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Updated: June 28, 2025
To speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montégut does, as a romancier pessimiste, seems to me very much beside the mark. He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of human nature; indeed, I should even say that at bottom he does not take human nature as hard as he may seem to do.
Arved and Quell stood in a secret glade and looked at each other solemnly but only for a moment. Laughter, unrestrained laughter, frightened the squirrels and warned them that they were still in danger. "Well, we've escaped this time," said the poet. "Yes; but how long?" was the sardonic rejoinder of the painter. "See here, Quell, you're a pessimist.
As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.
Although a sad man at times, as I understood, the doctor was not a pessimist, and in many ways, both by practical jokes and the humoring of odd characters, sought relief from the intense emotional strain which the large practice of his profession put upon him.
From the general narrative there stood out little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and masterly of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father'; of his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine heights, of something cold, impotent and baffling in himself, which was to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the axe to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after friendship which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a skeleton at the feast: and the persistence through it all of a kind of hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more powerless to satisfy: all these Langham put into words with an extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase.
To be cut off now from all ministration, all comforting to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over they have broken his neck and buried him" it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in prison, and she knew that she would see him again.
Champagne in the glass is a beautiful thing to see. So is water, the morning after. That is the fault with frolic; there is always an inescapable rebound. The most violent love drops into humdrum tolerance. A pessimist is only a poor devil who has anticipated the inevitable; he has his headache at the start. Mental champagnes have their aftermaths even as the juice of the grape.
But because the selection relied on was purely circumstantial opportunist selection, so that the alliances were mere marriages of convenience, they have turned out, not merely as badly as might have been expected, but far worse than the blackest pessimist had ever imagined possible. How it will all end we do not yet know.
When the pessimist is popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the Byronists.
And as his losses increased and downfall threatened him, all that remained of the bel esprit and moralist, once so prone to discuss literature and social philosophy with Santerre, was an embittered, impotent individual one who had proclaimed himself a pessimist for fashion's sake, and was now caught in his own trap; having so spoilt his existence that he was now but an artisan of corruption and death.
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