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 110 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 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 ques- ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 111 tion 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.
112 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 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 unlearn- able, — 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.
ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 113 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 114 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 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, ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 115 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 116 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 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.
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 ques- ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 117 tions 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 118 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 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 ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 119 “ 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 self- criticism 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 120 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 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, “ 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,” — ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 121 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 122 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY \ 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 ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 123 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