"Some Aspects of Pessimism" by Agnes Repplier is a wide-ranging critical essay that examines the intellectual tradition of pessimism in Western thought, testing it against the claims of optimism and finding neither philosophy entirely adequate to the facts of human experience. Repplier opens by recounting Matthew Arnold's lecture on Emerson in America, noting how the audience, disappointed by the absence of flattering oratory, finally warmed when Arnold praised Emerson's unconquerable optimism. This anecdote serves as a launching point for her skepticism toward easy optimism. She challenges the popular doctrine of compensation, advanced by Arnold and others, which holds that joy and sorrow balance themselves justly across human lives. Repplier finds this consolation philosophically weak, pointing out that the existence of suffering darkens the horizon for thoughtful souls regardless of any theoretical equilibrium, and that the sight of another's misery does not genuinely increase one's own happiness. She then turns to the self-styled pessimists, observing with dry wit that they are not quite as miserable as their rhetoric suggests. Writers such as Edgar Saltus and W. H. Mallock claim that systematic pessimism is a modern scientific achievement, distinct from the older melancholy of earlier ages. Repplier dismisses this pretension, noting that Hegesias of Cyrene was every bit as systematic as Schopenhauer three centuries before Christ, with more concrete results, since several of his disciples actually hanged themselves in deference to his teachings. She argues that the fundamental positions of pessimism and optimism have always coexisted in roughly the same relation, with optimism dominant in popular culture and pessimism speaking persistently to those with the leisure and intelligence to attend. Her survey of ancient thought is particularly rich. She demonstrates that the Greeks, so often praised for their joyful embrace of life, were in fact deeply acquainted with melancholy. Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Menander, and Euripides each offer pronouncements on the wretchedness of existence that would not embarrass a modern German philosopher. The analysis of Antigone is notably careful: Repplier defends the heroine's reluctance to die as entirely natural, contrasting it with the radiant martyrdom available to Christian women, who possessed a hope the Greeks entirely lacked. Repplier then addresses the theory that Christianity is responsible for diminishing earthly happiness by systematically disparaging worldly pleasures. She resists this charge, drawing on Walter Pater's portrait of early Christian cheerfulness in Marius the Epicurean and arguing that the medieval church took life as it found it, offering the doctrine of eternal hope to people for whom earthly life was genuinely and severely difficult. On the question of whether pessimism is tied to any particular creed or political alignment, Repplier is equally skeptical of neat categories. She notes that pessimists have been deeply religious like Pascal and Chateaubriand, or thoroughly skeptical like Schopenhauer and Hartmann, or philosophically detached like Amiel. Optimism and pessimism cut across religious and political lines, appearing in saints and libertines alike. Her treatment of Schopenhauer is memorable. She points out the paradox that the great apostle of pessimism lived with considerable snug comfort, shielding himself from want by prudent management of money and from ennui by unremitting intellectual labor. He expected nothing, desired as little as possible, and learned all he could. Far from being miserable, he was essentially a cold, witty, self-sufficient man. Repplier contrasts him sharply with Leopardi, whose despair was total and whose pages radiate genuine midnight suffering. Leopardi's particular contribution to pessimistic philosophy is his devastating argument that neither hope nor memory offers real consolation, since the future can only bring increasing sorrow and few people would willingly relive their past even for the pleasures it contained. Repplier closes with a survey of contemporary literature, finding it pervasively and rather fashionably gloomy. Scientists are reportedly cheerful, but the literary intelligentsia offer Heine's discordant laughter, Baudelaire's flowers of evil, Carlyle's thunderous denunciations, and Ruskin's prophetic woes. Even fiction has adopted a new kind of sadness, no longer content with tragic deaths or happy marriages but instead marrying its characters and then coolly informing the reader that happiness was never really forthcoming. She cites Henry James's The Bostonians and Thomas Hardy as examples of this tendency to deny the reader even the modest satisfaction of a concluded joy. The essay ends on a note of sardonic humor, quoting Hamlet's bleak remark that a man should simply be merry, and suggesting that with such relentless literary gloom pervading even the novel, readers may in time achieve the jocundity of the Danish prince himself.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1899 · Genre: Philosophy, Essay, Literary Criticism