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Updated: July 2, 2025
It is indeed possible to find some cold consolation in Gladstone's Chester speech in 1855, when he predicted that if only the colonies were left freedom of judgment, it would be hard to say when the day of separation might come. But Grey had already suspected Gladstone of pessimism on the point, and we now know that as an imperialist Gladstone's course from 1855 had a downward tendency.
A far more sober artist than Hugo, he was also a far profounder thinker, and a sincerer man. His melancholy, his pessimism, were the outcome of no Byronic attitudinizing, but the genuine intimate feelings of a noble spirit; and he could express them in splendid verse. His melancholy was touched with grandeur, his pessimism with sublimity.
There is a prodigious and prodigal display of genius in his work, savannahs of epigrams, forests of ideas, phrases enough to fill the ocean. There is enough material in the romances of Edgar Saltus to furnish all the cinema companies in America with scenarios for a twelve-month. Early in the Eighties a writer in "The Argus" referred to him as "the prose laureate of pessimism."
As a matter of fact, however, the trail looked innocent enough at the first glance, and Scott's pessimism may be laid partly to the circumstances under which the trip was attempted and partly to the fact that Scott almost always hated to change his mind. "How long will it be, do you suppose, before you can send back for the others?" queried Polly, as they rode away.
Bevan's partner, too?" Then Marcus started, and an odd little smile played round his mouth. The very same thought had already occurred to him. "Of pleasures, those which occur most rarely give the greatest pleasure." Epictetus. Dr. Luttrell's fit of pessimism did not last long.
Here we have to deal with a pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is a revolt in its favour.
There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halévy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken sadly, or even solemnly.
Newthorpe must count upon very moderate activity either of mind or body henceforth. He himself was not quite unprepared for this collapse; he accepted it with genial pessimism. Fate had said that his life was to result in nothing nothing, that is, from the point of view of his early aspirations. Yet there was Annabel, and in her the memory of his life's passion.
Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart.
"It isn't as long as one of his sermons won't take me five minutes to read. Here, listen to this, ladies and gentlemen: 'In this age of festering pessimism and decadent depravity, it is no surprise to the nauseated reviewer to open one more volume saturated with the fetid emanations of the sewer "
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