PESSIMISM IN FICTION

The told story was not at first used for the purposes of pity, terror, and purification, but mainly for fun. Shall we make a great exception of the Book of Job, the inspired novel all occupied with its subject, the history of a single valuable soul? A family swept out of life are of no moment to that novelist, save as their fate causes the affliction of Job. By and by he shall be comforted with other sons and daughters. These, like the dead ones, are negligible except as sons and daughters to one not negligible man. Never was art truer to a single intention. The earlier family have no names named, but the later receive names because they are to go on living for the final joy of a momentous man.

If we may be permitted (or may be permitted as time goes on) to read Genesis, too, as a divine and all-significant novel, here is an even earlier example of the novel written with the gravest intention, and with simple and economic art. Here the ‘stars also’ are swept into being as the sons of Job are swept out of it, in a phrase that does not pause upon the universe that was to live, as the phrase did not pause upon the beautiful young men who were to die. The earth is central for that purpose, and Job for this.

But leaving aside, as a digression, the case of 123these divine examples of grave fiction, and that of the parables of the Gospel with them, we find an art of story-telling, whether in Arabia or in Tuscany, devised chiefly or altogether for pastime. It is an art of childish origins—the pretending that such or such things came to pass, the making things come to pass at the speaker’s whim. It is an arbitrary make-believe and irresponsible, whereas the drama must, as it were, make good its words by making a show. When the novel began in Italy it raised a childish laugh by jests unchildish. Its stories ended happily even though iniquitously. A mere pastime, it filled none but the idlest hour, or the weariest hour of rest. Boccaccio’s fictions were proportionate. There was little of them, and they did not encroach. It is a question whether the habit into which we in our time have slipped—fiction as a custom and a habit—is proportionate; and all our modern pastimes are in like manner questionable as to their quantity. And when the pastime of the greater number—the reading of the novel—is charged by the novelist with so many functions as it now carries we cannot but wonder that irresponsible hands should claim, and into those hands should be given, purposes so various and purporting to be so grave.

It is the novelist, then, with no one to whom he must answer, with no facts to which he must be bound, and with only such truths as he sets in secret before his eyes—it is the novelist at whose 124discretion lies the power of suggestion that is followed by a million souls. The idle reader opens the novel for pleasure and learns to find that pleasure in painful things. A pessimist has him by the ear, having captured him at the mischief of his idleness and his desire for passive pleasure. On the pessimist author’s side also there is some spiritual sloth in his activities, for pessimism is the easier way. If he would confess himself he would tell us that it is so. And one of his fruits is the obvious destruction of comedy, but the other, equally lamentable though less obvious, is the destruction of tragedy.

We have all been troubled by Dante’s lack of pity for the people of his infernal pilgrimage. It is true that he has compassion upon Francesca (for the dreadful fact is that he had known as ‘a little radiant girl’ the very woman whom he saw in eternal woe), but he witnesses unmoved the other wounded displaying before him their immortal wounds and the other miserable recounting to him their immedicable grief. Are we to understand that some misery is beneath living compassion, and that pity and terror do not pass the limits of life’s known and intelligible ways, the ways of customary men, where anguish is not cut off from good, and hope, a banished angel, is not abolished? If so, it is easier to understand why the literature of despair is indeed not tragic, why it denies tragedy as comedy itself does not. If pessimism robs us of laughter it has done worse by ‘beguiling us of our tears’, 125not that for its sake they are, but that they are not, shed.

It is no wonder that the proffer of Browning’s optimism, half-heartedly made again on the day of his centenary, did again fail. His ‘All’s right with the world’ is as vain as the pessimist’s ‘All’s wrong with it’. It is out of the range of customary life. Intelligible joy and grief are in the midways, and in the midways there is cause for as much sadness as our human hearts can hold. One of the most heart-piercing lines in our poetry is Patmore’s

After exceeding ill a little good.

But if the ill had so exceeded that the little good was not, the pierced heart would have closed upon an insensible cicatrice.

Perhaps, by the way, another reason why Browning’s remedies are proffered in vain is his denial of fear. Browning refused to submit to fear, at once the penalty and the duty of mankind. Pessimists, on the other hand, are afraid, and they and Browning do not understand one another in their opposition, they are not intelligible enemies. Our pessimists fear, not without cause, and Browning is vociferously hopeful, without full cause. The antagonists are not within touch. And yet that robustious poet is held, or was held by his own generation, to be a realist. In certain evil things he was, on the contrary, an idealist. Having never known such a Spanish friar, or such a Bishop 126Blougram, he created them before he detected them—and at such close quarters, so point-blank! He was too intimate with the Sludge he made. But the pessimist, though so partial and so imperfect, is a better realist than he.

A tragedy the noblest and most dreadful of our time—I refer to Monsieur Paul Claudel’s drama, L’Otage—is the truer antithesis of pessimism in fiction, whether in the story told or on the stage. It is a tale of exceeding ill and a little good, of a world wherewith all is not right. I have lately read a novel in which everything went wrong, and what final solace appears takes the form of a little chatter about a servant’s photograph. In Monsieur Claudel’s play the solace is in the form of a momentary act of divine death after exceeding ill.

L’Otage should be ministered to pessimists, or rather to their readers, for tears, and Mr. Jacobs for laughter. The age is not without its remedies.

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