Confess that England proved. Wash first the stain As shall "the glorious liberty So shall the noble natures of our land (Oh nobler and more deeply founded far Than any born beneath a Southern star) That shakes the proud; for Independence walks With staid Humility aye hand in hand, Whilst Pride in tremor stalks. It will thus be perceived that our author is not insensible to the follies and vices of the age, and that where necessary he can vigorously apply the scourge. The progress of morality, and the lifting of England into a purer social atmosphere, cannot but find their expression in every true poet. He is not a selfish being who sings simply of the burden of his own heart; he is to bear up the burden of others and make the cries and desires of the world intelligible. Without his aid these aspirations could scarcely find utterance, and thus the transition into a nobler state would be a work of much slower growth, if it were not indeed altogether arrested. Having taken a rapid survey of the various works which Sir Henry Taylor has published, it is now essential to enquire into the claims he has upon us as a representative of the poetic art-that is, as regards his general characteristics. In the first place we are struck with the wholesome feeling of contempt which he cherishes for opinion in the bulkopinion, that is, which would ask merely that the taste of readers should be consulted by giving them that mental pabulum which requires no digestion, but which is in reality an evidence of the intellectual effeminacy of the time. Self-conscious as every real poet must necessarily be, he is yet not abjectly subservient to the taste of the period; and judiciously insists upon giving to men that amount of mental exercise which has almost come to be a bugbear to the generality of readers. His obvious sincerity would always prevent him from truckling to what he considers an indignity to his art; and in all that he has written there is nothing which could detract from the exalted standard he has set up. Perhaps this accounts in some degree for the fact that though his readers are enthusiastic to a degree, they are at the same time rather select than numerous. But just as Comte would consider the willing admiration of a few earnest disciples worth all the fulsome eulogy of those who did not understand his philosophy, so Sir Henry Taylor has a better reward than the mere surface applause which bespeaks the popular but by no means invariably the great writer. Another obvious excellence in his writings is his strict adherence to poetic truth. Many writers will violate the proprieties for the sake of effect, but the author devoted to his art would rather make a splendid failure than a wonderful success upon a false basis. All the influence which man has brought to bear upon man--and all the strenuous efforts of our wits and satirists—have not been successful in getting rid of the sham element either in society or literature. It is refreshing and invigorating consequently to come upon a writer who dares to place his aim high, and who endeavours to achieve that aim, whether accompanied by the applause or the condemnation of his fellow-men. The hero is that man who, having decided what is right in his own mind, pursues it with the most unflinching courage, regardless of the consequences which his advocacy or championship may bring to him individually, provided only the principle for which he contends ultimately triumphs. It takes many years for some work to be rightly estimated; and in this category we should place the dramas of Sir Henry Taylor. But the reward which eventually comes is broad and deep. The poet has seen further than his contemporaries, and the justness and accuracy of his vision can only sometimes be tested by succeeding ages. Let him go back so far as Chaucer, if he will, as a model for the form in which he gives forth his thoughts to mankind; but the spirit which underlies them is that which has animated the man himself, and it is consequently bound sooner or later to find its echo. Pursuing still further the claims which this dramatist has upon us, we are inevitably struck with one arising from the general symmetry of his works. We perceive in them that equal balance of imagination, reason, and sentiment which go to round off the true poet. The poet of "imagination all compact," were he nothing else but imagination, would soon pall upon his readers. He would be like a bark at sea, in the midst of the tempest, destitute of a guiding hand-the guiding hand of reason. All the elements we have above mentioned are necessary to the poet who would strike the various chords of humanity; and it is because we think that Sir Henry Taylor has met these requirements that we should yield him so conspicuous a place amongst the poets of the nineteenth century. Not only has he never written a line which, dying, he would wish to blot, but there is nothing which he has written that he may not look back upon with unmixed satisfaction. We are convinced that when all the artificial excitement of the present period has died away when men ask for the Samsons amongst the poets and the philosophers who are to pull down the pillars of the house of mere sensuous delight and gratification, such names as that of Sir Henry Taylor will recur to them as being amongst the choicest and strongest spirits of their art. The works we have been discussing are a veritable and permanent addition to English literature; the reader's first acquaintance with them is a surprise and a delight-his closer knowledge reveals their grandeur and durability; and we are persuaded that he will finally arrive at the conclusion that the drama has received no greater accession of culture and force during the present century than it has through the author of Philip Van Artevelde. G. B. S. The Pessimist's View of Life. FROM the point of view of what is called a healthy common sense all enquiry into the worth of human life doubtless seems unnecessary and even ridiculous. Men in possession of a fair amount of health and fully occupied in some interesting mode of activity will always take for granted that the aims of life are worthy of pursuit. In the case of the large majority of mankind the staggering query : "Is it after all worth so much toil and fuss?" never suggests itself except perhaps in some brief intervals of sickness or depressing sorrow when activity is suddenly arrested and the object of wealth, fame, or luxurious living recedes for an instant from the eager pursuer's grasp. With a sufficiency of bodily and mental energy, and with an appropriate channel for this energy, people are always predisposed to think favourably of life and its opportunities. Indeed, it is commonly supposed that a healthy mind is necessarily a sanguine one; and it may be said to be a kind of practical postulate of the normal and actively engaged mind that life is worth the living and that happiness is really attainable. But out of this mass of busy, deeply interested minds their emerges now and again a spirit of another complexion, inactive, critical, and sceptical, only too well disposed to challenge the easily adopted assumption of the many. These eccentric persons, reflecting on men and their pursuits, soon perceive that life is not always such a rosily-tinted object as the unthinking are apt to presuppose; with a keen vision for the dark shades and blemishes of earthly existence-which betrays the vigilant, sceptical intellect, and also perhaps the mind morbidly sensitive to painful impressions-they speedily collect material for another and contrasted view of the world. Life as seen by these is no longer a fresh and beautiful garden stocked with fragrant flowers and luscious fruits, but rather a dreary desert waste where only hurtful plants abound and where nourishing and grateful growths are rare and hardly reached. Of such a temper are the harsh censors of morals who occasionally arraign society, the earnest, prophetic souls which tear the veil from an illusory national prosperity, the religious teachers who seek to call men off from the vanity of the world, and the cynical writers who care only to raise a laugh at their portraiture of life's pretentious mummeries. Here, then, we have shadowed forth the two radically opposed forms of the Welt-anschauung, the hopeful optimistic belief in the sweetness and beauty of human life, and the cheerless and desponding conviction of pessimism that life is nothingness and vanity. Yet let it not be supposed that all who make it their special business to expose the hollowness of much of the world's so-called prosperity and gaiety are necessarily pessimists. All true reformers, however depressing their estimate of existing institutions and habits of life, must, it is obvious, have believed in the possibility of something really desirable. Even Rousseau, who supposed modern social life to be one gigantic evil, imagined that happiness might even now be reached if men would only throw off the shackles of civilised forms and return to the sweet simplicity of primitive life. So, too, our own unsparing censor, Mr. Carlyle, with all his contempt for the shams of existence, owes his moral force to an invincible belief in a valid and satisfying, even though rather hazily conceived, reality. Religious leaders, again, cannot be called pessimists, for their firm persuasion that a truly satisfying existence is to be reached after the brief flutter of earthly life enables them to look hopefully on the world's evils. Yet though not in the full sense pessimists these moral and religious teachers clearly set out from the pessimist's starting-point. Like him they see first of all and most distinctly the huge evil of the world, and in this sense they strongly contrast with the undoubting happy spirits which go forth to life assured of its perennial bloom. Just as we find the optimistic and pessimistic temper of mind showing itself in different individuals of the same society and age, so we may see alternations of these moods among different societies and at different epochs in the same national development. Among the light-hearted races of Southern Europe, for example, we do not find the severe and gloomy notions of life which have grown out of the brains of the hardy, deepsearching Teutons of the North. So, too, we may notice that it is in the first flush of energetic national life, and in the glad season of national youth, such as that realised in the first ages of Greek civilisation, that the brightest ideas of the world and its possibilities arise, whereas when action is no longer so full and a checkered history of success and defeat lies behind, as in the latter period of the Roman Empire, doubts arise as to the genuineness of that life-gold which glitters from afar with so rich a lustre. An arrest of vigorous and engrossing activity, an impulse of critical reflection, such, then, are the conditions of the birth of the first germinal form of the pessimistic theory of the world. But what, it will be asked, is the relation of this rudimentary pessimism to the highly complex and fully developed pessimism of modern Germany! No one who will read either Schopenhauer or his enthusiastic successor Edward von Hartmann can fail to see that there is a very close connection between the two varieties. Much of the outcry of these later writers against the hollowness of modern social life, with its lauded refinement and elegance, reads like the outpourings of much older teachers.* But apart from this * This has been well pointed out by Dr. E. Pfleiderer in an interesting little account of modern pessimism (Der moderne Pessimismus). emphatic attack of contemporary manners, the newer and "philosophic" pessimism may with reason be supposed to have an affinity with its nonspeculative predecessor. For is it not the product of Germany, the land of the grave-minded, brooding, all-sifting Teutons, the land, too, of Heine the poet who has sung the great world-pain for all time? And though it may strike one as strange that this ungladdening interpretation of life should continue to be accepted by so many Germans even now when their country is entering upon its recently won estate of national unity and political independence, it should be remembered that this strange gospel really took root in Germany before these golden days, when sore disappointment, the result of long deferred social hopes and aspirations, embittered the best hearts of Germany. Philosophical pessimism thus clearly has one foot firmly planted on the old and stable ground of human nature, the querulous, protesting spirit with which in all ages man has faced the reality of the world's evil when once clearly recognised. But as a philosophical system it has, of course, an independent basis as well; and of this we must now seek to give a brief account. The philosophic pessimism of Schopenhauer and his followers is the distinct denial of the optimistic theory of the universe laid down by Leibnitz in his theological work, Essai de Théodicée. This writer concluded that the Deity had out of a choice of an infinite number of possible worlds created this as the best, and in reply to the natural objection that the existence of evil contradicts this supposition, he sought by a curious process of reasoning to show that all evil is imperfection or negation, a necessary condition of the highest good. To this theory the German pessimists directly address themselves. Both Schopenhauer and Hartmann assert that evil and suffering are a positive thing; further, that the evil of the world greatly exceeds its good, and that consequently the existing universe is worse than no universe at all. The pessimist theory, then, does not teach as the word might suggest, that this world is the worst possible, only that it is worse than none at all. It would be better, says the pessimist, to have no existence, than existence on such terms. So far Schopenhauer and his followers agree. But Hartmann has something to add to his master's theory. Though the existing world is worse than none at all, it is nevertheless the best possible as Leibnitz asserted. How can this be? Because every possible world is necessarily a bad one having a preponderance of suffering over enjoyment, and the existing one is the least bad, that is, the one with the smallest possible excess of evil. verse. We cannot here enter into a full consideration of the metaphysical basis on which the pessimists seek to place their conception of the uniSuffice it to say that both Schopenhauer and Hartmann look on the sustaining force or principle of all existence, material as well as mental, as will. Will is for them the one substance and the Divine Creator of the world, only it is not a concrete personal will, but a VOL. XXXIII.-NO. 196. 21. |