byron is a modern likeness of him that in the legend afterwards became St. Christopher. Only Byron seeks the strongest with¬ out finding him, learns to despise the devil, and never meets the devil’s master. W orn out with the search, the poet flings himself down in the woods of doubt and dreams “Don Juan.” We look in vain for the right adjective with which to qualify this poem: it is so full of strength, so lavish of splendid re¬ sources, and yet in sum so disappointing. It has no true ending, and never could have had one. It is a mountain stream, plunging down dreadful chasms, singing through grand forests, and losing itself in a lifeless gray alkali desert. Here is romantic selfcriticism pushed to its farthest consequences. Here is the self-confession of an heroic soul that has made too high demands on life, and that has found in its own experience and in the world nothing worthy of true heroism. We feel the magnitude of the blun¬ der, we despise (with the author, as must be noticed, not in opposition to him) the miserable petty round of detestable experiences — intrigues, amours, din¬ ners — in brief, the vulgarity to which human life V is reduced; but the tragedy is everywhere to be read between the lines, not in what is said. The romantic spirit has sought in vain for the satisfac¬ tory emotional state, and for the worthy deed to per¬ form, and now rests, scornful and yet terrified, in dizzy contemplation of the confused and meaning¬ less maze of sensations into which the world has re¬ solved itself. “ There is nothing there to fear or hope,” this spirit seems to say.
“ When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, And proved it, ’t was no matter what he said.”
Or again: — “ ‘ To be or not to be? ’ Ere I decide I should be glad to know that which is being; ’T is true we speculate both far and wide, And deem, because we see, we are all-seeing.
For my part, I ’ll enlist on neither side, Until I see both sides for once agreeing.
For me, I sometimes think that life is death, Rather than life, a mere affair of breath.”
In “ Manfred ” the same spirit seeks another, and not quite so successful, a form of expression. The only peace that can come to this world-weary spirit, Manfred expresses at the sight of a quiet sunset. The only freedom from eternal self-examination is found in an occasional glance at peaceful nature.
“ It will not last, But it is well to have known it though but once; It hath enlarged my thoughts with a new sense, And I within my tablets would note down That there is such a feeling.”
The famous last words of Manfred, — “ Old man, ’t is not so difficult to die,” — coming as they do after all Manfred’s vacillation upon just this point, indicate the final resolution of despair to brave all possible wretchedness from with¬ out for the sake of feeliug within, in all its strength, though but for a moment, the fierce defiance of the rebellious Titan. Hungry for deeds, finding noth¬ ing to do, fearing the possible future life, and hating the present, the hero at last resorts to an untrue but stirring assertion of absolute personal independence of all the hateful universe here and hereafter: — “ Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me.
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey — But was my own destroyer, and will be My own hereafter.”
This is pessimism that overleaps itself. The out¬ come of self-analyzing romanticism is the determina¬ tion to build afresh a world that shall be nobler than this poor world of decaying passive emotions. Feel¬ ing will not do. Manfred attains something by ac¬ tion, even though he first acts in the moment of death. Doing work of some kind is, then, that to which we are necessarily driven. But if the action of defiance can make death tolerable, why might not some kind of activity make life tolerable? Is not the worthy life then to be found, not in emotion, but in work? Is not the ideal state the ideal activ¬ ity, not the ideal feeling? This suggestion had been at the foundation of the prototype of Manfred, the Faust of Goethe.
Praise of the first part of Goethe’s “ Faust ” is nowadays superfluous. Doubtless the work is a \ torso,1 but so is the life of man. Extravagant en¬ comium of “ Faust,” such as that wherewith Her¬ mann Grimm has marred, as with a showman’s ha¬ rangue, the conclusion of his otherwise most instruc¬ tive “ Lectures on Goethe,” seems as out of place as applause in a cathedral. The poem is grand and profound, because the life problems it so truthfully portrays are grand and profound; in form, if you except digressions, it is sublimely simple and unas¬ suming. Its imperfections are as open to view as is its grandeur. The doctrine of the poem may be thus briefly suggested. Here is a world wherein nature, the expression of divine intelligence, is perfect; wherein man, by the same divine wisdom, is left in darkness and confusion. The angels, who simply contemplate nature’s perfection, are the “ true sons of God.” But they do nothing. They only see and think. Man is to act. By his action he is freely to create such perfection as already passively exists in nature. That is, his life is to become an harmonious whole. The postulate of the Lord is that this is possible. Mephistopheles holds the opposite opinion. The question is to be solved by the case of Faust.
Faust is a man in whom are combined all the strength and weakness of the romantic spirit. No excellence he deems of worth so long as any ex¬ cellence is beyond his grasp. Therefore his de¬ spair at the sight of the great world of life. So small a part of it is his. He knows that he can 1 Cf. the opinion of M. Edm. Scherer as quoted in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s essay, A French Critic on Goethe, in the Mixed Essays, pi never grow great enough to grasp the whole, or any finite part of the whole. Yet there remains the hopeless desire for this wholeness. Nothing but the infinite can be satisfying. Hence the despair of the early scenes of the first part. Like Byron’s Man¬ fred, Faust seeks death; but Faust is kept from it by no fear of worse things beyond, only by an acci¬ dental reawakening of old childish emotions. He thereafter feels that he has no business with life, and is a creature of accident. He is clearly conscious only of a longing for a full experience. But this ex¬ perience he conceives as mainly a passive one. He does not wish as yet to do anything, only to get everything.1 But at the same time with this desire for a tempest of new feelings, Faust has the con¬ sciousness that there never can be a satisfactory feel¬ ing. Mephistopheles, stating the case of the con¬ tented man of the world, assures him that the time will come for enjoying good things in peace. Faust indignantly replies that pleasure can never deceive him, the tolerable moment never come. In making this very assertion, however, and in concluding his pact with Mephistopheles upon the basis of this asser¬ tion, Faust rises above his first position, and assumes a new one. The satisfactory pleasure can never be given to him, and why? Because he will always remain active. Satisfaction would mean repose, re¬ pose would mean death. Life is activity. The meaning of the pact is of course that, for good or i Cf. the lengthy discussion of this point in Friedrich VLscher, Goethe’s Faust, Neue Beitrdge zur Kritik des Gedichts, especially p. 291 and p. 304. “ Er (Faust; weiss also fur jetzt nur von der Lust.
for evil, all the existence of a man is work, and that no one is ever wholly lost so long as the power of accomplishment remains his. But if work is the es¬ sence of life, then satisfaction must be found not in feelings but in deeds. The world is good if we can make it so, not otherwise. The problem of Faust is therefore the discovery of the perfect kind of activity.
With this insight the romantic spirit has risen be¬ yond itself. The essence of romanticism is the de¬ sire for fullness of personal experience. The essence of this new spirit is the eagerness to accomplish something. The difference is vast. Faust, following this new tendency, might be led to an obscure toiling life of endless self-sacrifice. His pessimism (for in the early scenes he is a pessimist) might give way before unquestioning heroic devotion to some great end. Does this take place? W e know too well the answer. The whole poem is indeed a conflict be¬ tween the two tendencies in Faust, but the first, the desire for manifold passive experiences, is until the last scenes of the second part predominant. Faust is active, but his activity is mainly a continual pur¬ suit of new experiences. Even at the end he is not active as other men are active; his work is done by magic; and the accomplishment for whose sake he is at last willing to say, This is the highest moment, is an anticipation, not a reality. In the real world the satisfactory work is never found. And thus the solution of the problem is not fully given, though the poet, while suggesting it, has done more than any other modern poet. The revolution had fur¬ nished as life-ideals grand emotion and heroic action. The two cannot wholly be harmonized. The highest forms of activity imply self-sacrifice, drudg¬ ery, routine, cool-headed calculation. The highest forms of emotion, pursued by themselves, intoxicate and enervate. It is the purpose of Goethe to lead his hero through the various stages of emotional life, for the sake of making him prefer in the end a mode of action to all forms of simple emotion. The result is to be a man above the deadness of ordinary worka-day realism, yet as devoted to toil as the stupidest realist. There is to be a free surrender of a full self to the service of some high end. Nothing is lacking to the conquest over pessimism, except the clear statement of that for which the converted Faust is to work. The goal of activity once found, the problem will be solved, and the devil’s wager lost. But the dim allegorical suggestions of the sec¬ ond part will not suffice to give us the account of what is wanted. Faust is to work for human pro¬ gress, and progress means the existence of a whole nation of hard-laboring, fearless men who fight for¬ ever for their freedom. To have been the father of such a people is the highest blessedness. Good, in¬ deed, we say; but to have wrought by the devil s aid, through magic and oppression, is this the high¬ est? Is this the type of the best activity? And is the great problem after all really solved? For what is the ultimate good of the eternal warfare with nature in which mankind are thus left? Faust leaves be¬ hind him a nation of toilers, whose business it will be to build dikes to keep the sea out. A worthy end of romantic hopes, truly! That Goethe himself is not wholly content therewith is proven by the epilogue in heaven, which means, if it means any¬ thing, that the highest end of human activity i?
something very fine, but altogether inexpressible, in¬ visible, inconceivable, indefinite, a thing of ether and dreams. One longs in this last scene for the presence of Mepliistopheles, who surely has as much right there as in the prologue, and who would be sure to say, in his terse and sinewy fashion, just the right and the last word about the whole business.
The incompleteness of “ Faust ” is the incomplete¬ ness of modern thought. The poet is silent about the final problem, because modern thought is still toiling away on the definition of the highest human activity.
Thus we have found that our moral problem is shared by others than the moral philosophers. Al¬ most at random we have taken a few suggestive illustrations of this same moral problem as it ap¬ pears to the poets. Had we made use of the poets of the present day, we could have illustrated still other aspects of the question. The restless dramatic genius of Browning, for instance, always giving us glimpses of new ideals that men of strange fashions have or may have, unweariedly warns us not to pre¬ tend to narrow the possible objects of life down to one, however sacred we may think that one to be. Life, thus viewed, seems a grand everlasting war¬ fare of ideals, among which peace is impossible. And with this insight into the actual and seemingly irreconcilable warfare of human aims, ethical doc¬ trine must begin. The outlook is gloomy, but the problem must be faced.
III.
III.
Such are some of the motives that give genuine meaning to modern pessimism. This instability of all ideals is the greatest danger to which idealism can be subject. And the problem is not one of mere theory, nor yet even of poetic emotion alone. The problem is one of daily life. W e choose some fash¬ ion of life in the morning, and we reject it before night. Our devotional moments demand that all life shall be devotional; our merry moments that all life shall be merry; our heroic moments that all life shall be lived in defiance of some chosen enemy. But we are false to all these our ideals, even while we pretend to have them. And the most dishear¬ tening aspect of the whole matter lies in the fact that we cannot prove even our faithlessness to be un¬ worthy, unless we can bring ourselves steadfastly to accept some ideal by which our faithlessness itself can be judged. And this would imply that we were no longer faithless.
We have thus reached the root of moral skepti¬ cism. The worst that moral skeptics can say is that all choice of ideals is an accidental caprice, that ideals have no basis but this caprice, and that a moral code depends for its successful propagation wholly on the persuasive personal force of the man that happens to have it and to teach it.
For the first, then, we provisionally accept this skeptical view. W^ e shall regard the moral ideals in this light. We shall seek no impossible proof for any of them. But we shall try to see whither the skeptical view itself leads us.
\ If we look now for a final and perfectly cold¬ blooded statement of this moral skepticism, a state¬ ment that shall let us see once for all its meaning, its foundation, and its scope, the present author knows of no better expression of it than the one that is con¬ tained in the appendix to Mr. Arthur Balfour’s “ Defense of Philosophic Doubt,” 1 under the title “ The Idea of a Philosophy of Ethics.” Mr. Bal¬ four has shown us by the book in question that he has a very useful office in philosophic discussion, and we can only thank him for having made posi¬ tive advance in ethics easier, by his clear statement of the difficulties that in the past have barred the way.
“Scientific judgments and ethical judgments deal,” says Mr. Balfour, “ with essentially different sub¬ ject-matters.” Scientific propositions state “facts or events, real or hypothetical.” Ethical proposi¬ tions do not “ announce an event,” nor yet do they tell any “ fact of the external or internal world.” Ethical writers too often consider the “ psychology of the individual holding the moral law.” But this is no matter for ethics, but only for psychological science. In fact, “ if a proposition announcing ob¬ ligation require proof at all, one term of that proof must always be a proposition announcing obligation, which itself requires no proof.” “ There is no arti¬ fice by which an ethical proposition can be evolved from a scientific or metaphysical proposition, or any combination of such.” “ The origin of an ultimate ethical belief can never supply a reason for believing 1 Loudon, MacMillan & Company, 1879.
it, since the origin of this belief, as of any other mental phenomenon, is a matter to be dealt with by science; and my thesis is that (negatively speaking) scientific truth alone cannot serve as a foundation for a moral system; or (to put it positively), if we have a moral system at all, there must be contained in it, explicitly or implicitly, at least one ethical proposition, of which no proof can be given or re¬ quired.”
The reader may ask: Is all this the loftiest ideal¬ ism, or is it simply philosophic skepticism about the basis of ethics? We may leave the reader to ex¬ amine for himself Mr. Balfour’s very ingenious dis¬ cussion, but one or two very obvious and simple consequences may be quoted from the rest of the es¬ say, and these will serve well enough to show here tbe drift of the discussion.
“ An ethical proposition is one that prescribes an action with reference to an end.” Every such prop¬ osition “ belongs to a system.” “ The fundamental proposition of every such system states an end, which the person who receives that system regards as final — as chosen for itself alone.” “ When two suck systems conflict, their rival claims can only be de¬ cided by a judgment or proposition not contained in either of them, which shall assert which of these re¬ spective fundamental ‘ ends ’ shall have precedence.” « If revenge against a particular individual is for me an end-in-itself, a proposition which prescribes shooting him from behind a hedge may be one of the dependent propositions belonging to that particular system.” “ Though under the name ethical are ineluded not only moral, but also non-moral and im¬ moral systems, the distinctions regarded from the outside between these subdivisions are not essential, and have no philosophic import.” Such then is the skeptical outcome of this very idealistic position from which we ourselves started. Thus viewed, the moral world seems essentially chaotic. Each end, if chosen, has its own way of marshaling acts as good and bad. But one end cannot establish itself theoretically over against another. The warfare among them is practical, but is not rationally to be judged or ended.
Each says, “ In me is the truth about right and wrong. I am the Way.” But for one another they have, not arguments, but anathemas. They give no proof, only assertion and condemnation. It is the contemplation of this chaos that has suggested to us that plausible and yet dreadful pessimism of which modern thought has had so much to say, and of which this chapter has tried to give some notion.
CHAPTER VI.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths.
Shelley, Epipsychidion.
We have needed to dwell on our ethical skepti¬ cism, to experience the real strength of its doubts, in order that we should be able to get new and bet¬ ter methods of construction for our own doctrine. Deep as is the truth that lies at the basis of many ethical doctrines now either doubted or abandoned, one thing always seems defective about their fashion of building. This one defect has made us question their worth as theories. And our theoretical doubt, as we dwelt upon it, has become practical. We have seen how this ethical skepticism leads to the gloomiest pessimism. Both the skepticism and the pessimism we must meet fairly and fearlessly. And we must ask them how even they themselves are possible.
I.
Our skeptical criticism of ethical theories has been so far either internal or external. We have criticised each doctrine in itself, questioning either its consistency or its inner completeness; or else we have criticised it with reference to other doctrines.
In the first case our criticism led to no general skepticism, and had importance only in the special case. But the other kind of criticism was of more importance, and took another turn. We said to the doctrine: “ Perfect as your system may be in itself, your assumption of your highest end always finds over against itself an equally stubborn assump¬ tion of an exactly opposing end. And you have no proof to offer for your rejection of that end. You simply insist upon calling it a diabolical end; you hurl at it your anathema. Now we, who have wanted proof, not mere enthusiasm, we, who stand critically before your doctrine, and view it from without, and desire to know why we are to accept it, we feel a skeptical indifference about your end, as soon as we compare it with the opposing end, and as soon as comparing, we find the difference be¬ tween them to be one that rests, not on demonstra¬ ble truth, but on a mere kind of caprice. Practi¬ cally we may agree with you in choosing, as men of action, your aim. Our personal caprice may agree with yours. But theoretically we cannot jus¬ tify this aim. We find, in all that you say, no ob¬ jective moral truth, but only somebody’s capricious resolution. And even if we chance to accept your resolution, who knows when we shall change our minds, and begin acting in some new way, so that what we now call good shall be called evil? In brief, if there is to be possible anything more than moral preaching, if there is to be anything \vorthy of the name of demonstrated moral doctrine, then all your discussion must lead to something not de¬ pendent on the bare choice of individual moral agents. But in truth what you give us is just the fact of your choice. And hence it is that we are skeptics.”
What does this our skepticism mean? Unreflective, self-satisfied skepticism always means mental death; but in self-critical skepticism, observant of itself as of everything else, moves the very life-blood of philosophy. And of this the whole of the present book will try to be an illustration. Just here, there¬ fore, we want to be as watchful of our skepticism as we were of the systems whose theoretical weakness led us hither. What is the sense of this theoretical skepticism of our present attitude? On our reply all else turns. And our reply is: This skepticism expresses an indifference that we feel when we con¬ template two opposing aims in such a way as mo¬ mentarily to share them both. For the moment we realize equally these warring aims. They are ours.