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Updated: May 2, 2025
Fixation upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling that the world is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce panics. How this fascination of the obvious has balked the work of the Commission I need not elaborate.
Equally intense, and more exuberant, was the delight of scholars and artists, when the asceticism and pessimism of the Middle Ages, which had given birth to such bodies as the Carmelite monks and the mendicant friars, gave way before the revival of Greek literature and art. The world seemed suddenly to have renewed its youth.
He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
Whoever attempts to judge in objective fashion must not, when looking back from to-day, relegate all that has since happened to former discernible facts, but should consider that, in spite of all pessimism and all fears, the hopes of a reasonable peace of understanding, even though involving sacrifices, still existed, and that it was impossible to plunge the Monarchy into a catastrophe at once for fear of its coming later.
Instinctively Christophe made himself more German than he was, in art. Revolting against the voluptuous ataraxia of a certain class of Parisian music, he set up, with violence, a manly, healthy pessimism. When joy appeared in his music, it was with a want of taste, a vulgar ardor, which were well calculated to disgust even the aristocratic patrons of popular art. An erudite, crude form.
Written in the manner of Zola, the book, which, because of an alleged dry rot in the German army, prophesied mischance in the future, produced its effect not so much through an apparently objective but gloomy depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism.
Inasmuch as this cannot be done in homes that are already demoralized, the main hope must be that such education will be given to children in homes that are as yet relatively pure and stable. Movements toward such education already exist in society, and, as we have already said, there is no reason for pessimism, if we take a long view of the situation.
This is the teacher, whose pessimism is generally admitted, of whom Mr. Jones says that, he had "tremendous expectations." "He believed there was to be a day after today, and recognized his obligation to it," writes Mr. Jones in his indiscriminate laudation of Jesus. Is that why he said "Take no thought of the morrow," and predicted the speedy destruction of the world?
This view and the various aspects of the condition which Lamprecht describes, the relation of the materialism, the pessimism and the melancholy of such a time to the optimistic trends and the deep forward movement need a closer study than we can here give it, but may we not see in it the truth that such conditions as these are prone to cause wars as a phase of the process of the inner adjustment of national life?
Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night. But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake.
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