The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891

But science, not content with tracing institutions, has been analyzing personality. We see now that there can never again be such an orgie of the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. “It is the last of the fates,” says Wilde, “and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know.” It is the “divinity that shapes our ends” and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities, predispositions, and transmitted taints, atavisms, and reversions. It finds the soul not a spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of strange contradictions and warring tendencies, with traces of spent passion and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of forgotten deeds and survivals of vanished habits. We are “possessed” not by demons but by the dead. These are in Ibsen’s drama the real ghosts which throng our lives and haunt our footsteps, remorseless as the furies. We are followed by the shades of our ancestors who visit us, not with midnight squeak and gibber, but in the broad noonday, speaking with our speech, and doing with our deed. We are bound to a destiny fixed before birth, and choice is the greatest of illusions. The world is indeed a stage, and life is but a hollow ceremony, spontaneous enough to the eye, but wherein the actors recite speeches and follow stage directions written for them long before they were born. Thus science grinds color for our modern Rembrandts.

The final blow to the old notion of the ego is given by the doctrine of multiple individuality. Science tells of the conscious and the sub-conscious, of the higher nerve centres and the lower, of the double cerebrum and the wayward ganglia. It hints at the many voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy and pain, and scarce give sign, dwellers in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be, often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself free. This I is, no doubt, a hierarchy or commonwealth of psychical units that at death dissolves and sinks below the threshold of consciousness.

It is plain, then, that the swift spread of science has brought men into a new universe. Few there are that can adorn the new home with ornaments saved from the old. For most men the universe which science tells of rises about them unsightly and barn-like, with bare walls and naked rafters, and until art can beautify the walls, and poetry gild the rafters, men will have that appalling feeling of being nowhere at home, that awful sinking as if the bottom were dropping out of all things.

The last great motive to despair is supplied by Indo-German philosophy. Under the headship of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, there has grown up of late a black pessimism rooted in Hindoo thought, and allied to that strange exotic cult of Eastern religions that has enabled Neo-Buddhism to proselyte even in Christian Europe. Its success has been brilliant. In twenty years Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious” has reached its tenth German edition, entered all the great languages of Europe, and called forth a vast literature of its own. Thoroughly in touch with modern culture and gifted with a striking style, Hartmann is to-day, perhaps, the best read philosopher on the continent.

Hartmann dwells upon the sorrow inherent in all existence. Happiness, whether expected in one’s own life, in an ecstatic life beyond the grave, or in the far future of humanity, is an illusion. The breaking through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The world is a mistake—a stupendous blunder of the blind unconscious. From it there is no escape until the world is hurled back into nothingness by a supreme effort of the collective human will. To bring about this replunge into Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit of life—all these exist to bring forth the pessimist. He alone has gained true culture, and reached a rational insight into the emptiness of existence. He alone has rent the veil of Maya and pierced the last illusion. His task is to waken humanity, now tossing on its bed of pain, from the spell of the great alluring world-dream. By showing the vanity of endeavor he is to still the fatal lust for life and bring all men to despair and longing for Nirvana. Thus does he become the true savior of mankind; for at this point the world, obeying the desperate resolve of the human race, will vanish utterly,

“And like the baseless fabric of a dream
Leave not a rack behind.”

The pessimistic temper of the age reveals itself in every field where mood finds utterance. Every book that makes a sensation does it by virtue of the phase of despair it presents. Every drama that creates a furore does it by uncovering some new tragic element in life. Anything optimistic falls flat. The literary men of Europe are recklessly underbidding each other in the attempt to show that life is sadder, or meaner, or baser, or emptier than had been supposed. The cynic and the pessimist share public attention. Not that European writers are insincere. The authors and thinkers themselves have been the first to feel the Zeitgeist. They have written as they have because they have found the melancholy view of life the most fruitful thing in recent culture. They have found it the richest in novelty, surprises, images, scenes, reflections, effects, and sensations. The worthlessness of life is an idea that agrees with science, meets the mood of the age, and fires the imagination of the artist.

The French, Norwegian, and Russian realism of the last decade is the utterance of later pessimism. For the term “realism” describes something more than an art. It describes an ethical view. It means the conviction of Flaubert: “You may fatten the human beast, give him straw up to his belly, and gild his manger; but he remains a brute, say what you will.” The realists are filled with the scientific notions of human nature. They base romances on psychology, physiology, or pathology. They study Darwin, and Spencer, and Ribot. They look constantly for the traces of the savage cave-dweller. The great masters,—Tolstoï, Zola, Ibsen, Maupassant, Flaubert, Gautier, Loti, Bourget,—as well as their swarms of disciples, are ever on the watch for marks of decadence, or for vestiges of the brute in man’s instincts and passions. To the old romanticism of Victor Hugo they oppose blunt truth-telling and remorseless analysis. They spare no illusions. “Love, marriage, family,” cries Tolstoi’s hero, “are lies, lies, lies!”

This same ethical spirit is shared by realism in art. A painter seeking in the work-house a model for his “job,” an actress visiting the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,—these show the modern appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times’ spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and despair.

Most of our great critics of life,—Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoï, and Ruskin—have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement and despair.

The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly asks in a recent poem:—

“What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps of a meaningless Past?”

Since the time of Goethe, poetry has turned from Hellenic to Hindoo sources. Cultured Europe seizes with a strange eagerness on the sublime, dreamy conceptions that underlie Hindoo pantheism—Sansara, the unabiding pain-world; Nirvana world of rest and re-absorption; the deceptive veil of Maya, the wheel of life, the melting bubbles poured from the bowl of Saki, the Brahma fallen from unity and serenity into multiplicity and pain, the illusion of birth and death, the evil of all individual existence, the retreat from life, the euthanasia of the will and the return to non-existence,—these with their rich train of imagery thrill the jaded and blasé European with a rare and profound emotion. Besides these spoils, the poet of to-day revels in the results of later metaphysics. The naïve balance of pleasure and pain is disturbed. Suffering becomes an almost supernatural fact hid in a halo of mystery, and is not to be blotted out by any quantity of joy. One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the legend of a suffering unconscious.

THE HEART OF THE WOODS

BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE

Twilight fell softly over Beersheba, beautiful Beersheba. It is going into history now with its sad old fancies and its quaint old legends,—its record of happiness and of heartbreak,—those two opposing, yet closely interwoven inevitables which always belong to a summer resort.

But Beersheba is different from the rest, in that the railroads have never found it; and it goes into history a monument to the old days when the wealthy among the southern folk flocked to the mountains, and to Beersheba—queen of the hill country of Tennessee.

The western sky, where it seemed to slope down toward Dan, had turned to gaudy orange; the east was hazy and dimly purple, streaked with long lines of shadow, resembling, in truth, some lives we remember to have noticed, lives that for all the sombre purple were still blotched with the heavier shadows of pain that is never spoken.

It was inexpressibly lonely; true, a cowbell tingled in the distance, and now and then a fox barked in a covert of Dark Hollow, that almost impenetrable jungle that lies along the “Back Bone,” a narrow, zigzag ridge stretching from Dan to Beersheba.

Dan, modest little Dan, seven furlongs distant from queenly Beersheba, with its one artistic little house refusing in spite of time and weather, and that more deadly foe, renters, to be other than pretty and picturesque, as it nestles like a little gray dove in its nest of cedar and wild pine. A very dreamful place is Dan, dreamful and safe.

Safe, so thought the man leaning upon the low fence that inclosed the old ante-bellum graveyard that was a part of Beersheba also. For in the olden days people came by families and family connections, bringing their servants and carriages. And those who died at Beersheba were left sleeping in the little graveyard—a quiet spot, shut in by old cedars and rustling laurel. A very solemn little resting-place, with the cedars moaning, and the winds soughing, as if in continual lament for the dead left to their care. Among the quiet sleepers was one concerning whom the man leaning upon the fence never tired of thinking, while he made, by instinct it seemed to him, a daily pilgrimage to her grave. It was marked by a long, narrow shaft, exceedingly small at the top. Midway the shaft a heart, chased out of the yellow, moss-stained marble, a heart pierced by a bullet. He had brushed the moss aside long ago to read the quaint yet fascinating inscription:—

“Millicent—April, 1862. ‘Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!’”

He had heard the story of the sleeper underneath often, often. It is one of the legends now, of Beersheba. Yet he thought of it with peculiar interest, that twilight time, as he stood leaning upon the low fence while the sun set over Dan. His face, with the after-glow of sunset full upon it, was not a face in keeping with the quiet scene about him. It was not a youthful face, although handsome. Yet the lines upon it were not the lines made by time: a stronger enemy than time had left his mark there. Dissipation was written in the ruddy complexion, the bloated flesh, and the bloodshot eye. The continual movement of the hand feeling along the whitewashed plank, or fingering, unconsciously, the trigger of the loaded rifle, testified, in a dumb way, to the derangement of the nervous system which had been surrendered to that most debasing of all passion, drink. He had sought the invigorating mountains, the safety of isolation, to do for him that which an abused and deadened will refused to do. It is a terrible thing to stand alone with the wreck of one’s self. It is worse to set the Might-Have-Been side by side with the Is, and know that it is everlastingly too late to alter the colorings of either picture.

His was an hereditary passion, an iniquity of the father visited upon the son. Against such there is no law, and for such no remedy.

He thought bitterly of these things as he stood leaning upon the graveyard fence. His life was a graveyard, a tangle of weeds, a plat of purposes overgrown with rank despair. He had struggled since he could remember. All his life had been one terrible struggle. And now, he knew that it was useless, he understood that the evil was hereditary, and to conquer it, or rather to free himself from it, there was but one alternative. He glanced down at the rifle resting against his knee. He did not intend to endure the torture any very great while longer. He possessed the instincts of a gentleman,—the cravings of a beast. The former had won him something of friends and sympathy,—and love. The latter had cost him all the other had won. For coming across the little graveyard in a straight line with the shadows of the old cedars, her arms full of the greens and tender wild blossoms of the mountain, was the one woman he had loved. She had done her best to “reform” him. The world called it a “reform.” If reform meant a new birth, that was the proper name for it, he thought, as he watched her coming down the shadow-line, and tried to think of her as another man’s wife; this woman he loved, and who had loved him.

He saw her stop beside a little mound, kneel down, and carefully dividing her flowers, place the half of them upon a child’s grave. Her face was wet with tears when she arose, and crossing over to the tall, yellow shaft, placed the remainder of the offering at its base. She stood a moment, as if studying the odd inscription. And when she turned away he saw that the tears were gone, and a hopeless patience gave the sweet face a tender beauty.

“‘Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!’”

He heard her repeat the melancholy words as she moved away from the old shaft, and opening the gate he waited until she should pass out.

“Donald!”

“I couldn’t help it, Alice. You are going away to-morrow; it is the last offence. You will forgive it because it is the last.”

“You ought not to follow me in this way, it isn’t honorable. See! I have been to put some flowers on my little baby’s grave.” She glanced back, as she stood, her hand upon the gate, at the little flower-bedecked grave where two months before she had buried her only child.

“You shared your treasures with the other,” he said, indicating the tall shaft.

“I always do,” said she. “There is something about that grave that touches me with singular pity. I feel as if it were myself who is buried there. I think the girl must have died of a broken heart.”

“Have you never heard the story?” said Donald. “I suppose it might be called a broken heart, although the doctors gave it the more agreeable title of ‘heart disease.’ It is very well for the world that doctors do not call things by their right name always. Now, if I should be found dead to-morrow morning in my little room at Dan, the doctors would pronounce me a victim of ‘apoplexy,’ or ‘heart failure.’ That would be very generous of the doctors so far as I am concerned. But would it not be more generous to struggling humanity to say the truth: ‘This man died of delirium tremens,—killed himself with whiskey. Now you other sots take warning.’”

“Donald Rives!” the sad eyes, full of unspoken pity, not unmixed with regret, sought his.

“Truth,” said Donald. “And truth, Alice, is always best. The world, the sick moral world, cannot be healed with falsehood. But the woman sleeping there—she has a pretty story. Will you wait while I tell it—you are going away to-morrow.”

She glanced down the road, dim with the twilight.

“The others are gone on to Dan, to see the moon rise,” she said hesitatingly.

“We will follow them there in a moment,” said Donald. “I have a fancy for telling you that story.”

He laughed, a nervous, mirthless kind of laugh, and slipped his rifle to his other hand.

“She had a lover in the army, you understand. She was waiting here with hundreds of others until ‘the cruel war should cease.’ One day when there had been a great battle, a messenger came to Beersheba, bringing news for her. He brought a letter, and she came across the little court there at Beersheba, and received it from the messenger’s own hand. She tore it open and read the one line written there. Then the white page fluttered to the ground. She placed her hands upon her heart as if the bullet had pierced her. ‘Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!’ That was all she said or did. The ball from old Shiloh did its work. The next day they buried her up there under the cedars. The letter had but one line: ‘Shot at Shiloh, fatally,’ and signed by the captain of the company who had promised to send news of the battle. Just a line; but enough to break a heart. Hearts break easily, sweetheart.”

She looked at him with her earnest eyes full of tears.

“Do you think hers broke?” she asked. “I do not. She merely went to him.”

“As I should go to you, if you were to die, because I cannot live without you.”

“Hush! I am nothing to you now. Only a friend who loves you, and would help you if she could, but she is powerless.”

“O Alice, do not say that. Do not give me over in that hopeless way to ruin. Do not abandon me now.”

“Donald,” the voice was very low, and sweet, and—strong. “There was a time I thought to help you. I did my best and—failed. It is too late now. I am married. You who could not put aside your passion for the girl whose heart was yours, and whom you loved sincerely, could not, assuredly, put it by for the woman whose love, and life, and duty are pledged to another. Yet, you know I feel for you. You know what it is to be tempted, so alas! do I. Wait! stand back. There is this difference. You know what it is to yield; but I have that little mound back there”—she nodded toward the little flower-decked grave,—“the dead help me, the sleeper underneath is my strength. If I were dead now, I would come to you, and help you. Do that which, living, I failed in doing. Come, now; let us go on and see yon moon rise over Dan. The others have gone long ago.”

They passed out, and the little gate swung to its place. The dead at Beersheba were left alone again. Left to their tranquil slumbers. Tranquil? Aye, it is only the living who are eager and unhappy.

Down the shadowy road they passed, those two whose lives had met, and mingled, and parted again. Those two so necessary to each other, and who, despite the necessity, must touch hands and part.