The pessimism of James Thomson (B. V.) in relation to his times 9783111656038, 9783111271835

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STUDIES IN ENGLISH Volume XI

LITERATURE

THE P E S S I M I S M OF JAMES T H O M S O N (B.V.) I N R E L A T I O N TO H I S T I M E S by

KENNETH HUGH

BYRON

@ 1965

MOUTON & CO. LONDON

· THE HAGUE

·

PARIS

© Copyright 1965 Mouton & Co., Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

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Printed in The

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65-23874

TO MY FATHER

PREFACE

O antique fables! beautiful and bright And joyous with the joyous youth of yore; O antique fables! for a little light Of that which shineth in you evermore, To cleanse the dimness from our weary eyes, And bathe our old world with a new surprise Of golden dawn entrancing sea and shore. - James Thompson (B.V.) from his "Proem", Works, II, 61, January, 1882.

The poet James Thomson (B.V.) was not well known during his lifetime (1834-1882) except by a discriminating few who could understand the genuine feeling beneath his often rough, idiomatic English. Reviewers in the respectable journals, the Spectator and the Academy, and a number of well-known literary figures of the period, George Eliot, George Meredith, Philip Bourke Marston, and Bertram Dobell gave favorable notices, some private and some public, of The City of Dreadful Night upon its first appearance in 1874; and later William Michael Rossetti respected Thomson's qualities as a critic and as a poet. The time was ripe for a new poet to take his place among the great of his time. Swinburne had published Atalanta in 1865; William Morris's popular The Life and Death of Jason had come out in 1868; and the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was published in 1870. The fame of Tennyson and Browning had been established twenty years before; and the poetry of the aesthetes, of Yeats, of Housman, and of Hopkins was still in the future. Like Byron and Lamartine, Thomson found his principal

8

PREFACE

poetic subject in the mutations of fortune of the spiritual life of a transfigured self; and although The City of Dreadful Night is not a representative Victorian poem, a place for Thomson's pessimism was found despite a new feeling, a changing attitude, which was evolving in his period - one which looked forward to the hollowness of the 1920's - but Thomson had no time to rise to it. Unfortunately for Thomson and for his literary reputation, his greatest poem was not published in a widely read journal, and a volume of his poetry was not forthcoming until six years later. By 1881, the year before his death, he could rally his poetical powers only enough to write a cry of pain, "Insomnia", and a poem calling on his muse, a muse which could not answer except in death. Thomson will never be counted one of the major poets, nor even one of the greater minor poets; but there will always be a select audience. There will be those fascinated by the unremitting pessimism of his life, those who will appreciate the mystic beauty of his best poetry and the ultimate expression of nineteenth century ideas, and those who will be drawn to his life and to his work as they are still drawn to the living mystery of the American Edgar Allan Poe. The writer would like to acknowledge here a multifold indebtedness for the help and consideration extended by many, by his colleagues, and by Dr. Edwin Capers Kirkland in particular. The strengths of this study are to be attributed to them, the weaknesses to the writer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface Introduction I.

7 11

Thomson and the Matter of his Background . . .

19

Thomson and Religious Pessimism

48

III.

Thomson and the Philosophy of Pessimism . . .

86

IV.

Thomson and Emotional Pessimism

113

Existential Perspective in The City of Dreadful Night

139

Conclusion

159

II.

V. VI.

Bibliography

165

INTRODUCTION

The "MELENCOLIA" that transcends all wit. - James Thomson (B.V.), from The City of Dreadful Night, Works, I, 171, section XXI.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur Symons wrote that James Thomson's name "has almost dropped out of sight; the critics of the hour have been too busy discussing the immortals of the moment".1 This fact remains true today to some extent if we discount the continuing though sporadic bursts of interest in his life, the long defeat so graphically described in his works and in his poetry. The best and most recent biographical-critical study was done in 1950 by Imogene B. Walker cited elsewhere in this study. There have also been from time to time attempts to explain Thomson's pessimism in the light of such uncomplicated causes as heredity, as stemming solely from the early loss of his sweetheart, as the result of a congenital disease, and as a product of the evolutionism of his times. In any case, two facts have been firmly established beyond any need of question: that the forming of Thomson's life-philosophy of atheistic pessimism involved the greater part of his adult life, and that his poetry has become synonymous with nineteenth century pessimism, or better, with the word pessimism itself. While it may be conceded that Thomson was the pessimistic poet of his period, he was not the only poet of his time to react sensitively to the challenging of traditional ways of life and thought. Others felt the effects of the destruction of faith in 1

Arthur Symons, Studies in Two Literatures (London, 1924), VIII, 34.

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INTRODUCTION

God and immortality around them, if they did not actually succumb to them, and became aware of the minute value of human life in a meaningless universe of newly conceived vastness, even if they refused to credit it. Tennyson reformed himself so that he might reform his contemporaries. He "is the great master of metric as well as of melancholia; . . . the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist".2 Arnold invoked the wisdom, intelligence, and imagination of the past in adjustment to the present, but he was so intent on the present that he saw little of the future. He felt that Nature was powerful but that man was losing or had lost faith, and he said it in "Dover Beach". Clough lost the comfort of being directed by a divine authority and for the most part of his life was a skeptic in the ancient sense of the word. Carlyle was a pessimist in search of optimism, but he could not find it, for he looked for the God of his own soul in the social developments of the nineteenth century or in the historical developments which preceded it. Nor was Browning immune, he whose Abt Vogler raised himself to a point whence he could catch a glimpse of the beatific end of earth's worst failures: There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fullness of the days?3 Even Browning had his doubts which he expressed in the "Epilogue to Ferishtah's Fancies" and in the gloomy "La Saisiaz" with its emphatic ending: I must say—or choke in silence—"Howsoever came my fate, Sorrow did and joy did nowise,—life well weighed,—preponderate".4 These poets are but a few, and more might be listed: Fitzgerald, 2

T. S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern (New York, 1936), p. 189. Robert Browning, The Works of Robert Browning, ed. G. F . Kenyon, IV (London, 1912), 258-259. 4 Ibid., IX, 136. 3

INTRODUCTION

13

Hardy, Housman; for while the moral absolutes received from the past were more slowly destroyed, the philosophical and religious values cracked more quickly under the strain of the new science and the Higher Criticism. But none of these poets, especially not Browning, is a complete pessimist. What, then, constitutes a true pessimist, what is it that sets Thomson apart, aside from the fact that he is a poet of lesser stature, from these men? The contention of this study is that the development of the bitter pessimism in James Thomson's writings is a symptom of the pessimism and mental confusion of his period; that it reflects (microcosmically), and contributes to, the essence of nineteenth century pessimism resulting from (1) the breakdown of religion, (2) the dissolution of philosophical idealism, and (3) the destruction of emotional judgements caused by the apparently incurable evil following the industrial revolution. Man had reached the point of being able to reason out, to assess for himself, the value of life; and he had as a guide the new and startling scientific discoveries which reached a climax in the publication of the Origin of Species and the resulting controversy. Accordingly, man felt himself to be the top link in the chain of being and could look to himself and to his world for the good therein. But upon looking he found a greater preponderance of evil than of good as one of the results of the evil aftermath of the industrial revolution. He was forced to turn to established religion, to the Bible, for explanation and relief from the dilemma he felt he had created for himself. But here, too, he found an impasse; not only did he place himself on the top link of the chain, but he chopped off all the links below and could not return to earth. Established religion was under fire; the infallibility of the Bible was being attacked, its veracity questioned not by hot-headed fanatics but by men of great learning, by men of the cloth. Another disillusionment, too, was based upon the seeming collapse of the ideals of the French Revolution Ruskin felt that man had gone beyond nature and was thus destroying himself. What was one to do; where were the standards? Was life worth living?

14

INTRODUCTION

Life was not worth living. Activity to be worthwhile must be directed toward a goal which is either attainable or, if unattainable, have meaning. If both of these conditions fail, the result is bitter pessimism. One solution is to regain confidence in formerly accepted ideals and, with Tennyson, have faith and belief without proof. The other solution is to form new ideals to replace the old and direct your path toward them; look to the classical past for a new ideal, with Arnold, or return to nature with Ruskin. For Thomson both of these paths were blocked. His belief in the Lord Christ was replaced by admiration for Jesus the man; his faith in God and immortality was destroyed only after a long struggle. His desire for love was buried with Matilda Weiler; his natural desire for the companionship of his own kind was frustrated by the recurrent attacks of dipsomania which estranged him from his friends one by one. He was an outcast from religion, emotion, society, and the philosophy to which he finally attained did not relieve the futility of his search for the way back. I have tried to see Thomson's dilemma from a Victorian viewpoint, but of course I have been able only to look at it from that angle. To "see" it from the Victorian standpoint would have entailed becoming involved sufficiently to reach the same conclusion reached by Tennyson, or by Arnold, or even by Thomson himself, perhaps. I have used in this study what might be called a "dipolar" arrangement within each major division. Chapter II begins with a short history of the Broad Church Movement and of the Higher Criticism, but at the same time it takes into consideration that these attacks against belief, especially Christian belief, were not begun with the idea of destroying faith in Christianity. The fact that they brought forth from a large segment of the populace, including prominent lay and clerical figures, rigorous denials of the tenets of pessimism and equally rigorous affirmations of the faith in God indicates that there was a powerful need and desire for belief which was in opposition to the loss of divine authority. There must be a recognizable attack before a defense can be brought forth; it is evident that Pusey and others felt the ground of their faith shake or they would have noticed a need for

INTRODUCTION

15

shoring it up. In Chapter III, in which the value of life is discussed, we can see the growing belief that life is simply a manifestation of Will, robbing it of much of its value; and the Will to exist is therefore in conflict with the desire for oblivion. In Chapter IV we find many examples of the constant opposition between reality and unreality - the grudging acceptance of the former and the desire for the latter expressed in the picturing of dream-worlds and of a world of dreams. Also here is a kinship between the loss of belief in the self-perfectibility of man and the loss of belief in the value of life. Finally, in Chapter V the conflict is between existence and non-being, or as the early twentieth century Christian existentialist, Edmund Husserl, puts it: "The breaking up of present-day philosophy with all its fumbling and undirected activity forces us to think. Compared to earlier times, the decay since the middle of the last century [i.e., the nineteenth century] has been quite unmistakable. In setting up goals in the areas of problems and methods, unity has been lost".5 Certain limitations in this study should be noted here. I have not delved deeply into the causes of the Higher Criticism, nor have I considered the outcome of the attacks on Biblical infallibility or the effects, far reaching as they were, which they had not only on the Victorian period but on present day religious thought. Neither have I made any attempt to discover the intricacies of Victorian church politics. I have only alluded to the startling, or perhaps shattering, discoveries made by the scientists of the day from Lyell's publications on geology to Darwinism as preached by Huxley. Little has been said about the rapid spread of industrialization, the growth of democracy, the faith in "progress", and a myriad other characteristics of the age. It is sufficient to say that they existed and that they have been studied; the results of such studies are easily available, and discussions based on them are not pertinent to this subject. For the same reason I made no attempt to define Romanticism, for I felt that such definition is the province of Irving Babbitt, 5

Jakob Amstutz, "Origins and Types of Existentialism", The Journal of Religion, XLI (October 1961), 248.

16

INTRODUCTION

Arthur O. Lovejoy, and C. S. Lewis.® I have used melancholy and pessimism interchangeably except when melancholy was prefixed by romantic, the latter being that feeling of pleasant sadness or perhaps thoughtfulness so aptly defined by Milton and by the eighteenth century Graveyard School. Not a trained philosopher, I have treated of philosophical matters here, but I have done so always with the knowledge that I was covering areas in which I have not been trained and so paid them a healthy respect. It is well to bear in mind, too, that there is a man, an individual, behind every philosophy and that any philosophy ceases to be intelligible when this personal element is overlooked. Nor trained in formal religion, I have discussed matters of religion, but religion is a personal, individual matter, too. Until late in life Thomson was unable to free himself "from the delusion that he was a sinner who had sinned the unpardonable sin. 'The Christian conscience', says a discerning critic, 'survived in him to torment the skeptic'. He had in him the blood, tinctured with fanaticism and intolerance, of long generations of Scotsmen, who had bequeathed to him something of their religious fervour, together with their not less fervent love of the national drink. His vigorous intellect enabled him to free himself from the bondage of Calvinistic theology, but its poison could not be altogether eliminated from his system".7 Thomson saw both the good and the evil in the world, and their incompatibility oppressed him like a nightmare. He struggled and found himself continually baffled because he was altogether unable to perceive how sin may be overcome of suffering. His tragedy lay in the havoc which this, the seeming inexplicableness of human life, worked with his sensitive moral susceptibility. As a convenience to the reader, the following brief chronology has been appended to this introduction: 1834

James Thomson was born on November 23.

β See C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words (Cambridge University Press, 1960). Studies by the others are noted elsewhere. 7 Bertram Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism (London, 1910), pp. 59-60.

INTRODUCTION

1840 1842 1851

1852 1853 1858 1862

1863 1866 1870 1872 1873 1874 1875 1880 1881 1882

17

His father returned from duty at sea stricken with paralysis. His mother died. He taught in the regimental school at Ballincollig, Ireland, and was befriended by the garrison-master, Barnes, and his family. He became acquainted with Charles Bradlaugh and fell in love with Matilda Weiler. His father died after a long illness; Thomson learned of Matilda's death. "The Fadeless Bower" was accepted by Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. Released from the service for a minor infraction, October 30, he lived with the Bradlaugh family and contributed to the National Reformer. He contributed "To Our Ladies of Death" and a year later "Vane's Story" to the National Reformer. He moved out of the Bradlaugh's home under amicable conditions. He began to rough out The City of Dreadful Night. He was sent to Colorado for a mining concern but was recalled the following year when the company failed. He was sent to Spain for the New York World in July but was recalled due to illness. The City of Dreadful Night first appeared in the National Reformer. Thomson quarreled and finally broke with Charles Bradlaugh. His first volume of verse was published, followed by a second and a volume of prose. In March he wrote "Insomnia" during a brief return of his poetic powers and foretold his doom. On June 1 he called on the blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, but had to be taken to the hospital directly from Marston's home. He told his friends he would leave the hospital on Monday, dead or alive.

18

INTRODUCTION

He died in the hospital on June 3 and was removed on the following Monday. He was buried June 8 at Highgate Cemetery.

I. THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

Infections of unutterable sadness, Infections of incalculable madness, Infections of incurable despair. James Thompson (B.V.) from The City of Dreadful Night, Works, I, 158, Section XV.

Because of the vastness and complexity of the scholarship available to the student of nineteenth-century literature and the great amount of work done even in a highly specialized area, it seemed necessary to make some accounting of the material contributing to the completion of this study. No attempt has been made to reproduce an exhaustive critical bibliography of pessimism, or even of the works about and by James Thomson. There has been, on the other hand, a drastic and often arbitrary selectivity involved in the hope that what remains is essential and relevant to a consideration of the milieu of Thomson's pessimism. Such selectivity has been made necessary not only by the wide range of scholarship concerned with the poet but also, and especially, by the immense literature devoted to the Victorian background and to pessimism and its many variants - romantic melancholy, religious and philosophic pessimism, and the like. Faverty's guide to Victorian research has been of inestimable value to me in the preparation of this chapter and need be examined only briefly to give some idea of the multiplicity of material available, and its content covers just the last twenty or thirty years.1 1

Frederic E. Faverty, ed., The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research

20

THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

Thomson has been thoroughly covered biographically and critically,2 but nowhere do I find a consideration of Thomson within his milieu - that is, a study of how he fits into the strain of nineteenth-century despair and what force, if any, he has had in the spread of pessimism to later generations of poets. In the poetry of the nineteenth century there is represented nearly every shade of faith and doubt and indifference, and the phase of blank disbelief and despair, as well, has found consummate expression in the poetry of James Thomson. Generally he has been more or less isolated from his period as the poet of pessimism, as though there were only one poet of pessimism, and as though he were an anachronism in his age. The consideration of Thomson in the necessarily broad light of the breakdown of orthodox religion, of the dissolution of idealism, and of the destructive forces of the developing machine age has rendered a careful selection of materials extremely important. The first category to be considered must of necessity be the editions of Thomson's works and the major biographies of the poet. It is interesting to note that Thomson is the only important Victorian poet whose complete works have not been reprinted since the edition of 1895, which was exhausted in 1936.3 Because the events of the poet's life are inextricably bound together with his writings, it seemed fitting to combine critical and biographical works. The next major division in logical sequence consists of general works on the subject of pessimism subdivided into those treatises bearing specifically on pessimism itself and those contemporary studies dealing with the subject in England and written within the Victorian period. (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), referred to hereafter as Faverty's Guide to Research. 5 Henry S. Salt, The Life of James Thomson ("B.V.") (London, 1889), Bertram Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism (London, 1910), and Imogene B. Walker, James Thomson (B.V.): A Critical Study (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), whose work is also a critical estimate and should be listed with that of Jeannette A. Marks, Genius and Disaster; Studies in Drugs and Genius (New York, 1925). 3 J. M. Cohen called attention to this fact in his review of Imogene B. Walker's study of Thomson in The Spectator (January 12, 1951), p. 58.

THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

21

These divisions are followed by a section concerned mainly with romantic melancholy in the eighteenth century, its appearance in certain nineteenth-century poets, and melancholy in the Victorian period. The final sections return to more general treatments, but this time the emphasis is on the Victorian background and certain figures in the period important to a consideration of Thomson and of pessimism. The purpose of this chapter is not, however, to provide a merely mechanical listing of pertinent works such as any competent bibliography could provide. On the contrary, much that is important can be learned of the subject under consideration from such a grouping. It seems significant to me that although Thomson's poetry is seldom read, other than The City of Dreadful Night, judging by the dearth of modern editions, a great deal has been written about various aspects of the poet and his poetry. The very choice of materials concerning the pessimism of Schopenhauer and his supporters and detractors in England indicates the attempt to avoid twentieth-century commentary on nineteenth-century ideas in the major portion of this study. That it was necessary to pick and choose among the great amount of material concerning English pessimism in the nineteenth century implies also, I believe, that it was a subject of great moment during that period. It is significant, too, that a limiting date was found necessary to restrict the material on melancholy to specific historical periods, and that such a large number of recognized authorities should have devoted considerable portions of their more general works, which in many cases have become standards, to the subject at hand. James Thomson's first biographer was his friend and publisher Bertram Dobell, who, because he was a poet himself and an excellent critic, recognized the qualities of Thomson's poetry. Dobell turned in 1880 to William Reeves for financial assistance in the publication of a volume of Thomson's poetry, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. The London firm of Reeves and Turner brought out the rest of Thomson's poems thought suitable for publication in a second volume in 1881 and

22

THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

a third in 1884.4 Dobell expanded the memoir of Thomson published in the 1884 volume and placed it in the two volume edition, The Poetical Works of James Thomson (B.V.), which, also published by Reeves and Turner, was printed in 1895 and became the last complete edition of Thomson's works. It is this edition which was used exclusively in this study and will be referred to simply as Works in any later references to materials drawn from it. Between the 1884 and 1895 editions Henry S. Salt prepared a biography of Thomson which employed information from letters and journals written by the poet. In the Preface to the first edition of this work, Salt states with regret that he had not personally known the poet of whom he wrote.5 Before a revised edition by Salt was prepared, Dobell published a slim volume, The Laureate of Pessimism, in 1910 with some deletions from and additions to the earlier memoirs. Two other early works concerned with the biography of Thomson should be noted briefly: a German doctoral dissertation published in 1906 by Josephine Weissel, and James E. Meeker's The Life and Poetry of James Thomson (New Haven, 1917). Both of these works are included in Lionel Stevenson's article "The Later Victorian Poets".6 He speaks of Josephine Weissel's works as a "conventional German doctoral dissertation"7 and calls Meeker's book "undistinguished and sometimes undependable".8 In the latter work, especially, the student feels the lack of source citations and other critical apparatus so necessary to further research in any subject. More recent biographical works mentioned by Stevenson are 4 Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, and Other Poems (London, 1881) and A Voice from the Nile and Other Poems, ed. by Bertram Dobell (London, 1884). 5 The first edition of The Life of James Thomson ("B.V.") by Henry S. Salt was published in 1889 by Reeves and Turner and Bertram Dobell. A later, revised edition was published by Watts and Company of London in 1914. It is this second edition which will be referred to throughout this study as Salt, Life. • Stevenson's article comprises Chapter 9 of Faverty's Guide to Research, pp. 236-266. Two pages of the chapter are devoted entirely to Thomson and contain a selected list of the most important works about the poet. 7 Stevenson, p. 236. 8 Stevenson, p. 237.

THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

23

the chapter on Thomson in Jeannette Marks's Genius and Disaster (see note 2) and Imogene B. Walker's critical study.· Jeannette Marks's work is concerned mainly with the causes of drug and alchohol addiction and their effects on the work of writers, and her chapter on Thomson is a good treatment of his work and his dipsomania, far superior to her earlier treatment of Thomson in the North American Review,™ which contains little on the poet and much on his malady. Of Mrs. Walker's work, Stevenson says that she "has produced an adequate and intelligent book".11 I have found occasion to rely heavily on this work which makes use of material not published in any other form. Also mentioned are "James Thomson and his City of Dreadful Night", by N. Hardy Wallis in Essays by Diverse Hands (London, 1935), and introductions to volumes of Thomson's poetry by Gordon Hall Gerould and Edmund Blunden.12 Other works cited by Stevenson include papers and articles which concern such specialized studies as Thomson's sources.13 William D. Schaefer, in his article "The Two Cities of Dreadful Night", PMLA, LXXVII (December, 1962), 609-616, takes the position that Thomson's masterpiece joins two separate poems. He supports his stand convincingly by following the 0

Mrs. Walker's book, cited in note 2, will be referred to hereafter as Walker, James Thomson (B.V.). 10 Jeannette Marks, "Disaster and Poetry: A Study of James Thomson", North American Review, CCXII (July 1920), 93-109. II Stevenson, p. 237. 12 Gordon Hall Gerould, "Introduction" to Poems of James Thomson "ß.K." (New York, 1927), and Edmund Blunden, "Introduction" to The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (New York, 1932). Both of these volumes contain selections of Thomson's poetry. 15 Some of the more important in this list are: Henri Peyre, "Les Sources du Pessimisme de Thomson", Revue Anglo-Americaine (Paris, Dec. 1924 and Feb. 1925), pp. 152-156, 217-231; Benjamin M. Woodbridge, Poets and Pessimism: Vigny, Housman et alliC', Romanic Review, XXXV (1944), 43-51; Lyman A. Cotten, "Leopardi and The City of Dreadful Night", SP, X L n (1945), 675-689; Harold Hoffman, "An Angel in the City of Dreadful Night", Sewanee Review, XXXII (July 1924), 317-335; and George M. Harper, "Blake's Nebuchadnezzar in The City of Dreadful Night", SP, L (1953), 68-80.

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THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

chronology found in an early manuscript from the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. On the manuscript Thomson meticulously recorded the date on which each stanza had been written - an action typical of the poet. The dates indicate that about half the sections were written between January and October, 1870, and the other half between May and October, 1873. If the dating in the manuscript is correct as Professor Schaefer's solid evidence indicates, then the 1870 City is very different from the 1873 City. By reading the sections strictly according to the dates assigned, the 1870 City of unreality and personal emotion becomes a "sort of pessimist's manifesto" in the later version. This article goes far toward shedding light on R. A. Foakes's treatment of duality in The City of Dreadful Night, which noted that Thomson's two perceptions of the City - the treatment of unreality-reality duality - were artfully interwoven to make an artistic whole. Foakes's work is treated in greater detail in Chapter III of this study. Professor Schaefer says that both cities deserve to be called dreadful, but the nature of the dread is considerably different in the two. The earlier City is one of phantasmagoria with the inhabitants trapped, unable to escape their personal grief and the despair within their own minds. None of the supernatural can be found in the 1873 City, however, for here Thomson depicts a realistic banding together of men who have come to the conclusion - intellectually - that life is as meaningless as the mill which blindly grinds out whatever comes into it. We need take only one example from Schaefer's discussion: the river in Section 1 (dated July 10-19, 1870) which girds the City of Night, a city perchance of death, has become in Section 19 (June 6, 1873) the River of Suicides. Thus Thomson's later City takes on a reality and becomes a real London where real people can die no longer is it a state of mind, a supernatural world peopled by phantoms. Several other studies, although they cover a broader area in most cases, are important contributions to Thomson's biography and should be mentioned here. Such a study is J. A. Black's article which throws light on Thomson's interest in the German poet

THOMSON AND THE MATTER OF HIS BACKGROUND

25

14

Heine. Another interesting study, Ralph H. Goodale's "Pessimism in English Poetry and Fiction" (University of Chicago Abstracts of Theses, 1927), links Thomson with the nervous disorders and the "loss of religious guidance" of Addington Symonds and Amy Levy. Although essentially a review of an edition of the poems of Thomson, Morton Dauwen Zabel's discussion of the poet's pessimism is founded on a careful study not only of the poet but also of his poetry and his beliefs.15 Two further works which will be mentioned in another category must be included here as well: Gaylord C. LeRoy in Perplexed Prophets attributed Thomson's pessimism to a "psychic abnormality"; and Roden Noel, a poet in his own right, sees Thomson's lost love, Matilda Weiler, as important to the pessimist as the unattainable Beatrice was to Dante. Noel's theory is contained in his chapter on Thomson in Poets and Poetry of the Century, edited by A. H. Miles. Initiated by Rousseau and following hard on the close of the French Revolution, there came a disillusionment that gave impetus to a great upsurge of poetic melancholy. Byron in England, Leopardi in Italy, De Musset, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Leconte de Lisle in France, Heine in Germany, Lenau in Hungary, Pushkin in Russia, bore witness to widespread unrest. The hoped-for heaven upon earth could be found nowhere, and these writers gave utterance to the universal disappointment. Differences among them there certainly were, from the selfobtrusion of Byron to the impersonality of Leconte de Lisle, but one and all protest against the impassable barriers to intellectual satisfaction raised by human imperfection. The studied impassiveness, which so many in the late nineteenth century deemed essential to art - especially literary art - was only another phase of Byron's implore eterna quiete. "Pray, if I am shovelled into the Lido churchyard in your time, let me have the implora 14

J. A. Black, "James Thomson: His Translations of Heine", MLR, XXXI (1936), 48-54. 15 Morton Dauwen Zabel, "James Thomson's Poems", Poetry, XXXII (July 1928), 229-233. The article is a review of the edition of Thomson's poems edited by Gordon H. Gerould (see note 12).

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pace, and nothing else, for my epitaph" 16 Byron was weary; so were many others everywhere. Not only highstrung individuals but people in all walks were racked by unavoidable evils. As a result pessimism became as reasonable for society at large as for a few of its more gifted members. But it needed a system, a reasoned account, a "scientific" answer, if you will, to the question: "But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which no philosopher has hitherto satisfied me? For whose pleasure and service is this wretched life of the world maintained, by the suffering and death of all the beings which compose it?" 17 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), because he was a philosopher, was affected by the speculations of previous thinkers as were none of his poetic contemporaries. His thought was largely determined by Kant, but to enumerate the elements of his system, add Indian Buddhism, Plato medieval mysticism, and Schelling. Its peculiar doctrines were drawn from these sources; the diffused discontent expressed by the poets called it forth; its aim was the diagnosis of misery and the prescription of a cure; reasoned pessimism was its result. Schopenhauer's principal work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) was not immediately accepted at its publication in 16 Letter # 3 7 8 , to Richard Belgrave Hoppner, Bologne, June 6, 1819, in Roland E. Prothero's The Works of Lord Byron (London, 1900), IV, 310. Leslie A. Marchand in his Byron: A Biography, II (New York, 1957), 790, speaks of this incident in some detail: But what pleased [Byron] more than anything else in Ferrara was the Certosa cemetery, where he saw two epitaphs that threw him back into the old Childe Harold mood: "Martini Luigi Implora pace; and Lucrezia Picini Implora eterna quiete". "That was all", he wrote Hoppner; "but it appears to me that these two and three words comprise and compress all that can be said on the subject, - and then, in Italian, they are absolute music". 17 Giacomo Leopardi, Essays and Dialogues, trans. Charles Edwardes (London, 1882), p. 79.

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1818; "the author remained practically unknown until 1853, when an article by John Oxenford in the Westminster Review introduced him . . .".18 Although his ideas gained ground slowly in England, toward the close of the nineteenth century a great many works were brought forth to defend, explain, or combat "Scientific Pessimism".19 One such article is J. Troschammer's "Optimism and Pessimism".20 One of the first and most carefully prepared of the works on pessimism as a speculative system is James Sully's Pessimism: A history and a Criticism published originally in London in 1877 but used in this study in the more easily accessible second edition of 1891. Mr. Sully feels that the philosophic pessimism which he treats could not have sprung full formed from its own grounds but must have followed logically the course of despair traceable in earlier literature and thought. He had found scant mention of Schopenhauer's German movement prior to his first edition, although David Asher and others were writing of Schopenhauer in the British periodicals as early as 1855.21 Sully did make particular mention of Eime Marie Caro, who published a review of modern pessimism, Le Pessimisme au XIXe Siècle: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, in Paris in 1878. The works of Schopenhauer's partial disciple Eduard von Hartmann were coming to Sully's attention by the early 1880's. While thought in Germany was taking on a deeply pessimistic tone, the trend in England at the same time was in a slightly different direction, a direction Sully calls a "common-sense course, untroubled by speculative flights of the Germans".22 18 Ralph H. Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism in Nineteenth Century English Literature", PMLA, X L V n i (March 1932), 242. w James William Barlow, The Ultimatum of Pessimism: An Ethical Study (London, 1882), p. 2, draws a distinction between the scientific or philosophic theory of pessimism and what he calls Constitutional or Temperamental Pessimism (Stimmungspessimismus). 20 J. Troschammer, "Optimism and Pessimism", CR, XVIII (August 1871), 67-86, and XIX (May 1872), 775-788. 21 David Asher's Offenes Sendschreiben an den hochgelehrten Herrn Dr. Arthur Schopenhauer (Leipzig, 1855) would have been read only by those having a command of the German language. Thomson of course did. 22 James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism, 2d ed. (London, 1891), p. xi.

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Within this milieu is William Hurrell Mallock's Is Life Worth Living?; an attack on what it calls Positivism is carried in the statement that the present age can find no true parallels in the past because of the existence of Christianity, the "insignificance to which science has reduced the earth", and "the intense self-consciousness that has developed in the modern world". Other works concerned with this "common-sense course" dealt with a belief in the progress of mankind, the pleasures of life, and the compatible alliance between science and religious devotion for the betterment of humanity.23 Even without investigating other areas of thought there is here enough evidence to indicate that a feeling of despair had already pervaded English letters with saturation sufficient to cause a reaction, "a conscious and deliberate opposition to the pessimistic doctrine".24 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century and through the year Dobell published The Laureate of Pessimism (1910), a number of studies primarily concerned with pessimism were published in England. Moritz M. Kaiisch in Path and Goal, while seeking a positive solution to the problem of human happiness, investigates literature in the light of Buddhism, Stoicism, and German Pessimism.85 An ethical study of pessimism by James Barlow in 1882 (see note 19) examines the basis for the repudiation of the advice of Frederick von Hardenberg (Novalis) to commit suicide and thus be rid of an insupportable world. Barlow seeks to reduce the issue between pessimists and optimists to the form of a sum, and because every summation is a summation of units, he frames an eudemonistic (hedonistic) 28 The quotations are from Mallock, p. xii. Some of the "other works" are mentioned in Sully's preface to his 1891 edition (pp. xii ff.) and include June Hume Clapperton's Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness (London, 1885), which contains her belief in beneficent progress; John Lubbock Avebury's The Pleasures of Life, 2 vols. (London, 18871889), containing his sophistry on the troubles of the mind; and another attack against the pessimistic doctrine, F. T. Mott's "Corona: The Bright Side of the Universe" in his Studies in Optimism (London, 1888). 24 Sully, p. xiii. 25 Moritz M. Kalisch, Path and Goal: A Discussion on the Elements of Civilisations and Conditions of Happiness (London, 1880).

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unit as the basis - a unit involving two elements, subjective time and intensity of feeling. A more technically metaphysical criticism of philosophical pessimism can be found in Thomas B. Kilpatrick's "Pessimism and the Religious Consciousness" in a volume called Essays in Philosophical Criticism edited by Andrew Seth and Richard B. Haldane (London, 1883). Even more critical than T. B. Kilpatrick is John Tulloch in his Modern Theories of Philosophy and Religion (Edinburgh, 1884). In his chapter "Pessimism: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann" Principal Tulloch opens his argument against pessimism with, "And now finally there comes an old and worn-out cry of Pessimism, transferred from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Spree, and caught up, as such cries always are in England, after they have begun their course, and even wellnigh run it, in Germany" (p. 173). Although not well known in England, Professor Francis Bowen of Harvard treated pessimism from a philosophic and religious point of view in his Modern Philosophy, from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann (New York, 1877). In 1885 several works were published which discuss the problems of religion and pessimism from differing viewpoints. Charles H. H. Wright in The Book of Koheleth, Commonly Called Ecclesiastes (London, 1885), however, did not enter the critical arena; he is content to trace the points of agreement and dissimilarity between the modern German and the ancient Hebrew pessimism. David Asher, while not an opponent of Schopenhauer, nonetheless examines the pessimistic doctrine in the light of Hebrew theology with its confident assertion of the goodness of life.2· The Reverend J. Radford Thomson in Present Day Tracts argues against the "unreasonableness of Pessimism as a Philosophy", exposes the unfairness and errors of this way of life with the estimate that Christianity alone can solve the problem, and contrasts the "fruits of this system [of pessiM David Asher, The Final Outcome of Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Leipzig, 1885). See note 21 above for an earlier work on the pessimistic philosopher by Asher.

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mism] and those of the Religion of Christ".27 More than these scattered works, however, an excellent and carefully prepared article by Professor William Wallace in a contemporary edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica calls attention to the growth of interest in, and the concern for, the problem of religion and pessimism.28 Whereas John Hopps devotes only one short chapter of his book 29 to the discussion of pessimism itself and the balance to the solution of the problem by spiritual means, Mark Wenley's study begins with a definition and covers a number of views of pessimism from Biblical times to his present day. According to Wenley, pessimism "signifies that philosophical scheme which explains the universe 'proving' its badness; or, more strictly still, the systematized view of human nature which ends in the elimination of moral value - goods there may be, good on the whole there emphatically is not".30 Of course, this must be a very incomplete listing of the myriad works on the subject published in England between about 1877 and 1910. It seems to me, then, that the number of learned men who attacked the problems raised by the advocates of pessimism lends a certain credence to the supposition that among men of careful thought pessimism was a force to be reckoned with. It gained this force in the nineteenth century the works chosen for mention here were all published in the latter part of that century - but a number of these works follow a thread of melancholy from the early Hebrew works Job and Ecclesiastes to those of the end of the nineteenth century. This burgeoning interest in pessimism can be attributed, I think, to its systematization as a philosophy of life by Schopenhauer in the early periods of the century. Because of the problem of organization, some limitation must 27

J[ames] Radford Thomson, "Modern Pessimism", Present Day Tracts on Subjects of Christian Evidence, Doctrine, and Morals by Various Writers, VI, no. 34 (London, 1885), 1. 28 9th edition (New York, 1890), XVIII, 684-690. 29 John Page Hopps, Dieu, le Pessimisme, et la Science, trans. Mme. J. Hamelin (Paris, 1902). so Robert Mark Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism (London, 1894), p. 1.

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be assigned to the extent of the historical period of the pessimism within which Thomson is to be studied. Like so many general terms, which imply mainly an abstraction and ideal unification of qualities, however, pessimism is not interpreted precisely in the same way by everyone. With varying attitudes some of the commentators on philosophical pessimism that I have cited have found its beginnings in literature written about the time of the Babylonian Captivity,31 followed its thread in classical stoicism at the time of Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome, 160180 A. D.), in medieval mysticism, in Hamlet,32 in Goethe and the English "Romantic Period" of the early nineteenth century, and finally in the main philosophers of the movement, Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. "In his Mal romantique (Paris, 1908) E. Seillière labels the generations that have elapsed since the rise of Rousseauism as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Sensibility (Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761). Weltschmerz (Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, 1795). Mal du siècle (Hugo's Hernani, 1830). Pessimism (vogue of Schopenhauer and Stendhal, 1865). Neurasthenia (culmination of fin de siècle movement, 1900)". 3 '

Although these labels apply primarily to literary movements on the continent, a fairly well-drawn parallel can be constructed for the literature of England. It need be sketched here, however, only in outline. An abundance of examples of Weltschmerz can be found in the literature of the early nineteenth century, as in the poetry of Byron, for instance; echoes of the mal du siècle can be found in the later work of Clough and Carlyle; and, finally, Thomson has been called the "Laureate of Pessimism". " Samuel Rolles Driver in An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (New York, 1956), pp. 341 and 476, says that despite the depicting of Job as a patriarch, Job is a much later work than the time of Moses and was written not earlier than the age of Jeremiah and either during or shortly after the Babylonian Captivity or about 586 B.C. He gives 200 B.C. as the most probable date for Ecclesiastes. 3! Wenley says that Hamlet, as opposed to the other great tragedies, "presents a tragedy founded on a much more deep-seated and irremediable antagonism"; p. 99. " Irving Babbitt, notes to "Romantic Melancholy", in his Rousseau and Romanticism (New York, 1957), p. 317, n. 1.

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The line should be drawn, then, roughly through the late 1780's and the early 1790's. With such a limitation in mind, the next major grouping of material will be restricted necessarily to works dealing with a particular phase of the revolt against neo-classicism which began in the late eighteenth century. The listing which follows will consist of the major works pertinent to this study dealing with melancholy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These works will be followed in turn by those concerning the pessimism during the period coincident with Thomson's life span and the general malaise which introduced the decadence of the fin de Siècle movement, Seillière's generation of "neurasthenia". Considering chronology rather than importance, the first work to be listed is James Sutherland's discussion of the poetry of the eigtheenth century.»4 Sutherland devotes his last chapter, "Truants and Rebels", to a discussion of the poets who went outside the accepted poetic idiom for subject and method. Among these he included poets, such as Ossian, who wrote in a vein of melancholy more weighty than the "spleen and vapours" 35 of fashionable society. No doubt many people in the eighteenth century, poets among them, believed it fashionable to affect an air of melancholy in public, but there must have been those who were sincerely affected by the mood, or the idea would have died quickly as a fad. Following Sutherland in strict chronological order is Eleanor M. Sickels' The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats (New York, 1932). The excellence of Professor Sickels' book is an established fact; its importance 84

James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (Oxford, 1948). See especially pp. 146-167. » See Oswald Doughty, ' T h e English Malady of the Eighteenth Century", RES, Π (1926), 257-269, whose paper discusses the spleen as the "English malady". Doughty defines the spleen according to Sir William Temple, who said that it "makes us unequal in our humours, inconstant in our passions, uncertain in our ends, and even in our desires" (p. 258). Doughty goes on to explain that while such writers as Addison and Steele ridiculed the disease as an affectation of society, the boredom from which it stemmed was apt to lead to serious despair.

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to the chapter on Thomson and emotional pessimism is important. Her study includes in a lucid and readable style and in a knowledgeable and complete treatment such vital aspects of eighteenth century melancholy as a discussion of the Gothic elements (Chapter I); an explanation of the "confusions between White and Black Melancholy" (Chapter II); a treatment of the effects of melancholy in various aspects on early nineteenth century poetry (Chapter VI); and, finally, a complete treatment of the effects of war and industrialism and Weltschmerz on Romantic poetry. Another important work is Irving Babbitt's study of Rouseau's movement (see n. 33), especially his chapter "Romantic Melancholy" in which he says on page 237 that, "no movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom". Babbitt (p. 261, n. 58) calls attention to Paul Bourget who has in his Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine (Paris, 1926) traced the effects of the early romantic melancholy through their reinforcement by scientific determinism - the critical philosophy of John Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), a Kantian, who with Schopenhauer attacked Hegelianism. Bourget's study is an important link between the romantic melancholy of the early nineteenth century and the philosophic pessimism of the later part of the century. Other works, although not so important to this study, must be noted because of their general treatment of the period or because of their special treatment of a particular phase of it. One such general work is that by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes, which in six volumes deals with the Romantic Schools in Germany and France and with Naturalism in England.88 Two further works of a general nature are Margaret Sherwood's Undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1934) and F. L. Lucas's The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (New York, 1937). Miss Sherwood traces certain 36 Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, 6 vols., trans, from the Danish by Diana White (London, 19011905).

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trends of evolutionary thought, the genesis of which she finds in the eighteenth century, through the Romantic period in a group of essays dealing with the poets' imaginative interpretations of life. The essays extend in subject from Pope through Wordsworth to Santayana and, while intended to be suggestive only, contain intellectual and spiritual aspects pertinent to the confusion of the intellect which will be discussed in this work. Certain abnormal extremes of the romantic temperament are covered under the general term "reality principle" in the first two chapters and the Epilogue of F. L. Lucas's fairly general treatment of romanticism. That these "abnormal extremes" underlie much that is romantic and lead to that branch of pessimism akin to the emphasis on suffering is ably brought out by Mario Praz in his detailed survey of behavior from the "Medusean" beauty in Goethe, Shelley, and Keats to Swinburne and "Le Vice Anglais".37 He studies the period from about 1780 to 1850 by asking such questions as why the "beauty of the horrid", which once was the subject of seventeenth century conceits, should become the source of sensations. His croix de la matière is the "mysterious bond between pleasure and suffering", which has always existed, and its emergence as a common inheritance of Romantic and Decadent sensibility through a particular chain of literary influences. While there is much suffering among pessimists, and some pleasure as an outgrowth, Praz's work does not fall wholly within the confines of this study. It cannot be overlooked, however, in even such a brief consideration of works on the Romantic period as this one is. One other work should be included in the "general" category, Eino Railo's guide to English horror-romanticism,88 despite the fact that it is a general survey of a specific aspect of the period. The study begins with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and conducts a searching analysis of every subject within its 37 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed., trans. Angus Davidson (London, 1951). The quotations following are from pp. vii-viii. " Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle; a Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London, 1927).

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scope. Of prime interest is Section VI with its discussion of the Byronic hero and Section X, which contains a treatment of melancholy and of the love of sadness. The concept of the Byronic hero-type - the somber figure combining tragedy, crime, and remorse - derives in long descent from Milton's Satan and immediately from the heroes of Gothic romance, and "Byronism" was more than likely already prevalent when Byron availed himself of it.89 Many hold that gloom and pessimism are none the less sincere for being theatrically portrayed, and mention of Byron and the Byronic hero leads us to the other English Romantic poet greatly admired by Thomson, Percy Shelley - the Bysshe of his middle name gave Thomson one of the initials he used as a pseudonym. There are many treatments of Shelley, of his works, and of his thought in the Romantic period, too many to be listed here. One of the most important, perhaps, is Carl Henry Grabo's The Magic Plant: The Growth of Shelley's Thought (University of North Carolina Press, 1936), which attempts to trace this history of Shelley's ideas and states that Shelley spent an inordinate amount of "time and thought upon questions of practical politics, upon the problems of good and evil, and of free will and determinism" (p. vii). Another important work is The Pursuit of Death by Benjamin P. Kurtz (Oxford University Press, 1933), which studies Shelley's attitude toward death as a symbol of the destruction of the gentle and beautiful and searches for the poet's attitude toward life in what he says about death. A. T. Strong studies Shelley's major works with the view of revealing in them the outgrowth of the poet's social philosophy; especially interesting is his essay "The Sinister in Shelley". Floyd Stovall records the poet's development from revolt through conflict to final compromise.40 39 See Samuel C. Chew, ed., Childe Harold and Other Romantic Poems (New York, 1936), pp. xxv-xxvi. *o A. T. Strong, Three Studies in Shelley (Oxford University Press, 1922), includes besides the essay on the sinister, "The Faith of Shelley" and "Shelley's Symbolism". The other work mentioned is Floyd Stovall's Desire and Restraint in Shelley (Duke University Press, 1931). One other

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Two further works concerning Shelley should be mentioned, works which present the poet against the background of his period. Joseph Barrell's Shelley and the Thought of His Time (London, 1947) is a study in the history of ideas starting on the premise that "the two chief intellectual influences in Shelley's life and writings were the doctrines of Godwin and the French philosophers, and the doctrines of Plato and the Greeks"; and after explaining these doctrines, he shows how they affect Shelley, and concludes that "Shelley was at one with the thought of his time" (p. vii). The other, concerned mainly with the poet's early works, is Ernest Sutherland Bates's Mad Shelley: a Study in the Origins of English Romanticism (Chicago, 1929). To introduce the pertinent scholarship on the remainder of the Romantic poets chosen in this study is an Italian poet who had a profound effect on the mature Thomson. Giacomo Leopardi was able by being a poet of austere soul to invest the terrors of the charnal-house and the extreme suffering of human misery with an aura of beauty; few of the following English poets possess, even momentarily, the austerity of a Leopardi. James Thomson translated from the Italian the Essays, Dialogues and Thoughts of Giacomo Leopardi in 1869-1870, which were later edited by Bertram Dobell and published in London and in New York in 1905. The standard edition of these essays is the translation by Charles Edwardes (see note 17). The best and most recent treatment of the life of Leopardi is contained in the second edition of Iris Origo's Leopardi; a Study in Solitude (London, 1953), which is greatly enlarged from the 1935 edition.41 Only three English poets need be listed here, two who came close to madness and one who was a mystic. The first is Thomas Beddoes, who suffered a profound melancholy and work should be included here, the excellent book by Arthur M. D. Hughes, The Nascent Mind of Shelley (Oxford, 1947). 41 In this book Iris Origo says that "there are two Leopardis: the poet and the man. The man, as he revealed himself in many of his letters and his diaries, was a querulous, tortured i n v a l i d . . . with a . . . heart intolerably sad and lonely". But to this unhappy man was granted the poet's gift of a capacity for intense feeling and a sensitive imagination (p. xiv).

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lethargic eccentricity which made him skeptical of the value of effort. The fullest biographical and critical study is that by Royall H. Snow, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Eccentric and Poet (New York, 1928). The second is John Clare, who was marked as a poet of melancholy and who in later life passed into the shadowed regions of lunacy. The standard biography, J. W. and Annie Tibbie, John Clare, A Lije (London, 1932), furnishes an excellent review of the social set-up against which Clare was in revolt. Southey's Lives and Works of Uneducated Poets, edited by J. S. Childers (New York, 1925), also contains a good study by a contemporary of the poet John Clare. The last poet to be mentioned here is the Blake of William Gaunt's Arrows of Desire; a Study of William Blake and His Romantic World (London, 1956). Although the romantic impulse which flowered with such spectacular force in 1798 remained the dominant literary impulse well into the 1860's, the period extending from the accession of Victoria to the throne to the end of the century is generally labelled the "Victorian Period". It is in the early Victorian age that the optimism of the romantics began to fade, erased gradually by the impact of the industrial revolution and the implications of the new science upon philosophy and religious belief. Two scholars have treated the replacement of Romantic idealism by a materialistic and mechanistic view of the universe. Professor Foakes concludes that "during the nineteenth century the Romantic assertion gradually diminished in scope, until it was negated in The City of Dreadful Night".*2 John Heath-Stubbs follows the romantic line through its changes in the period between the writing of the cantos on Joy and Melancholy called Nepenthe by George Darley in 1835 and the work of W. B. Yeats in the early twentieth century. He finds that in the second half of the century English poets had a tendency to withdraw from the world "into a contemplation of purely decorative beauty".48 On the other hand, a third, Earle T. Welby 41 Reginald Anthony Foakes, The Romantic Assertion; a Study in the Language of Nineteenth Century Poetry (London, 1958), p. 181. 43 John Heath-Stubbs, The Darkling Plain; a Study of the Later Fortunes

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in The Victorian Romantics, 1850-1870 (London, 1929), suggests that the Pre-Raphaelites reacted to a revival of Romantic idealism. Rather than become involved in the ever-present controversy concerning the exact dates for the beginning and ending of the Victorian Period, which is really not pertinent here, it would perhaps be wise to state arbitrarily that in this study the Victorian Period will have as its earlier limit the time of the passage of the first Reform Bill in 1832 and as its later limit the coming into popularity of the so-called decadents, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Aubrey Beardsley. Wilde published Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892, and Beardsley's best years with The Yellow Book were in 1894-1895. Such a limitation, however, is to be applied only to the use of the phrase "Victorian Period" and not to certain far-reaching concepts which began as early as 1799, when the Marquis de Laplace was subjecting the scheme of the heavens to calculations in which he allowed no place for God.44 The flowering of the problems planted in the Romantic Period and nurtured in the Victorian are described in Vivian de Sola Pinto's Crisis in English Poetry, 1880-1940 (New York, 1951), a study of Oscar Wilde and the decadents at the turn of the century and their heritage extending almost to the present. As stated before concerning the materials presented in the listing of works covering the Romantic Period, the following is not meant to be a complete bibliography but an assembling of those works deemed pertinent to this study. The simplest classification seems to be to divide the works roughly into two categories, one list concerned with the treatment of pessimism and its allied ideas in the Victorian Period and the other concerned which specific authors. At the beginning of this chapter can be found a listing of those works on pessimism itself by authors writing generally within the bounds of the Victorian Period. At this point, I would like to discuss works mainly by of Romanticism in English Poetry from George Darley to W. B. Yeats (London, 1950), p. 148. 44 Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, Mécanique Céleste (Paris, 17991825).

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later authors dealing with pessimism and its effect on the nineteenth century thought. Whereas Sully's history of pessimism, written in 1877, has already been mentioned and would not be included in this category, Ralph H. Goodale's article on Schopenhauer will be (see note 18). For a truly excellent selected bibliography with critical comments on the works gathered, let me refer again to Faverty's Guide to Research noted earlier in this chapter. Books describing the Victorian Period in general are numerous, each having its own point of view, and a considerable amount of investigation was required before choosing the following group. A difficult but on the whole enlightening book is George Malcolm Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (New York, 1954), concerned with the politics, culture, industry, education, and the life of the masses and middle class. The difficulty for the reader lies in the fact that the author presupposes an intelligence and grasp of the period at least equal to his own, but it is just this knowledge on his part which enables him to utilize detail in such a manner that the age is summed up in a convenient and knowledgeable treatment. An equally general work done by a critic very close to the period is Hugh Walker's The Literature of the Victorian Era, 2nd ed. (New York, 1921). The first edition was written in 1909 and deals only with writers who had died before that year, and although the second edition is in the main a reprint of the first, the value of the book lies in its comprehensiveness. Much has been written, too, on the thought, the spirit, the beliefs of the Victorians. A study of any one of the facets of Victorianism is almost impossible without at least a working knowledge of a number of the works in this classification. One such book is Walter E. Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (Yale University Press, 1957), which treats specifically of the emotional, intellectual, and moral attitudes of the upper and middle classes of the period. Particularly helpful to this present study are his chapters on optimism and anxiety. Another excellent work is Jerome H. Buckley's The Victorian Temper; a Study in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.,

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1951), which, Professor Buckley says, "attempts to present the background in terms of a literary sensibility shifting in the variable climate of ethical and intellectual opinion from the exuberant thirties to the 'decadent' nineties".45 A less detailed survey of nineteenth century ideas is given by D. C. Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1940). He regards his book as a "companion" to the study of either British history or English literature in the last century. In the late 1940's a series of talks on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Third Programme conducted a twentieth century evaluation of the Victorian Period. Such subjects as "The Mood of Doubt", "Religious Belief and Controversy", "Man and Nature", were discussed by G. M. Trevelyan, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Basil Willey, and other prominent men. The broadcasts have been published under the general editorship of Harman Grisewood as Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians; an Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (London, 1949). A more detailed study of the intellectual and spiritual realities of the time can be found in Alan W. Brown's The Metaphysical Society, Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869-1880 (New York, 1947). The fourth volume of Hoxie Neale Fairchild's Religious Trends in English Literature (New York, 1957) covers the period from about 1830 to about 1880, a period which contains an abundance of poetry of religious pertinence, and is a study of the complex relationship between supernaturalistic religion and romanticism. One chapter is devoted entirely to the poetry of James Thomson. William R. Greg, writing in the same decade as Thomson, names the breakdown of religious belief, along with England's industrial decline and the threat of political supremacy on the part of the lower classes, as one of the three dangers confronting England.4' Rather than discuss these dangers at this point, suffice it to say that several works seek to analyze the Victorian uneasiness, works such as Edmund Gosse's "The Agony of the 45

Jerome H. Buckley, in Faverty's Guide to Research, p. 11. William Rathbone Greg, Rocks Ahead, or the Warnings of Cassandra (Boston, 1875). 4β

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Victorian Age", Edinburgh Review, CCXXVIII (1918), 276-295. H. V. Routh, Towards the Twentieth Century: Essays in the Spiritual History of the Nineteenth (New York, 1937), discusses Carlyle as a pessimist (Chapter 8) and the pre-Darwinian philosophers, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and traces the survival of Victorianism into the modern period. Philo M. Buck, Jr., in his Directions in Contemporary Literature (New York, 1942), claims that the present new, menacing, inhuman world stands before us even as earlier the Victorians prepared for the attitude contained in the last two lines of the following quatrain: How am I to face the odds Of man's bewilderment and God's; I a stranger and afraid, In a world I never made. —A. E. Housman, Last Poems.

The line of demarcation between general works on the period and works mainly concerned with individual authors is not clearly defined. Curtis Dahl's essay The Victorian Wasteland, for example, has as a general thesis that the twentieth century "wasteland" poets follow in the tradition of Hardy with Egdon Heath; Wilde's Reading Gaol; Morris's "Haystack in the Floods" and The Hollow Land; and Clough's "Say Not the Struggle". The best examples he finds, however, are in poems by Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and Thomson, and he discusses these poets separately.47 Another is the twelve-volume work by A. H. Miles originally published between 1893 and 1897 and later between 1905 and 1907.48 The work was actually done in the Victorian Period, and its present value lies in its wide range of material. Edmund Clarence Stedman's Victorian Poets (New York, 1903), on the other hand, is an early critical treatment -it was first published in 1875-of the individual poets and their styles. 47

Professor Dahl's essay can be found in College English, XVI (1955), 341-347, and in Victorian Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Austin Wright (New York, 1961). 48 A. H. Miles, Poets and Poetry of the Century, 12 vols. (London, 19051907).

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Although not necessarily representative of the main line of this study, George Eliot's spiritual conflict resulting from the abandonment of her father's religion is indicative of an important phase of the literature of the period. George Eliot had been drawn, after her experience, to the "advanced" biblical and theological scholarship of Germany, and this led to her translation in 1846 of D. F. Strauss's Leben Jesu. The problems, the malaise, the doubt and misery of the Victorians have been frequently discussed. One such discussion is R. Ε. B. George's "Victorian Philosophy of Suffering", CR, CXXIX (1926), 217-224. Arthur Lyttleton, in his discussion of the poets of faith and doubt, distinguishes between two "schools of modern paganism, the hopeful and the despairing". He chooses as representatives of the two schools Swinburne and Thomson.49 Gaylord C. LeRoy, mentioned earlier in this chapter (p. 25), groups six authors in point of time, the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and by place, England. "They have a further unity in that the significant features of each grew out of the way he adjusted himself to a new society", and in the fact that this society, while it changed considerably from the time of Carlyle to the time of Wilde, was on the whole the same for them all.50 Thomson, of course, did not "adjust". Basil Willey writes that the central theme of his nineteenth century studies is " 'the loss of faith', or (as it might often be called) the reinterpretation of current orthodoxy in the light of nineteenth century canons of historical and scientific criticism... to illustrate some phases of Victorian liberal thought from a group including historians, theologians, and men of letters".51 By the 1920's, however, it was difficult to appreciate the 49

Arthur Templeton Lyttleton, "Modern Pagan Poetry (Swinburne and James Thomson)", Modern Poets of Faith Doubt & Paganism and Other Essays (London, 1904), p. 213. Lyttleton uses paganism to express in poetry "that mode of thought which is too positive to be called merely infidel or agnostic or atheist, too negative to be called pantheist or positivist"; p. 212. 50 Gaylord C. LeRoy, Perplexed Prophets: Six Nineteenth-Century British Authors (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 1. The six authors studied are Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, James Thomson, Rossetti, and Wilde. 51 Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (London, 1956), p. 5.

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thought of those who fought through the early days of the industrial revolution. Their miseries have become foreign to the ideas of the late twenties. Richard Church, writing in London in 1928, observes in the youth of his own generation a "spirit of hope and enthusiasm". And still speaking of his own day, he says, "if we kick over the traces now, we fall on our backs for lack of something to resist us, and so present an amusing spectacle to our contemporaries". He feels that much beauty was created in the agonies of the rebels who did find something to resist them; and while he feels that Swinburne is at a discount, he would like to change the fact that Thomson is altogether obscured. He says that Thomson was, in his own words, a figure whose All too humble soul would arrogate Unto itself some signalizing hate From the supreme indifference of fate. 52

One last book needs be mentioned in this section: Graham G. Hough's The Last Romantics (London, 1949) is concerned mainly with the aesthetes, Ruskin, Rossetti, Morris, and Pater, who prepared the way for the poetry of Yeats. We come, then, almost full cycle to Professor Pinto's Crisis in English Poetry, 1880-1940, which, as stated before, begins with Oscar Wilde and carries us down almost to the present day. For the remainder of this chapter, it will be necessary to list a group of works which, while not all written in the twentieth century, were at least translated and for the most part discovered then. Beginning in the 1830's an obscure Danish Protestant theologian wrote an amazing number of works of a theologicalphilosophical nature exemplifying a certain type of philosophyExistentialism. S0ren Kierkegaard did not present a systematized view of life, but his polemical writings attacked the established patterns of his social and religious world. Existentialism did not spring full-grown in the mind of Kierkegaard, for it is evident that he took much of his thought from the Socratic, Stòic, and other earlier messages; and although he could have si Richard Church, "Pale Melancholy", [London] Spectator (Oct. 13, 1928), pp. 479-480.

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no followers, as such, he forms the base upon which the present existential philosophy is built. Existentialism was not systematized until the twentieth century, and in that time, in the period between the two world wars, a German philosopher Martin Heidegger based his line of reasoning on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. During World War II Jean-Paul Sartre, a French soldier released by the Germans after the fall of France in 1941, resumed his interrupted studies and writings. In 1938 he published a novel called Nausea as an outgrowth of his studies of Heidegger's existentialism, but it was during the German occupation of France that Sartre made his name. While seeming to adhere to the German ideals found in Heidegger and in Nietzsche, Sartre published his major philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness, and produced a number of plays in Paris that gave the very heart and soul to that section of the French resistance movement. Sartre based his philosophy on that of Heidegger, Nietzsche and ultimately on that of the Dane, Kierkegaard, but it is essentially an attempt to produce a coherent atheistic world-view. Kierkegaard was avowedly not an atheist, nor was Pascal with whom Kierkegaard ranged himself against the Hegelian system of absolutes; thus another branch of existentialism has sprouted from the same root. The Christian existentialists, while not so important to this study, are of enough force to be noted briefly: Karl Jaspers, a German, scientifically trained philosopher, redefined his Protestant faith in his book The Perennial Scope of Philosophy·, Gabriel Marcel, a contemporary Frenchman, with Jacques Maritain, represents the Roman Catholic view; and Martin Buber represents the Jewish viewpoint. Thus, from its so-called "founder", Kierkegaard, the existential philosophy has branched out into two main directions. We will be cencerned mainly in this study with Kierkegaard and the French atheist, Jean-Paul Sartre. The most coherent discussion of existentialism I have found is "A Primer of Existentialism" by Professor Gordon Bigelow of the University of Florida. His article, published in College English, XXIII (December 1961), 171-178, is an unbiased account of the various areas in which the main branches of existential

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philosophies find a common meeting ground. Generally, the commentators on either Sartre or on existentialism in general are biased to a degree that makes them useless to this study. Such a biased study is Alfred Stern's Sartre: His Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (New York, 1953) in which he attempts to destroy all originality of thought in Sartre; but it is balanced by one of the most complete and well-thought out studies, Marjorie Grene's Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism (University of Chicago Press, 1948). While Marjorie Grene is apt to be slightly biased in the favor of Sartre, she balances her favoritism with sound criticism. Although these will be the only commentaries necessary for my purposes, some notice must be taken of a few of the myriad works on the subject. One of the soundest general commentaries is that by Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, translated by Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron (New York, 1949). Professor Wahl is a French scholar whose work is one of the earliest to espouse the Christian existentialist view without completely destroying the Sartrean-atheistic system. Only two others need be mentioned: Wilfrid Desan's The Tragic Finale (Harvard University Press, 1954) and Norman H. Greene's Jean-Paul Sartre: The Existential Ethic (University of Michigan Press, 1960). Of the greatest help to this study have been the works of the existentialists themselves. Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, called Existence and Being in this country, has several translators, but the chapter "On the Essence of Truth" has been ably done by R. F. C. Hull and A. Crick. For Heidegger existence stands for the growth and change of man, and essence becomes meaningless (and therefore easily identifiable with existence). Karl Jasper's work, Einfuhring in die Philosophie, having but limited value to this study because of his religious views, has become Way to Wisdom, translated by Ralph Manheim (Yale University Press, 1951). The works of S0ren Kierkegaard used in this study have all been translated by Walter Lowrie. The Concept of Dread (Princeton University Press, 1944), according to the translator, contains an untranslatable word in the title. Angst in Danish, Angoisse in French, and anguish or dread

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"rightly indicate the distress of the moment, but do not suggest what is essential to the experience S. K. [S0ren Kierkegaard] deals with, that it is an apprehension of the future, a presentiment of something which is 'nothing', t h a t . . . it is 'the next day', a n d . . . 'it is fighting against the future', therefore against oneself-'and no man is stronger than himself".53 Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death have been recently published as a single-volume paper-bound edition by Doubleday Anchor Books (New York, 1954), and I have used this volume as well as the hard-bound single copy of Sickness Unto Death published at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1941. The distinction between the two editions will be noted, if necessary, by appending "Doubleday Edition" to the citations from the more recent printing. There are a number of excellent translations of Sartre's plays, and the best that I have found for The Flies is by Stuart Gilbert in John Gassner's A Treasury of the Theatre (New York, 1950). One of the handiest books for easy reference available on Sartre is a little volume called Existentialism and Human Emotions by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 1957). The first section, over forty pages, is titled "Existentialism" and has been taken from a book of that name by Sartre and translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1947). The rest of the book, about fifty pages, is taken from Hazel E. Barnes's translation of Sartre's L'Être et le néant. Professor Barnes, a knowledgeable philosopher and existentialist supporter, has translated Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York, 1956), the so called "Bible" of the existentialist philosophers. It is a long work, over 600 pages, and I found the French work, L'Être et le néant (Paris, 1957) an often helpful adjunct. Because I do not pretend to a philosophical bent, I have found these philosophers difficult and would have found them impossible, I am sure, had it not been for the clear-sighted (and clear-headed) commentaries by such scholars as Marjorie Grene and Gordon Bigelow. 53

Walter Lowrie, "Translator's Preface" to The Concept of Dread by S0ren Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press, 1944), p. x.

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It is my hope that a path, however faint, has been marked through the veritable forest of materials available for this study; I have endeavored to follow a path from the early editions of Thomson's works through biographical-critical material concerned with the man and his works. Thence from the general works on pessimism itself written chiefly in the Victorian Period on the Continent and in England, I considered the materials, selectively it must be admitted, concerned with Romantic Melancholy, beginning with the eighteenth century and coming down through the early nineteenth and through the Victorian Period itself. From a consideration of the works on Romantic Melancholy, I noted some of the general treatments of the Victorian Period, especially those written at a later time, and some of the more specific treatments of authors writing about pessimism and writing pessimistically. Finally, I touched briefly, and very much on the surface, the materials necessary for a twentieth-century treatment of James Thomson.

II. THOMSON AND RELIGIOUS PESSIMISM

Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God. - James Thomson (B.V.) from The City of Dreadful Night, Works, I, 158, section XIV.

In studying religious pessimism one finds it easier to reconstruct the tenets of orthodox Christianity of the middle ages, for instance, than to enter in spirit into that desperately bleak region which is Victorian doubt. One can achieve a reasonable orientation in art or in literary criticism, but the soul of man is harder to categorize; with it one feels at once intimate and remote. At a distance of more than a century, faith and doubt both speak differently; the eighteenth-century rationalist saw no purpose in imagination, and any religious questionings were looked upon as wasteful day dreams. Those in the nineteenth century who doubted - Tennyson, Clough, Carlyle - wrote, however, of their faith; today we would not say that they doubted, but that each had his own faith and wrote of it. It will be our purpose, however, to eschew the concept of our present century and attempt to view the revival of pessimism as a Victorian might view it, that is, as a "modern" nineteenth-century idea. Pessimism in religion, however, did not appear for the first time in the nineteenth century but was known and felt from the times of the Old Testament, of Buddha, of Christ. A chronological history of pessimism is not called for here, nor a history of its religious aspects, but to form a firm basis of understanding let us look briefly at Jewish pessimism as

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reflected principally in the Old Testament books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Specific law happened to be the one indispensable condition of order in the personal character of the ancient Hebrews, which presupposed that aspect of the badness of life by close acquaintance to sin with which they were chiefly distinguished. Jewish pessimism was always intimately associated with conviction of sin, an aspect of moral consciousness evinced more continuously and deeply by the Hebrews than by any other people. Now, sin bears a practical rather than a speculative interpretation. It presupposes a personal creator and a personal creature - presuppositions amplified in Judaism by the direct relation of the Holy One to the special race. Thomson was well aware of the highly personal relationship between the Jew and his creator, and he used this knowledge in his successful satire, "The Story of a Famous Old Jewish Firm". Jehovah, or Jahveh, is portrayed as Jah, the first merchant among a class of merchants, who after recovering from a wholesale, Noah-like liquidation, enters into a covenant with Abraham and his heirs. Even the Satan of Job has slight independent being: "And the Lord said unto Satan, 'Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand'" (Chap, i, 12). Satan proposes to work with divine permission, and having started the machinery of the trial of the patriarch, he is no longer seen. Unlike Mephistopheles, Satan came to try the fibre of Job's character, not to stimulate his intellect; and Job and his Deity face the issue together. Job, accordingly, is a record of the majestic struggles consequent upon apparent injustice. The sufferer, as he loses hold upon his belief in God, becomes pessimistic. After his second trial he curses the hour of his birth, and in reply to Eliphaz, maintains that his life is wind and without hope. Weakened faith finds its place partly taken by that conception with which pessimists in all ages have familiarized us. The earthly career is but a cycle. As the past has been, so will the future continue to become. Everything arrives, and in turn departs, yet no progress is traceable. Life is like a treadmill, a mere painful and necessary movement, which is good for nothing because it is productive of nothing. "If a man die,

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shall he live again?... thou destroyest the hope of m a n . . . Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: . . . His sons come to honour, and he knowth it n o t ; . . . But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn" (Chap, xiv, 14-22). This feeling of useless movement is echoed in Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night as the Wanderer overhears a couple talking, and one of them says, "The world rolls round for ever like a mill; / It grinds out death and life and good and ill" (Works, I, 143). There are a number of other echoes in Thomson's poetry of Biblical pessimism, but it is not to our purpose here merely to indicate that Thomson was familiar with the Bible, or at least with Job and Ecclesiastes. The author of Ecclesiastes approaches pessimism more closely than the poet of Job. The outstanding difference between the two books, from which the pessimism of the former proceeds, lies in the exclusively negative character of Ecclesiastes. Job's hope, leaning on the justice of God, accepts what, for this world, is the old solution, and rests contented. The author of Ecclesiastes, who is called Koheleth, perceives the impossibility of obtaining any reply beyond the ancient writings and is thoroughly conscious of this failure. The book opens, and in effect closes, with the words: "Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher [Koheleth], all is vanity". The writer did not brace himself to account for the wretchedness of things; but, given enough and to spare of pressing evils, and given little hope for reward for his travail on earth, he asked how man can best order his life in these miserable circumstances. "For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun?" (Chap, ii, 22). In contrasting the teachings of the book of Ecclesiastes with the doctrines of the nineteenth-century school of philosophic pessimism, Professor Wright notes that "the darkest feature in the Book of Koheleth is the uncertainty which the writer seemed to feel as to the doctrine of a future state of existence, and the cheerless view he expresses concerning the state of the dead".1 Jewish pessimism naturally 1

Charles H. H. Wright, The Book of Koheleth, Commonly Called Ecclesiastes (London, 1883), p. 191.

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stands in close connection with the semi-religious, semi-ethical doctrine of rewards and punishments peculiar to the chosen people. An interesting point which should be mentioned but not dwelt upon is the fact that the most remarkable development of pessimism in ancient times is to be found in the religions of the distant East. At its height, Brahmanism held the pessimistic view that the world and all things in it are maya or illusion, that human life is vanity and misery, which finds an echo in the Biblical Ecclesiastes. The only hope held forth is that, in the neuter rather than in the personal concept of Brahma, "the soul of man joins Brahma when it experiences salvation, and in that union it contemplates ultimate reality".2 Buddhism, however, is far more thorough in its pessimism in that it acknowledges no Creator, no absolute Being, while holding out as the only desirable prospect for the future, nirvana, which in the nineteenth century was understood to be the night of nothingness or at all events an eternal and passionless repose.3 Buddhism asserts a workable system; pessimism seeks to demonstrate its truth by a variety of arguments. Principal Tulloch says that pessimism "repeats not only the tones, but the systematized principles, of Buddhism. If [pessimism] has any novelty at all, it is simply in the fact that the spent dreams of the East have reappeared in the West".4 2

Edward J. Jurji, "Brahma", Collier's Encyclopedia, 1954 ed., IV, 9. Savrepalli Radhakrishnan, a twentieth-century scholar, in the Introduction to his translation of the Pâli text of The Dhammapada (Oxford University Press, 1954) attempts to bring us closer to Gautama Buddha's teaching in saying that when an individual attains enlightenment, he "passes into the world of being as distinct from that of existence, being which is free from form and formlessness, from pain and delight, though that state is not humanly conceivable. It is deliverance, freedom from rebirth, nirvana" (p. 23). 4 John Tulloch, "Pessimism: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann", Modern Theories of Philosophy and Religion (Edinburgh, 1884), pp. 173-174. Also see Marcus Dods, Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ: Four Lectures on Natural and Revealed Religion (London, 1877), p. 169 ff. It should be noted that both of these works state the nineteenth century conception of Buddhism which differs in some respects with the modern view as propounded by present day commentators. In one instance of many, the con3

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Leaving medieval mysticism for another chapter, we turn now to the famous affirmation of faith, Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion. In this work Biblical evidence is affirmed and strengthened by natural evidence, and belief was strengthened and confirmed for those who had or sought faith in a beneficent God and remained so strengthened until the advent of Darwinism in the nineteenth century.5 Bishop Butler's work did not stand the test of time, however, for it was attacked in its doctrine of divine punishment, which states that the suffering following the violation of a Law of Nature must be viewed as punishment meted out by the Author of Nature. We are left with no other alternative than to doubt the justice and charity of God, for frequently it is only through suffering the penalty that the existence of the law is suspected. No one will maintain that to inflict punishment for unavoidable ignorance is the part of a good and wise governor. "Even such a, book as Butler's 'Analogy', which certainly did good service in its day, in the present [i.e., 1882] state of theological controversy is a clumsy and dangerous weapon".6 Turning rather abruptly to the period under study we find the early Victorians unshakable in their faith, bolstered by prosperity hitherto undreamed of and economic progress unknown to any nation in the world at that time. But the defenses against ception of nirvana was thought of in the nineteenth century as complete extinction or annihilation, whereas S. Radhakrishnan, quoted above in note 3, tells us that it is the "extinction of the fire of the passions and bliss of union with the whole", that is with the supreme spirit. ("Introduction", The Dhammapada, p. 47). 5 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London, 1736). The following quote is taken from the "Advertisement" by Bishop Butler for his book and indicates that even as early as the 1730's religious doubtings were known widely enough to call forth his work: "It is come, I know now how, to be taken for granted, by many Persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of Inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious and accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present Age, this were an agreed Point, among all People of Discernment; and nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of Mirth and Ridicule, as it were, by Way of Reprisals, for its so long having interrupted the Pleasures of the World." β Barlow, p. 103.

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rationalism and disbelief so ably erected by Bishop Butler and William Paley (Evidences of Christianity) were being undermined by liberal politics, new theories of economics, and the triumphal advance of science, without fanfare at first but gathering momentum and popular support along its way. Space does not permit a detailed examination of this period of change and reform, but something must be said as a brief explanation in order to provide a background for the great theological conflict which involved Thomson as a propagandist on the side of secularism. Against such a briefly-drawn background it will be easier to understand the effects of early influences on Thomson's religious views; the reasons of his search for, and ultimate rejection of, religious belief; and the effect, if any, his work had on those who followed in the controversy which to some extent is still raging today. Politically and economically, the early years of the nineteenth century were years of reform. Parliamentary representation was still based on the list of boroughs made up in Tudor times. The Reform Bill of 1832 broke this corrupt political pattern and in so doing, placed the political power of England in the hands of a new economic group, the middle class, who formed a commercial aristocracy bent on furthering its own interests. Despite the fact that it was a period of reform, extension of the suffrage which began in this period was slow and gradual. Outside of reform, the changes extended even to the names of the parties: the Whigs, identified with the progressive middle class, called themselves the Liberals; the Tories, committed to preservation of time-honored institutions, took the name Conservatives (such changes are called verbicide by C. S. Lewis, Studies In Words, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 7). But politics and economics do not make up the whole of a nation's life, and in the nineteenth century both religion and science touched human experience and affected the thought and literature of the time quite as closely as political and economic circumstances. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the infallibility of the Bible was not questioned; it was readily accepted with little or no reservation. By 1830, however, science, the "vulgar

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upstart", was scoring triumph after triumph: Sir John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy gained wide popularity, and Sir Charles Lyell's The Principles of Geology prepared the way for the more startling revelations of Charles Darwin. Professor Annan states categorically that "at no time during the Victorian Age are doubts stilled or unbelief suspended" and goes on to list some of the "strands of unbelief" in each decade of the period: the 1840's were the time of the publication of Francis Newman's attack on Christianity, Phases of Faith, of his brother's "secession to Rome" and the consequent loss of faith by Froude and Clough. In the 1850's Annan lists the publication of In Memoriam, Omar Khayyam, William Rathbone Greg's The Creed of Christendom, and George Eliot's essays in the Westminster Review. For the decade of the sixties, he mentions the Essays and Reviews published by the Seven Against Christ and the excommuncation of Bishop Colenso by his fellow bishops in South Africa. And it was in the seventies "that opinion became decisively secularized with all the loss and gain that it entailed".7 The theologians of this period are generally divided into four groups - the Evangelicals, who had fused with the Low Church party, rejected the doctrine of Apostolic Succession and generally emphasized the Protestant position of the Church; the old High Church party who retained the sacraments and the Prayer Book; the Broad Church group, more scholarly and having a greater knowledge of the new criticism forming in Germany; and the "exponents of the Catholic Reaction, which is known in England as the Oxford Movement".8 It is the Broad Church party, however, that holds our main interest here. It was through them that the Church was invaded in the eighteen-fifties by the Biblical scholarship generally known as the Higher Criticism, which studied the intellectual and aesthetic values of the 7 Noel Annan, "The Strands of Unbelief', in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians; An Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age, ed. by Harman Grisewood (London, 1949), p. 150. 8 Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 81. Walker's division is slightly different, for he emphasizes Church politics rather than theological controversy.

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Bible and insisted on applying to the literary study of the Bible the same criteria that were being applied to works of literature. G. M. Young says that "English divinity was not equipped to meet - for its comfort, it was hardly capable of comprehending - the new critical methods of the Germans: it is a singular fact that England could not, before Lightfoot, show one scholar in the field of Biblical learning able and willing to match the scholars of Germany. . . The flock was left undefended against the ravages of David Strauss".9 The purpose of the Higher Criticism was principally to study the Gospels like any other documents and rid them of inconsistencies, assign authorship on a factual rather than a traditional basis, and attempt to draw a distinction between the teaching of Christ and that of Paul. A single example, although far from an isolated one, of Thomson's use of Higher Criticism appears in his prose satire "Christmas Eve in the Upper Circles" (1866). God is telling his Son, whom he considers a far more loveable character as Jesus the man than he is as the Lord Christ in Heaven, something of his own origin, and says, "You know how I began life, the petty chief of a villainous tribe". Thomson wrote a short essay, in this same year 1866, on the question of the divinity of Christ, "Jesus: as God; as a Man". In it he states that the man Jesus commands his heart's best homage, nor is Jesus as a man lowered in his esteem by the contradictions and absurdities found in his story and in his utterances. The disciples endeavored to report Christ's actual words but being fallible men made slight changes, for they found it difficult to report perfectly the words of a "teacher so mystically sublime". These minor changes in the letter would have had little effect on the totality of Christ's teachings had they not been repeated by word of mouth for so many years. When finally put into writing the changes in Jesus's words assumed immense variation as to the spirit. It might be well to note that Thomson treated the subject less seriously in an • George Malcolm Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (New York, 1954), p. 114. "Lightfoot" is Joseph Barber Lightfoot, Victorian churchman and scholar.

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essay taken from Rabelais, "Great Christ is Dead!" in 1875 and more seriously in "The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus" in 1876. In all of these essays and a number of others, Thomson appeared as the sincere seeker of the truth whether or not he was misguided or misinformed. How to explain the Gospel miracles, for they had to be reasoned out, was the problem attacked by Ferdinand C. Baur of Tübingen University and Paulus of Heidelberg. All the marvelous incidents from the birth to the ascension of Christ were explained through the known laws of causation. David Strauss, a tutor at Tübingen, was at this time devoting himself to his two-volume Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet,

con-

taining a speculative Christology which contradicts not only the Christian supernaturalistic conception of Christ but the Tübingen school's rationalistic conception as well. Needless to say his work created a sensation throughout Europe, and in England when it appeared in a three-volume translation in 1846. A. W. Benn tells us that Strauss's thought was distinguished by what has become known as the Mythical Theory. According to Strauss's conception of a myth, it has an element of historical fact around which are woven the religious feelings and ideas of groups of persons at a particular time and place. But these ideas, he argues, are not based on actual historical data, and the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, the miracles, the resurrection, and the glorification of Jesus he therefore considers to have no basis in historical fact. To Strauss a myth was a legitimate literary form for the expression of truth which the historian, the philosopher, or the scientist could not present in prosaic form. He felt that the idea had long been widespread that the world would be saved by the appearance of a Messiah, and Jesus of Nazareth was the right man at the right time.10 It is this work that George Eliot translated in 1846. While Marian (or Mary Ann) Evans (George Eliot) is not a typical person, her spiritual and moral history in many respects exemplifies trends and qualities of Victorian thought. As widely cultured as any woman of her age, she saw clearly the pettiness 10

Alfred W. Benn, History of English Rationalism Century, I (London, 1906), 382-383.

in the

Nineteenth

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of rural life in the immoral consequences of the Calvinist doctrine of Election. Her early break with dogmatic Christianity can be seen in the partial portraits of her early life in her fulllength novels, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. Humphrey House pictures her early study of Christian history "getting bogged in the early Fathers" and as a consequence pushing her studies back in time to read the rationalist Charles Hennell's book An Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity.11 According to general accounts of her life, she was assailed by religious doubts in her early twenties and, while living in Coventry, decided to give up church attendance. It was during this time, too, that she came under the influence of the Biblical scholars Hennell and Charles Bray, both of whom were interested in the advanced Biblical and theological scholarship of Germany. With their help she came to realize that while she had lost faith, she had gained truth; and she felt that she could best impart that truth to others by translating Strauss's Leben Jesu. "George Eliot. . . accepted Strauss's view, however much she disliked the details and tone of his book. She found the relentless unemotional debunking of miracle after miracle unsympathetic to her sense of beauty and to the symbolic fitness of things",18 and she was obliged to give up the Christian religion as she had understood it. The Broad Church movement, through its interest in German Biblical criticism, contributed further strands of disbelief by its influence on men whose changing histories are representative of the spirit of the age. Francis W. Newman, the younger brother of the Cardinal, began his spiritual life as a missionary intent upon converting the Mohammedan to Christianity and ended it with a denial of a future life.13 The story of his disenchantment with Christianity can be found in his book, Phases of Life, mentioned above. "Francis Newman was a scholar armed at all points, whose competence none could deny; 11 Humphrey House, "Qualities of George Eliot's Unbelief', in Grisewood, p. 160. " House, p. 162. » His importance in this connection is stressed by Benn, II, 17-36.

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and not only a scholar, but a master of clear and impressive language . . . and his moral was even higher than his intellectual authority... He supplied a practical refutation of the older Newman's doctrine, that those who reject Biblical or priestly infallibility must have begun by rejecting the authority of their own consciences".14 As Francis Newman represented the advanced religious tendencies of this period as opposed to his older brother John Henry, so did James Anthony Froude arrive at a position in opposition to that of his older brother, the Tractarian Richard Hurrell Froude. James Anthony traces his change from orthodoxy to skepticism and the disintegration of his beliefs in his semiautobiographical novel Shadows of the Clouds (1847) and in The Nemesis of Faith (1849). Religion to Froude constituted no more than faith in a living God, which need not be associated with myths that are or are not true. It was the reaction from superstitious legends contained in the Scriptures which diverted his attention to history, and it was in 1849 that he met Carlyle, who helped him direct his course as a historian.15 A somewhat later, minor poet has summed up the attitude wrought among the educated classes and within the literature of the period following the Broad Church upheaval. The entire poem is pertinent, but the portion here quoted is a particularly apt synopsis of what has been said so far of the undercurrent of pessimism and disenchantment with orthodox religion which was gathering momentum. And it is especially the last three stanzas of the poem "The Age of Despair" that are an indication, I believe, of how thoroughly the fabric of faith had been shaken by the controversy then raging: Dead is for us the rose we know must die; Long ere we drain it the goblet is dry; And even as we kiss, the distant grave Chills the warm lip, and dims the lustrous eye. Too far our race has journey'd from its birth; Too far death casts his shadow o'er the earth. » Benn, II, 27. 15 See Benn, Π, 36-46; also compare Algernon Cecil, Six Thinkers (London, 1909), pp. 156-213.

Oxford

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Ah, what remains to strengthen and support Our hearts since they have lost the tick of mirth? The stay of fortitude? The lofty pride Wherewith the sages of the Porch denied That pain and death are evils, and proclaimed Lawful the exit of the suicide? Alas, not so! no Stoic calm is ours; We dread the thorns who joy not in the flowers We dare not breathe the mountain-air of pain Droop as we may in pleasure's stifling bowers. What profits it, if here and there we see A spirit nerved by trust in God's decree, Who fronts the grave in firmness of the faith Taught by the Carpenter of Galilee? Who needs not wine, nor roses, lute nor lyre Scorns life, or quits it by the fate of fire, Erect and fearless—what is that to us Who hold him for the dupe of vain desire? Can we who wake enjoy the dreamer's dream? Will the parched treeless waste less hideous seem Because there shines before some foolish eyes Mirage of waving wood and silver stream? 16 Near the close of the 1850's the position of the liberal clergy in England was becoming more and more difficult. The great majority were too timid of public opinion or too reluctant to challenge accepted beliefs, and High Church insistence on dogma and governmental conservatism were combining to make a career in the ministry of the Church appear unattractive to young men of intelligence and promise. In 1860 a group of seven writers, leaders of the Broad Church party, spoke out in an attempt to vindicate "their own right to free enquiry, and also of doing something to heal the widening breach between religious belief and the growing intelligence of the country. In pursuance of this double object they resolved to issue a joint manifesto of the new views which had been gathering strength le Henry Duff Traill, Recaptured Rhymes: Being a Batch of Political and Other Fugitives Arrested and Brought to Book (London, 1882), pp. 135-136.

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ever since the collapse of the Tractarian movement" and the introduction of the Higher Criticism from Germany.17 Their volume was entitled Essays and Reviews, and among the socalled "Seven Against Christ" were Benjamin Jowett, afterwards Master of Balliol, and Frederick Temple, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. The general purport of the volume held that the new discoveries in natural science and Biblical scholarship should be accepted as not threatening but reinvigorating faith. It caused a great stir. Such was the tenor of the times that Ε. B. Pusey attacked it and circulated a declaration of belief in Biblical infallibility which garnered eleven thousand clerical signatures. The seven authors were prosecuted and condemned in the ecclesiastical court. It must be reiterated here, in the face of the number of signers on Pusey's petition, that this was not an age of religious skepticism but rather a period of doubt. Professor Houghton in his detailed study of the period between 1830 and 1870 says that "Christian faith was characteristic of the frame of mind. If most Victorians had reservations about one or more theological doctrines, they instinctively looked for the hand of God in the events of life; interpreted success as the reward of virtue, or suffering as the punishment for sin . . . The churches were crowded... sermons outsold novels. But here, too, as in other areas, belief was shaky".18 Two years after the publication of Essays and Reviews the controversy broke out anew when the Evangelical John W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, demonstrated by arithmetical methods that much of the Mosaic narrative could not be historial. His book, A Critical Examination of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, shows that contrary to all laws of population the seventy Hebrews who were led down into Egypt by Moses had grown to the vast figure of 600,000 warriors in less than a century. Not only did his work attack the historical character of the Pentateuch but it denied the Mosaic authorship of it, 17

Benn, II, 114. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 Haven, 1957), p. 21, n. 77. 18

(New

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all of which led to an attack on the belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible. That Colenso's writings and the controversy that followed were well known among the laity as well as the clerics is attested to by the fact that he was attacked by Bishop Wilberforce, F. D. Maurice, and Matthew Arnold; and "An attempt to oust Colenso from the bishopric which he had so nobly administered in the interest of the helpless natives, was defeated by the intervention of the lay authorities at home".19 Arnold felt that scientific studies should emanate from men of science while men of religion should adhere strictly to matters of religion. Arnold said in the same essay that a storm was raised when he "ventured... to criticise the celebrated first volume of Bishop Colenso". Arnold goes on to say that "It is a result of no little culture to attain to a clear perception that science and religion are two wholly different things", and that although the multitude will confuse them, it is of no importance.20 In the article Arnold refers to, he thought the book would not spiritually instruct the uneducated nor instruct the cultivated.81 Benn takes violent issue with Arnold in saying that not only the uninstructed but the instructed have been edified, and that edification has been advanced "by the removal of a crying scandal... that the wholesale massacres by which the Israelitish conquest of Palestine was formerly believed to have been accomplished, were certainly not commanded by the Author of the Decalogue, and were probably imagined by a sanguinary priesthood as a peculiar exercise of that idealising faculty with which it is now the fashion among theologians to credit them".82 The storm that thus raged around these "strands of disbelief", » Benn, II, 145. Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", Essays in Criticism, First Series, ΙΠ (London, 1903), 31. 81 Matthew Arnold, "The Bishop and the Philosopher", Macmiilan's Magazine, VH (January 1863), 354. 22 Benn, II, 145. Benn devotes ten pages (II, 135-145) to the Colenso controversy, and as is evident takes the Bishop's part. Benn seems to be in the right, for he appears to have gotten to the heart of the matter, and was evidently not influenced by the fact that Colenso's reputation had suffered greatly as the hands of his detractors and his fellow bishops in South Africa. 50

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what effect did it have on those who were living, working, and writing during this period? With some there was the slow corroding effect of water striking rock or, perhaps in the case of James Thomson, water wearing away sandstone.28 On others it produced a shock best exemplified by Elizabeth Barrett's reply when asked how she would feel if she had no belief in a soul or a future life. She would feel that her life was a terrible waste, that her struggle would be even more terribly empty, for the goal would be dust rather than the crown of heaven. "What a resistless melancholy would fall upon me if I had such thoughts! - and what a dreadful indifference... I should not have strength to love you, I think, if I had such a miserable creed. And for life itself,... would it be worth holding on such terms, - with our blind Ideals making mocks and mows at us wherever we turned?"24 There were those who would passionately affirm that the spirit of religion could survive in a mechanized world, men such as Joseph Barber Lightfoot (see above, p. 55), men of God with a blazing passion for social righteousness. Although he is representative, he is not representative of the entire nation; for there were others like Harriet Martineau and Charles Bradlaugh who did not hesitate to propagandize on behalf of out-and-out atheism, and still others like James Thomson who could not weave new ideas and old dogmas into a fresh pattern of thought. Another group which strongly threatened established religion had as it members those who felt that the time had come to transfer values from heaven to earth, but they will be discussed farther on in this study. Before leaving this discussion of those whose doubts fell between positive affirmation of faith and equally positive denial, one further quotation is called for: "And yet some of the most aggressive Victorians were profoundly insecure. The two most combative writers of the age, as they were called at the time, 23 Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 26 ff. Part of Mrs. Walker's thesis is the "development and final statement of [Thomson's] philosophy", but on the pages cited, she states that his first steps were "religious doubts". 24 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, 2, 136-137, quoted by Houghton, p. 68, n. 54.

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Carlyle and Kingsley, were deeply troubled with religious doubts, acutely aware of weakness and frustration".25 The cause of militant atheism must be taken into account, if only for the reason that one of its chief proponents, Charles Bradlaugh, was so intimately involved in the life and thought of James Thomson. But there is another reason - a large mass of opinion in England was hostile to the unreasoning belief in the old Christian dogma.26 Denial of, and disbelief in, the tenets of Christianity did not necessarily give rise to pessimism or to a pessimistic philosophy; for such disbelief, if sincere, gives rise to strong conviction. Conviction itself often brought relief from the intellectual and emotional fears that were bound up with religious doubts. One who had just such an experience was Harriet Martineau, a woman the Victorians found impossible to ignore.27 Brought up in a strict Unitarian household, she was in her late thirties when she recognized Christianity - she calls it a "monstrous superstition" - as merely a fact in the history of humanity, and found herself "with the last link of my chain snapped off, - a free rover on the broad, bright, breezy common of the universe".28 Although not everyone resolved his doubts with Miss Martineau's breeziness, her didactic tales, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-1834), were very popular. But in a period so frightened of the social consequences of irreligion and so ready to consider doubt a sin, she was likely to experience a sense of social loneliness and moral censure - as in Margaret Oliphant's devastating review of the Autobiography in Blackwood's (April 1877), pp. 129-130. Miss 25

Houghton, p. 216. See Benn's chapter, "The Unitarians and the Broad Church", II, 61 ff. 27 Thomas Carlyle's Reminiscences, ed. by J. A. Froude (New York, 1881), pp. 439-440, and the various collections of Mrs. Carlyle's letters contain references to the Carlyles' friendship with Miss Martineau. Other references express admiration or resentment and may be found in most of the diaries and letters of the time, as in Janet Ross, The Fourth Generation (New York, 1912), p. 244. 28 Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, ed. by M. J. Chapman (London, 1877), I, Period III, sec. 1, p. 116. For a sound and often humorous work on Miss Martineau, see Theodora Bosanquet's Harriet Martineau; An Essay in Comprehension (London, 1927). 28

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Martineau won respect for her independent opinions and gained a reputation as a respected freethinker in England, Europe, and America. Charles Bradlaugh had expressed anti-theological opinions, that is he had been an atheist, for five years before he met James Thomson at the army post at Ballincollig, Ireland. At the age of fourteen young Bradlaugh began to learn the Thirtynine Articles and to study the Gospels closely in preparation for teaching at the Sunday School of St. Peter's, Hackney Road, London. Unable to reconcile some of the inconsistencies in the Gospels, the boy wrote to the vicar, The Reverend J. E. Packer, for explanation and was immediately suspended for "atheistical" tendencies. Persecuted by his father, excluded from church and school, driven from his clerkship with a shipping company, Bradlaugh rebelled and left home an alien and an atheist.*» Befriended by other atheists and freethinkers, he managed to exist and begin the study of law, which was to stand him in good stead later in his career. Always scrupulous about money matters, he joined the army in 1850 and used his enlistment fee to pay a five-pound debt. In 1857 he left the army to begin his career in earnest as a secularist writer and lecturer and as editor of such freethought papers as the London Investigator

and the National Reformer.

Two years later he

voiced the creed which he followed for the rest of his life: "I do not deny that there is 'a God', because to deny that which is unknown is as absurd as to affirm it. As an atheist I deny the God of the Bible, of the Koran, of the Vedas, but I cannot deny that of which I have no knowledge".30 The rest of his life, until he died of a heart attack in 1891, Bradlaugh fought for liberal principles under this creed. He worked and fought for the right of the people to meet in groups in public without fear of M

Janet E. Courtney, Freethinkers of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1920), pp. 98-99. 30 Courtney, p. 115. Mrs. Courtney goes on to say that Bradlaugh did not so much attack belief in God as the "superstitious reverence for the Bible which he found prevailing". Bradlaugh should be remembered for the work he did to further religious toleration rather than for the beliefs which he held.

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interference from authority. He suffered jail and penury to gain the freedom of the press from charges of blasphemy and sedition, to allow publication of serious scientific discussions of social questions, and he was instrumental in securing for atheists and other non-Christians the right to make an affirmation of loyalty which would have the same legal and moral status in court as did an oath sworn on the Bible. In 1880 Bradlaugh was elected to parliament from the constituency of Northampton and immediately raised the question of the legality of taking an affirmation instead of an oath to sit as an M. P. That question soon evolved into a debate over whether or not an atheist could even sit in parliament at all. He was excluded from parliament a number of times, reelected by his constituency, and lived long enough to see a bill he had sponsored to allow affirmations in parliament become law.31 Bertram Dobell tells us that Bradlaugh and Thomson became fast friends during their service at the army camp at Ballincollig, Ireland, despite the great difference in their views concerning religion. Thomson "had not yet lost his belief in the Christian faith", and there was "much discussion between the friends,. . . Neither seems to have made a convert of the other, nor perhaps was there any endeavour on either side to do so".32 That some influence was felt, however, is evident in the fact that the young men kept up their correspondence after Bradlaugh left the army, and a little later Thomson was glad to contribute articles and poetry to Bradlaugh's papers. One of Thomson's early contributions was a prose tribute to the genius of Shelley, and another was his poem "The Dead Year" pertaining to 1860 and appearing in the National Reformer in January, 1861. It is as much a review of human events as a review of the past year - a gloomy, pessimistic poem in which the poet sees little 31 Walter L. Arnstein, "The Bradlaugh Case; a Re-appraisal", J HI, XVIII (April 1957), 254-269. Although concerned mainly with Bradlaugh's struggle with parliament, Arnstein's article contains an excellent summation of the causes leading to the controversy and its possible effects. 3 * Bertram Dobell, "Memoir", in The Poetical Works of James Thomson (B.V.), I (London, 1895), xxvi, cited hereafter as Dobell, "Memoir", I, with page number.

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or no improvement in future affairs, simply a prolongation of strife, bloodshed, and unhappiness. Mrs. Walker in her study lists Thomson's contributions to periodicals and notes the first appearance of each contribution in a book, making it unnecessary to enumerate them here.33 Unquestionably there were disadvantages in linking Thomson's name with that of the National Reformer. Not only did the paper lack literary respectability but many of its readers were alienated by Thomson's learned style - so different from the editor's slashing attacks. We hear that Bradlaugh received three or four letters energetically protesting against the publication of The City of Dreadful Night in his paper.84 Perhaps Bradlaugh's subscribers felt that it might be interpreted to the disadvantage of their own negative creed. "His chances for literary reputation while working for the journal were, if not completely nullified, at least reduced to a minimum, for no one known as a regular writer for the National Reformer could expect an unprejudiced hearing from either critics or the public at large".35 Be that as it may, Dobell says that "it was perhaps fortunate for Thomson that the columns of the Reformer were at all times open to him; for in it he could publish without restraint his most heterodox essays, a privilege which he would have enjoyed in no other paper with which I am acquainted. 'Vane's Story' and 'The City of Dreadful Night' would have sought admission in vain into the pages of any 'respectable' contemporary journal".3" The education of Thomson had been profoundly religious. The Presbyterian theology with which his childhood was imbued, especially from the life of his mother, seems to have left in him profound traces. Sarah Thomson followed Irving when he left the Kirk and retained a deep devotion to Irving's somewhat 33 Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), pp. 176-195. The contributions to the National Reformer are found between pages 178-187. 34 H. S. Salt, The Life of James Thomson (B.V.), rev. ed. (London, 1914), p. 116, cited hereafter as Salt, Life, with the page number. 35 Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 47. 3 ' Dobell, "Memoir", I, xlviii.

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mystic, less strict Calvinism." That she filled her home with an omnipresent evangelism is attested to by Thomson's clear recollection in his last years of the impressions gained as a child: "I remember well Irving's portrait under yellow gauze . . . the congregation ejaculating groaning responses to the minister's prayer . . . I think mother, who was mystically inclined with Edward Irving, had also a cloud of melancholy overhanging her".88 But the religion of his mother was not to be the only depressing influence on Thomson's life. When he was six his father returned from a voyage as a chief officer suffering from a paralytic stroke which partially destroyed his mind and his body. The years following, he lived until 1853, were filled with his disagreeable and sometimes violent temper, his beginning dipsomania, and his losing battle against poverty. "The significant point is that during his first six years Thomson lived in a home wherein religious emotionalism was high and that this emotionalism was intensified during the two following years. Certainly such an atmosphere left its mark".3® His beliefs were without doubt solid, for it is not before 1852 or 1853, when he was already near his twentieth year, that we see his thought enter into a phase of transition and of doubt. The separation between the time of his childhood and his early manhood was not without shock and suddenness, but Thomson did not go through one of those "nights" which are devoted to the sudden collapse of belief. The author of The City of Dreadful Night hesitated for ten years before adopting this pessimistic conception from which his name is now inseparable. The poems which he composed during this period of transition, from approximately 1852 to 1862, permit us to follow the development of his thought. Thomson was not at this point S7 See Walker, Literature of the Victorian Era, p. 92, who tells us that Irving's mysticism was enhanced by his acquaintance with Samuel Coleridge and that he came to believe that the second advent of Christ was imminent. "His followers prepared ascension r o b e s , . . . The faithful spoke with tongues, which to the profane ear of Carlyle sounded like 'a shrieky hysterical lall-lall-lall' 38 From a letter written by Thomson to his sister-in-law, Mrs. John Thomson, quoted by Salt, Life, pp. 3-4. »· Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 6.

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an atheist, but he felt that humanity had lost Christianity and all that the word implies, ritual, orthodoxy, belief in Christ. He still retained a belief in God, however, and thought that mankind must also hold such a belief, even though it was felt only in the heart. His hesitation and his doubt stemmed from the conflict between an emotional need to believe in God, a need more than likely arising from his childhood experiences, and an utter lack of ability to reconcile the tenets of Christianity with the evil in the world around him. The poetry of this period in some measure gives an indication of his future reputation "of an atheist flinging his materialistic challenge to the tottering Jehovah of the established faiths".40 The poem "Suggested by Matthew Arnold's 'Stanza from the Grande Chartreuse'" of July 1855 is the first to be considered in this transition period.41 Here we see a thought which searches still and which, sincerely, reveals Thomson's doubts and hesitations. The subject is the anguish of uncertainty, for he cannot resign himself, without a feeling of self-destruction, to the abandonment of the Christianity of his childhood. In Part I Thomson appears to take it for granted that Christ is dead and that Christianity had died with him; he speaks of his poem as a "Dirge for a mighty Creed outworn" and of Christ: "None mourn Him, dead with deep-moved soul, / Whom, living, all our sires adored?"42 Orthodox faith is no longer a force in the world, for the men in it feel that they are themselves gods who are blinded to their doom by the "material might" which holds sway. Thomson felt that he and the rest of humanity were lost in a dead world and were without the means to effect an escape - he ends the first part of his poem with a supplication to God to teach them how to worship Him. There were many others, as I pointed out earlier, who felt keenly this loss of hope of immortality; and there were some, such as Charles Bradlaugh, who were heartened by such an attitude. At this «» J. M. Cohen, p. 58. 41 The date for this poem, and others by Thomson, is taken from The Poetical Works of James Thomson, 2 vols. ed. by Bertram Dobell (London, 1895) and will hereafter be referred to as Works. « Works, II, 369.

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period, however, Thomson suffered from his "anguish of uncertainty" in a manner not unlike the poets Clough and Arnold. Arthur Hugh Clough was one of the victims of the destructive conclusions of the Higher Criticism. He had become intensely introspective under the influence of Dr. Thomas Arnold at Rugby and had hesitantly looked toward Newmanism, but he found that his reason would not allow him to embrace Catholicism.43 He could no more follow a course of militant disbelief than he could adhere to the Thirty-nine Articles, and in 1848 he resigned his tutorship and fellowship at Oriel College when he recanted his subscription to the Articles. Professor Fairchild has this to say of Clough: "Certainly this wavering, tortured doubter wrote many poems suitable for use on inspirational calendars, but his optimism is so utterly devoid of foundation in reason or in faith that to me it is more depressing than the blackest pessimism, Twill all be well: n o need of care; Though how it will, and when and where, We cannot see, and can't declare. In spite of dreams, in spite of thought T i s not in vain, and not for nought The wind it blows, the ship it goes, But whence and whither, no one knows.

Compared with that, The City of Dreadful Night is positively bracing".44 Only a word need be said of Arnold's doubt and despair which were tempered by a Stoic resignation which he held out against the spiritual void of modern life. It has been said that "Arnold disbelieved in the divinity of Christ and at least doubted immortality; and he defined God as 'a stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness'".45 He 43 For a more complete discussion of Clough's bewilderment, see H. W. Garrod, Poetry and the Criticism of Life (London, 1931), pp. 109-127. A number of Clough's shorter pieces record his struggles: "Qui Laborat Orat", "Blank Misgivings", "Sic Itur", and "Parting" are typical. 44 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Literature, IV (New York, 1957), 257. 45 Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Age, p. 467.

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sought a new social order but could find no solution; and Thomson in Part II of the poem, "Suggested b y . . . the Grande Chartreuse", states that although "the great Form lies there nerveless", there will be a rebirth when a new spirit of expression is found, "In the Old's death the New has birth" (Works, II, 364). In Part III, while stating that "vainly ye choose you Saviours" in this age, he echoes the serene acquiescence expressed in the best of Arnold. Thomson echoes faintly "The Scholar-Gypsy" and "Resignation" in these lines: Yet we be patient, meek and pure, Unselfishly resigned to God's Mysterious judgments; and endure Our sore scarce-intermitted loads Of grief and weary pain, inbued With sternly passive fortitude.46 "The Doom of a City", subtitled "Fantasia" and dated in 1857, foreshadows much in Thomson's later work, but the theme belongs distinctly to his earlier period. The recognition of a Providence has not been rejected, and even a faith in human amelioration has been expressed. At this point Thomson believes in the existence of a beneficent God who punishes us and rewards us after this life, and who ameliorates the lot of humanity. Section ix of Part II, beginning on page 133 of the Works, volume II, for example, shows us Nature supremely indifferent to the lot of its children. And in Section xvi, one of the shadowy forms who filter through the City of Night crouches in a church unable to "join the songs of praise" and must creep out with faint hope of returning. This passage has poetic worth, but much of the poem is destroyed by Thomson's crudity; the poetic polish was not to come until later. In "The Recusant", a sonnet of 1858, we are present at a conflict between the ardent aspiration after a solid faith and the love of the truth above all. The poet is alone in the countryside on a Sunday evening; he contemplates the dormant fires and also the little church which rises beyond an orchard in bloom. The sound of the bell which calls the faithful to evening prayers, 48

Works, II, 378.

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he imagines, sends a message of peace, which even he could share if only he could enter the church "to kneel and pray". The disbelief and the doubt could then disappear, and "All peace float to us with its Sabbath bell", but this is only the dream of a lost sensibility when "Conscience replies, There is but one good rest, / Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast".47 "The Recusant" expresses not only an intellectual conflict but also a tranquil resignation and compliance, for the religious and Calvinist education which Thomson had received had too profoundly penetrated his nature. His sensibility was not less affected than his intelligence, and he was to be crossed many a time by an excess of morbid despair and of remorse such as that in "Mater Tenebrarum". This short poem of 1859 is, for the first time, bathed in an atmosphere of pessimism; not the pessimism of resignation, and without hope, which will be that of Thomson's last years but that of an intense suffering, which is almost physical. The poet is no longer an orthodox Christian, but he maintains still his faith in the existence of a soul and in a future life; or, more correctly, he wishes to maintain it. He is impelled by an ardent desire to find again the one whom death took from him; his life would be truly too sad if everything terminated at the grave, if there was no hope of meeting again, in a different and better world, those whom death separates us from here below. It is the last poem in which he expresses a belief in immortality. According to a note penciled at the head of the original manuscript, "A Real Vision of Sin" dated Friday, March 4, 1859, was "Written in disgust at Tennyson's, which is very pretty and clever and silly and truthless".48 The poem shows that Thomson's spiritual faith has become more and more weakened, but his attempt to be naturalistic has given us nothing more than a shocking account of sheer bestiality. In this bitter parody of Tennysonian optimism two incredibly wretched old beggars, a man and his wife who own an equally mangy cur, have reached the very depths of existence and arrive at a " 48

Works, II, 432. Works, Π, 391.

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suicide pact. After many stanzas of disgusting recriminations, they agree to throw themselves into the slimy bog nearby, but the old man manages to keep the bank following a sickening struggle. As he tips up the gin, which is his alone now, the dog hurls itself at his throat and they both disappear below the surface of the swamp. The poem is little more than an exercise in bestiality, but Thomson could rise to greater poetic heights in his attack on established religion as is evidenced by the following stanzas, which are given to the figure of Shelley in his tribute to that poet. Shelley has returned after his unsuccessful attempt to show mankind its errors and thus bring them to improvement, and says this speaking principally of Christianity: The Churches are polluted,—let them fall And crush old errors underneath their weight The royal purples are a bloody pall To stifle Freedom,—rend them ere too late; The laws are silken meshes for the great But iron nets to hold the poor and mean,— Let them too perish .. . But what next is seen? Because the priests were false, the shrines impure, Mankind in God himself all faith have lost; Because blood dyed old purples, they endure To walk all naked in the sun and frost; Because old laws the law of justice crost, They would live henceforth without any law: No loyal service, no revering awe! 49

If, two years later, "To Our Ladies of Death" revealed the hesitations of a spirit which still believed in good and in bad and in a sort of distributor of justice, the magnificent poem in prose A Lady of Sorrow, begun in 1862, is the expression of a complete and definitive pessimism. Thomson is now in his twenty-eighth year, and the evolution of his thought has reached a terminus. The death of his sweetheart, Matilda Weiler, which caused him to doubt the possibility of happiness and the existence of a providence, was the starting point. It continued slowly, this gradual change, through interior struggles and pangs, aided 49

James Thomson, "Shelley (Poem)", in his Shelley, a Poem (London, 1884), p. 3.

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perhaps by the influence of the free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh, whose acquaintance Thomson had made in 1852. It led finally to a series of negations - of the existence of God, of immortality, of freewill, and of progress - which formed the philosophic base of his pessimism more complete without doubt than pessimism had ever been. Before we go on with Thomson's second poetic period, roughly dated between 1862 and 1874, something must be said of a poem written in 1861, "To Our Ladies of Death", which the poet acknowledges as dependent upon De Quincey's "Suspiria de Profundis" for its religious symbolism. The three conceptions of death represented in the poem are contained in the three Ladies: Our Lady of Beatitudes represents the gracious mother "garmented in purest white" whose right hand rests upon a long, two-edged sword and whose left holds an olive branch; she it is who takes to her the heroes, the saints, the unblemished children. On her the unworthy poet dare not call. The next, Our Lady of Annihilation, is "sibyl, sorceress and queen" who holds a rod of serpents in her right hand and a cup of fire in her left. It is she who awaits with her scourge "the selfish, fatuous, proud, and pitiless", and the poet will not call on her. It is to the third, Our Lady of Oblivion, who gathers to her breast "the weak, the weary, and the desolate" that the wanderer in the City of Night makes his plea: Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep; Down, down, far-hidden in thy duskiest cave; While all the clamorous years above me sweep Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance, A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.50

In this poem, as in the "Dead Year" (mentioned above, page 65) to a lesser extent, Thomson for the first time expresses a wholly pessimistic view of human life. Not yet an atheist, he nonetheless feels keenly the grief that rises out of man's ignorance, that s® Works, I, 119.

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grief which confronts him with a mysterious futility and carries with it the consciousness of the ultimate unknown of life which led him to kinship with Leopardi. Before his thirtieth year Thomson was weary of living, weary of hoping, weary of thought and yearned for "divinely tranquil Death, / To come and soothe away my bitter pain".51 An event occurred in 1862 which was to have an important and far-reaching effect on the poet, for he was suddenly cut loose from the one steadying influence in his life, the army. Still lacking a purpose and a direction in life, he was discharged for a minor infraction of the rules,52 and he came again under the influence of one of the leading atheists of the day. Dobell suggests that the army acted against Thomson as much for his heavy drinking, which was even then becoming noticeable, as for his breaking a minor rule.53 The rest of his life, it might be noted, would be blighted by his addiction to alcohol. Following his discharge, Thomson sought out his friend Charles Bradlaugh for aid in seeking employment in London. Bradlaugh took him into his home, found him employment, and accepted his contributions to the National Reformer, but there is little reason to believe that Bradlaugh purposefully contributed to Thomson's final conversion to atheism. As we have seen, the poet had been moving gradually away from a belief in the sort of personal pseudo-religion expressed in his early poetry. His wavering beliefs were confronted by the whole-hearted, militant unbelief of a persuasive man whose arguments were well-tried and practised, a man, furthermore, in whose home he spent many happy years. Conjecturing as to what might have been is, of course, idle, but it is a fact that it was not until Thomson left Bradlaugh's home that his atheism and pessimism fused into such utterances of despair as "In the Room", "Insomnia", and The City of Dreadful Night. Perhaps it would not be wrong to assume, then, that Thomson, left to his own devices upon his discharge, would have reached the depths of despair and 51 32 53

Works, I, 121. Salt, Life, pp. 34-35. Dobell, "Memoir", I, xlix.

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disbelief at an even earlier date had he not had the warmth of a happy home life for at least a few years. Salt gives us a pleasant picture of Thomson's life with the Bradlaughs, reinforced by quotations from the descriptions contained in Hypatia Bradlaugh's reminiscences.54 During the time Thomson was intimate with this family - he lived with them until 1866 - and until the break with Charles Bradlaugh in 1875, he wrote regularly for the National Reformer, and he enjoyed his greatest surge of literary output, writing prose satires, poetry, and some attempts at narrative fiction. The great majority of the prose satires are on religious subjects and have "an assaulting power: the work that Swift might have produced had he been an atheist and not a Christian".55 The praise is, perhaps, too extravagant, for although "Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery" is one of Thomson's better satires, the only portion of the work reminiscent of Swift is the title. His best work as a religious satirist appears in "Christmas Eve in the Upper Circles" and "The Story of a Famous Old Jewish Firm", both of which appeared in the National

Reformer

in 1866. In "Christmas E v e " God, old,

crotchety, and worn out, is sick and tired of being overruled by his stuffed shirt of a son and wishes the "other party" would lend him some fire to warm his chilly abode. He decides not to take part in the Christmas festivities, sends for Dean Swift, parson Sterne, and (Friar John) Rabelais, and decides to drink something stronger than Lachrymae Christi with them for three times seven days until Christmas will be over. "The Story of a Famous Old Jewish Firm" noted above is an extended satire on the Christian religion which Thomson thought well enough of to have printed in pamphlet form. It follows the adventures of the firm, and those of its chief trader Jah, from the very 54 Salt, Life, pp. 36-44. Salt quotes liberally from Thomson's letters to Mrs. Bradlaugh, which indicates that Thomson was welcomed, not considered an intruder, in the home. He also refers to Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner's Life of Charles Bradlaugh, 2 vols. (London, 1896). 55 Benjamin Ifor Evans, English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century (London, 1933), p. 195.

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beginnings down through time to events contemporary with Thomson's own period. If satire is the blending of a critical attitude with humor and wit in the attempt to improve humanity, then the elements of excellent satire are present in his polemic prose, but too often Thomson is sad and morose over the state of society and slips into irony. G. W. Foote, who collected a number of Thomson's satires in a volume published in 1884, has this to say: Thomson's satire was always bitterest, or at any rate most trenchant, when it dealt with Religion, which he considered a disease of the mind, engendered by folly and fostered by ignorance and vanity. He saw that spiritual superstition not only diverts men from Truth but induces a slavish stupidity of mind, and prepares the way for every form of political and social injustice. He was an Atheist first and a Republican afterwards. He derided the idea of making a true Republic of a population besotted with religion, paralysed by creeds, cringing to the agents of their servitude, and clinging to the chains that enthrall them. 56

The major emphasis of this study is on Thomson's poetry, and the poetry of this period varies to a great extent from the orthodox rationalism of Bradlaugh and his followers, even to the point of injecting a hearty note to offset the deepening gloom of the poet. It is in this period, 1863-1865, that the so-called "happy" poems picturing Thomson's cockney acquaintances were written. "Sunday Up the River", which contains as section XV stanzas long popular as a song, especially for baritones, and "Sunday at Hampstead" are generally looked upon as depicting moments of joy in Thomson's life, and it may be that they do. But a closer examination of the poems indicates that the poet is merely indicating what he has seen, not what he feels. He was 58 G. W. Foote in the "Preface" to Satires and Profanities by James Thomson (London, 1884), p. vi. To say that Thomson is not Swiftian does not denigrate his ability as a satirist. Aside from the two works described above, the following reprinted in this volume are worthy examples of the best of Thomson's satire: "The Athanasian Creed", 1865; "Mr. Kingsely's Convertîtes", 1865; "The One Thing Needful", 1866; "Jesus: as God; as Man", 1866; and "A Word on Blasphemy", 1867. The satires were printed first in the National Reformer or G. W. Foote's Secularist on the dates noted.

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a recorder of the scene; he did not attempt to escape his pessimism by entering into intense physcial activity. "The Naked Goddess" (1886) and "Weddah and Om-el-Bonain" (1868) are more concerned with utilitarianism and romanticism than they are with religion, or the lack of it. Only one minor poem should be mentioned in this chapter, "Two Lovers" (1867), which tells the story of lovers who are separated by their religions the girl, a Christian, falls in love with a Mohammedan but they are parted - and each changes his faith at the moment of death to be with the other in eternity. Imogene Walker suggests that the poem is reminiscent of Browning's method in "The Statue and the Bust", which expresses a "belief in the value of a full life".57 This is true, but whereas Browning found his secure faith in love - love underlay the facts of life as he experienced them; love in the human heart was for him the best evidence of God's providential love - Thomson was not much of a believer in immortality. Whereas he expresses the wish that we live out our lives while we have the chance he also sees that it is as possible that we made the gods rather than they us, and if that is the case the lovers are "mocked by Doom in their heroic death". Browning, it may be added, seldom doubted, but when he did he sought "assurance in an illogical and paradoxical attainment of faith through doubt; St. Michael [in Bishop Blougram's Apology] stands the more secure just because he feels the serpent writhe beneath his feet".58 Among the poems of his period of maturity there is one which has definite autobiographical elements, and it is not the least curious. This is "Vane's Story" (1864), an amusing fantasy wherein Vane - possibly a diminutive of Vanolis, that is to say, Thomson himself - recounts a visit of his dead sweetheart, but the transition from fantasy to realism is not well contrived, giving the work a noticeable unevenness. The Rose of Heaven has returned to him to convert him from the evil of his religious doubtings. The ironic questions which he poses to her on the « Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 84. 58 A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 194«), p. 1400.

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inhabitants of the celestial regions, his sarcastic cynicism, alternate with developments of the most ardent lyricism and the fashion with which he suddenly terminates the poem by this very prosaic counsel which he gives to his sweetheart: "Early to bed and early to rise, / Is the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise!" 59 The poem, in my estimation, is marred by such crudities and such another as this in the Epilogue: (Grossness here indeed is regnant, But it is the grossness pregnant; Heine growled it, ending thus His wild Book of Lazarus.** The pessimism of Heine is here recalled, that pessimism so particular, half serious, half raillery, which will be discussed in a later chapter. His anti-Christian irony lacks dramatic force, for when Vane is speaking of work and of the labors of God's creation of the world, he says that on the seventh day he rested and blessed his work, And afterwards, we read, He cursed The work He thought so good at first; And surely Earth and Heaven evince That He has done but little since.81 But Thomson suffered, at this period, from fits of depression in which he felt keenly his unworthiness to associate with mankind; and some of the passages in "Vane's Story" wherein he recognizes the necessity of accepting his wretched life partially compensate for the crudity of the poem. At one point, near the beginning of the poem, he reminisces of half-remembered periods of frantic remorse but realizes that As well a thorn might pray to be Transformed into an olive tree; As well as weevil might determine To grow a farmer hating vermin; That 1 am that 1 am of God Defines no less a worm or clod.62 00 «« « •2

Works, Works, Works, Works,

I, I, I, I,

50. 50. 8. 19.

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This feeling of being an outcast from society prompts Dobell to call this work "the poet's Autobiography and Apologia" and draw a parallel between Thomson and Cowper, whose characters bore little resemblance but whose afflictions were remarkably similar. Both of these poets looked upon themselves as lost souls, and Thomson regarded "the world as a scene of black and immitigable despair".63 Thomson had doubts and fears as early as the 1850's and expressed them in his poems and prose, ever getting farther and farther from orthodox belief until the final culmination of his thinking is given voice in his greatest, most pessimistic, most atheistic poem, The City of Dreadful Night. In this poem his melancholy reaches its height, his atheism its clearest delineation. Imogene Walker tells us that this is the final step, "the conclusion at which he arrived after leaving orthodox religion, wandering through a maze of doubts and questionings, struggling in the fruitless search for a compromise".84 Even though Thomson seems to have finally reached assurance, it is difficult to estimate rightly this poem, because although it is by no means an artistic whole, being imperfect and fragmentary, yet the impression it leaves is the impression of the whole rather than of any of the parts. After reading it, we fail to find any one passage which quite comes up to the feeling which the poem has created; we seem to be perpetually just coming to it, and missing it. The reason appears to be that in Thomson the imagination so overwhelmed the other faculties that both the total unity of the subject and the working out of the details are lost in the dark atmosphere of despair that his imagination could cast around his object. Pessimism is no new thing, even in poetry; Clough expressed it in his scepticism, Arnold said it emotionally in "Dover Beach", and Tennyson represented a "nineteenth century sage caught between religion and science, faith and doubt, facing the newest discoveries of the century, at once excited and disturbed by them but ending virtually in a 'Lord, I believe; help thou M M

Bertram Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism, p. 15. Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 98.

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my unbelief". What was new to this period, or at least what is especially powerful in Thomson's poem, is the impatience, the refusal to take the sorry consolation that the secularist offers, the "cold rage" with which even the refuge of death is rejected. He has seen what life might be, and he cannot rest satisfied with his pessimism; T h e m a n speaks sooth, alas! the m a n speaks sooth W e have n o personal life beyond the grave; T h e r e is no G o d ; F a t e knows n o r w r a t h n o r r u t h : C a n I find h e r e the c o m f o r t which I crave? *

*

*

O u r life's a cheat, our death a black abyss: H u s h and be m u t e envisaging despair.— ββ

This passage, perhaps, does not represent Thomson's highest point in poetry but it indicates an interesting element in his thought. If he has reached the point of acceptance, the "comfort of certainty",67 why, then, the element of despair? It may be that, as Goodale says, "the author felt the need of the religious emotion which would have given his pessimism a cloak of mysticism".68 But the poet has no belief in personal immortality; he does not even have the cold comfort of the existentialist Sartre, who says that "man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also what he wills himself to be after his thrust toward existence".69 His destiny is deadly, "For in this Limbo we must ever dwell, /Shut out alike from Heaven and Earth and Hell" (Works, I, 139). es Willey, p. 53. 66 Works, I, 158, 160. 67 Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 98. Mrs. Walker says that this poem "is the expression of his acceptance of atheism. It is ironic that the comfort of certainty for which he sought so long should in the end have been derived from a negative c o n c e p t . . . found in atheism". The poet himself says that we knew nothing of life before birth and will know nothing of it after death, and "these thoughts . . . comfort me". (Works, I, 160.) 68 Ralph H. Goodale, "Pessimism in English Poetry and Fiction", Abstracts of Theses, VI (University of Chicago, 1927), 348. " Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York, 1957), p. 15.

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Thomson certainly lacked the introspective and happier paganism of a writer such as Swinburne, for instance, who could declare, "Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things".70 But Swinburne's beliefs are perhaps more correctly stated elsewhere than in the "Hymn of Man"; it may be that they are contained in the Prelude to Songs Before Sunrise in the line ending "man's soul is man's God still".71 Such a belief in the soul of man implies a freedom that ignores the fact of a paganism like Thomson's. Pessimism may be a false theory of life, but the misery which causes and is caused by it is in the world, and Man, before he can become the master of "Things", must master his own despair. Professor Fairchild has gotten to the heart of the matter when he says that "the subjectivism which enables happier romantics to assert the divinity of man has deprived Thomson of everything but 'infinite void space.' Perhaps the saddest feature of the poem is the absence of conviction that anything is really true or really false. The Inner Light has willed to extinguish itself".72 Thus, when the poet fails to realize that Christianity is strong and durable because Christ recognized the feelings of despair and misery that have always existed in human nature, and fails to believe that there is compensation after death for the woes of life, his pessimism has reached its nadir and his disbelief has become almost an affirmation. The only freedom is to end your life "when you will, /' Without the fear of waking after death" {Works, I, 156). Life had become for Thomson a series of trivial incidents so devoid of any ultimate purpose that he only infrequently roused himself to an awareness of existence. Thomson's life was not a direct downward plunge after writing The City of Dreadful Night, but the valleys of the downward curve were far deeper than the hills were high. For seven years after writing The City of Dreadful Night Thomson wrote no '« Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works of Algeron Charles Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (London, 1925), II, 169. 71 Ibid., p. 73. « Fairchild, IV, 473.

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poetry, busying himself with contributions to G. W. Foote's Secularist magazine and Cope's Tobacco Plant, a trade sheet with high literary value. Of the Secularist Thomson told W. M. Rossetti that the editors upheld secularism as a "practical rule of life, and as such quite distinct from Atheism and all other merely speculative systems".78 His only other work at this time consisted of contributions, and these infrequently, to a monthly periodical The Liberal. It was his hope that publication of his poetry in a medium having a wider scale of readership than that of the National Reformer would give him a greater range of reader and, of course, a larger public. Thomson wished this despite the forebodings that a poet with his connections and unorthodox views might find a public divided between hostility and support, with the weight of numbers on the former. Finally, after a six-year delay, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems was published by Reeves and Turner at the instigation of Bertram Dobell and had begun to pay its way in a few months, a circumstance almost unheard of for any but a few major writers. "Yet this vol. by an unknown writer, and burdened with the heavy dead weight of the sombre and atheistical & generally incomprehensible 'City of Dreadful Night', had paid its expenses".74 His book was followed by the second, Vane's Story, Weddah and Om-el-Bonain, and Other Poems, in October and by a later collection of prose works, the Satires and Profanities. With these fortunate occurrences to aid him, Thomson was slowly climbing out of the valley of despair into which the six-year delay had plunged him. He received the kind attentions of such men of letters as George Meredith, W. M. Rossetti, and Roden Noel; and he obtained an entry into a better class of magazines, the Fortnightly Review, the Cornhill, the Athenaeum, and the Weekly Dispatch.™ In February 1881, William Maccall received a letter from 73 From a letter to W. M. Rossetti, dated December 21, 1875, requesting that a notice of the Secularist's publication be placed in Rossetti's Academy. Quoted by Salt, Life, pp. 94-95. 74 From a diary entry by Thomson for August 17, 1880, quoted by Salt, Life, p. 115. 73 Salt, Life, p. 130.

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Thomson and comments that the poet "appeared to have escaped for a time from the dungeons and despairs of the Inquisition, and to be gladdened for an instant by the sun . . . and seemed to be almost hopeful and happy, and half ashamed to be".7® But the time in the sun was only an instant, and the poet himself seemed to be aware that his gleam of hope was but a transitory will-o'-the-wisp. It was during this time that he wrote "Insomnia", a cry of anguish from a tortured being, and "The Poet and His Muse", which calls on his muse to come and kiss my aching brow, And thus a little life and joy infuse

Into my brain and heart so weary now; Into my heart so sad with emptiness.77 But his muse comes to him from regions of death where no tales are told and no songs are sung; his muse is dead, and ghosts cannot sing. A more personal record of his feeling is contained in another poem of this period "To H. A. B." commemorating his forty-seventh birthday, in which Thomson says that when one is forty-seven years old "he looks not onward for his heaven, / The future is too black and cold" {Works, II, 59). Thomson had climbed only such a little way up the hill when he died of internal bleeding brought about by complete exhaustion on June 3, 1882. A man who knew him well during this last period said, "Let it not be misread as a harshness, or as a lightly tripped-off phrase, when I give out that, in all verity to me, his later life was a slow suicide, perceived and acquiesced in deliberately by himself".78 It may be that he no longer had the stamina to fight the disease that finally killed him, but during Thomson's final years, we hear of no recanting, of no death-bed conversion to a faith that he had denied. Nowhere is there evidence of any sort of affirmation or reaffirmation of belief such as we find in T. S. Eliot's steady transition from the desolation and barrenness of his Wasteland to his renewal of faith in the Four Quartets. 7 · William Maccall, "A Nirvana Trilogy; Three Essays on the Career of James Thomson", quoted by Salt, Life, p. 133. 77 Works, Π, 64. 78 G. Gordon Flaws, Secular Review (July 1, 1882), p. 137.

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A. W. Benn, in his History of English Rationalism, says that "in his last years Thomsom might be more accurately described as an agnostic than as an atheist; and agnosticism was in fact the point of equilibrium round which the oscillations of contemporary thought were moving".79 But Dobell tells us that Thomson denied in later life the basic tenets of Christianity and probably got his impetus from early doubts as a child. It is certain that he worried greatly about the difference in religious fervor between his sweetheart, Matilda Weiler, and him, for even then (about 1851-1853), "his opinions . . . diverged a good deal from the straiter paths of orthodox belief'. 80 It appears to me that Thomson, especially in his later years, asserted more than the idea that it is impossible for men to attain knowledge of God. Bradlaugh expressed the belief that to deny God was to deny nothing, but Thomson held and stated the atheistic belief that there is no God. In the "Proem" of January, 1882, six months before his death, he wrote: No God in all our universe we trace, No Heaven in the infinitude of space, No life beyond death—coming not too soon.81 This statement seems to express the literal meaning of the term "Atheistical belief".88 Thomson is, in fact, the poet of religious despair and one who reproached himself for his inability to believe. Because he could not accept the idea of a beneficent deity, he felt himself condemned to reject all conceptions of a divine order. We have been able to follow some of the strands of unbelief as they wound through the forty or so years between the early 1800's and 1880's and found that there was a decided undercurrent, if not a welling up, of religious doubt and unbelief in the England of that period. One of these strands we have been '» Benn, II, 383. 80 Dobell, "Memoir", I, xxvi. «ι Works, II, 62. 82 See the distinction of terms in the Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. by Dagobert D. Runes (Ames, Iowa, 1960), pp. 7 and 26.

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able to unravel in the life and poetry of James Thomson. Born into a home charged with a strongly emotional Calvinism, he suffered further alienation from the world by the sudden disabling of his father, the distressed circumstances of the family, and the early death of both parents. While engaged in at best an uncongenial occupation, he became the fast friend of a confirmed atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, and in 1853 fell deeply in love with a young and beautiful girl. It may be that Thomson had possessed some foreboding of the blow that was to be dealt him by the nonetheless unexpected and sudden death of his young love, Matilda Weiler.83 His life was blighted in that year by the death of his sweetheart, and the sorrow was to remain with him throughout. His youthful religious doubts have been traced through his early literary works, especially in such poems as "Suggested by . . . the Grande Chartreuse" which expresses his regret over the widening gulf between his beliefs and the central tenets of Christianity. In "The Doom of a City" there is a portent of the thoughts contained in his greater "City" poem, but he still evidences traces of a belief in the soul of man and a deity he prays is beneficent. "Mater Tenebrarum" for the first time emphasizes his pessimism. As his belief in God lessens, his pessimism and his despair gain strength until in "Vane's Story", in A Lady of Sorrow, and in "To Our Ladies of Death", they reach their full force and his "utter loneliness forlorn" is wholly accepted. All that remains is the final, almost triumphant declaration of his atheistic pessimism in The City of Dreadful Night. But the triumph of the disease of the mind is short-lived; the disease of the spirit flares briefly in "Insomnia" and in "The Poet and His Muse" to be forever extinguished by the disease of the body. 1,3

Dobell in the "Memoir", I, xxviii, mentions that a passage in the prose work A Lady of Sorrow indicates that perhaps Thomson had fears for his future happiness because he was aware of Matilda's delicate health.

III. THOMSON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PESSIMISM

O sad Fraternity, do I unfold Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore? Nay, be assured; no secret can be told To any who divined it not before: None uninitiate by many a presage Will comprehend the language of the message, Although proclaimed aloud for evermore. James Thomson (B.V.) from The City of Dreadful Night, Works, I, 124, Proem. O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief; A few short years must bring us all relief: Can we not bear these years of labouring breath? James Thomson (B.V.) from The City of Dreadful Night, Works, I, 156, section XIV.

Men, in the exercise of observation, reflection, and reasoning, cannot but endeavor to construct a philosophy of life. As soon as men begin to regard existence as a whole, to consider the world as a problem, to demand reasons for their own nature and experiences, for their own history and hopes, they must theorize. In fashioning for themselves a philosophy of life, men will of necessity be influenced by individual temperament; some are by nature cheerful, and some are by nature morose, and some may, although they carry the canker of black despair in their hearts, put forth a pleasant and amiable countenance to their friends even though they feel none of the pleasure themselves. Circumstances, too, both personal and domestic, both social and political, will largely affect their speculations and determine their conclusions. Despite the title, and the avowed subject of

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this chapter, this is not the place for a professional philosophic discussion. It is true that James Thomson had a "philosophy of life", but we cannot in all fairness judge Thomson, who was not a philosopher, by the standards of learned, professional philosophy. It is also true that much must be said of philosophy in this chapter, but we cannot forget that Thomson is an author and that this is primarily a literary study. Nineteenth century thinkers realized that human experience abounds in sorrow and privation, in perplexity and difficulty, in misfortunes and disappointments, in sins and fears. Man's body is often weak and unfit for the demands made upon it; his intellect is beset by doubts which cannot be solved; his heart has aspirations which cannot be satisfied; his lot is liable to vicissitudes, to calamities, to untimely end. What explanation can be given of our existence? Where shall its unity be grasped? Is a philosophy of life possible? As a matter of fact, philosophies of life have been worked out not only in the nineteenth century but also in all cultivated communities, both in ancient and modern times. They have differed from one another, both in the measure of fairness with which they have contemplated the facts of human existence and in the measure of sagacity and insight with which they have apprehended the true and divine meaning underlying what is apparent. The Victorians particularized by placing the theories of optimism and pessimism in opposition,1 and these doctrines, with the emphasis of course on the latter, will be discussed from a Victorian standpoint in so far as it is possible for a product of the twentieth century to do so. It is necessary to take this perspective and to take some pains doing it, for philosophic conclusions drawn during Thomson's period, in many instances, are no longer valid. The doctrine of optimism is a case in point. We have Browning's happy phrasing of the idea from the point of view of the little silk weaver in Pippa Passes, "God's in His heaven / All's right with the world", which was written about 1841; and the Reverend Thomson, writing in 1885, said that to the 1

See Walter E. Houghton, especially Chapter 3 "Anxiety", pp. 58-91 and Chapter 11 "Enthusiasm", pp. 297-304.

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advocates of optimism "this is the best of all possible worlds, life is fraught with happiness, man is capable of development in all excellence, and the prospect before the human race is bright and alluring".2 F. C. S. Schiller said that optimism should merely express the affirmative view of the question of the value of life, but that it "was originally the expression for a subtle philosophic doctrine, devised by Leibniz, which purported to show more. Leibniz undertook to prove, not merely that life was good, but also that ours was the best of all possible worlds".3 But Leibniz did not make it clear that the best of worlds was necessarily good. In his chapter on Enthusiasm Walter Houghton discussed a standard of judgement which he called "moral optimism" compounding "admiration, love, and hope" to form "greatness of human nature".4 But in comparing this judgment with the present-day attitude, he found an entirely different situation and showed the difference by describing Kingsley's popularity as a lecturer because of his optimistic enthusiasm and by noting that in 1923 Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale was wildly applauded for telling the graduates "to go out and meet the unseen with a leer".5 Pessimism is not so easily disposed of, however, despite the obvious conclusion that it represents the worst of all possible worlds.® It might be revealing to look at a number of definitions, for it is a subject not easily defined. Even in the wide use the term received in the nineteenth century, it was often more loosely employed. In popular language those persons were called pessimists who took a gloomy and despondent view of their own lot and of the prospects of society at large. Ralph Goodale in his article on pessimism in English literature tells us that the 2

J. Radford Thomson, p. 5. F. C. S. Schiller, Must Philosophers Disagree? (New York, 1934), p. 136. 4 Houghton, p. 297. 5 Houghton, p. 298. 6 Schiller on p. 143 states that it is impossible to establish either doctrine, "for what do we know about possible worlds other than the world (or worlds) we find ourselves actually immersed in, and about their possibilities of good and evil". He feels it is enough to face the question of the value of life. 3

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word pessimism "denoted merely an inclination toward discouragement, and was quite rare in that sense" prior to 1875. He goes on to say that the first writers in England on Schopenhauer used the word to describe the philosopher's doctrine, and "soon afterward we find it taken in this sense as denoting a settled belief that life is not worth the trouble". 7 Farther on in the same article Goodale finds three types of pessimism active in the last century - the pessimism of futility, of disillusion, and of pain. 8 They will be discussed farther on in this chapter. Mark Wenley in 1894 defined pessimism as "dissatisfaction with life, arising from the supposed emptiness of existence, hopelessness in the present and despair of the future". 9 Charles H. H. Wright, while not defining the term in his study of Ecclesiastes in 1883, did say that although many of the conclusions of the pessimist philosophers upon thorough study are illogical and unscientific, he "cannot but believe that their philosophy is but the natural outcome of atheism". 10 Finally, James Barlow, who made his study of pessimism in 1882, discussed the term as the opposite of optimism in Leibniz's sense but made the distinction that it signifies the worst of all possible, not imaginable, worlds. Such is the sense of the word, in general, when used in a Schopenhauerian connection, but it was Barlow's idea that the word represents "the preponderance of evil over good in the world". 11 Generally speaking, then, we can say that pessimism has no simple definition, but that it can be described as the name given to the doctrine that this is the worst of all possible worlds - a world in which human life necessarily contains more pain than pleasure, in which there is no prospect of improvement of the human lot, where life is not worth living, and possibly a world in which conscious existence must be regarded as the worst of all possible evils. There are more alternatives in life in the nineteenth century sense than just the choice between optimism and pessimism. 7

Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 242. Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 245. » Wenley, p. 1. 10 Wright, p. xii. u Barlow, p. 3. 8

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One might venture into any one of four classes of belief: there were those who held that life was good, and hoped that it may become still better; those who held that life was good, but feared its deterioration; those who held that life was evil, but hoped for its improvement; and those who held that life was evil, and likely to get worse. Thomson during his lifetime placed himself in the fourth category; witness these lines from an unpublished poem written some time after The City of Dreadful Night: What profit from all life and lives on earth? What good, what use, what aim? What compensation for the throes of birth And death in all its frame, What consciousness life had ever paid its cost? From nothingness to nothingness—all lost! 12

If the lines from the poem are combined with these from a letter to George Eliot, "I have no Byronic quarrel with my fellows, whom I find all alike crushed under the iron yoke of Fate, and few of whom I can deem worse than myself, while so many are far better", 13 we have all the elements necessary to make up the three types of pessimism Goodale found in the nineteenth century. The pessimism of futility "is due to the fact that the reason has no power to establish values. It is commonest in persons whose vital forces are jaded",14 people whose logic can no longer see the worth of accomplishment. His second type, the pessimism of disillusion "results from the human tendency 12 This stanza is quoted from Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 156. Mrs. Walker assigns the poem to "the three evenings of September 16, 17, and 18, 1876", whereas Dobell in the "Memoir", I, lxxiv, says that the poem was composed on the same evenings, but gives 1878 as the year, and he gives this same date in The Laureate of Pessimism, p. 35, which he claims to have considerably revised from the "Memoir". The exact dating of the poem is not material, for by its content and structure it obviously follows the great "City" poem. Thomson asked that it not be published because he felt that it contained more truth than poetry, but he was nothing loath to publish his work from the final poetic outburst of 1881. 13 The letter is a reply to George Eliot's commenting upon his "City" poem and is published in its entirety in a number of works, including Dobell's The Laureate of Pessimism, p. 23. 14 Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 245.

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to place final value in some ideal object - in the sentiment of power or ecstasy, the idea of God, or of eternal life, for instance. If this object proves illusory, the person is unable to substitute another; he is left with the pessimism of futility, but with the added pain of disappointment. . . . The pessimism of pain is due to the impression that there is an unbearable surplus of pain in the world".13 Thus far in this chapter I have attempted to point out that this should not be a professional philosophic discussion because Thomson was not a philosopher and because this work is intended to be a literary study. I have also brought together several nineteenth century definitions of the term pessimism, and attempted to restrict the discussion to a Victorian point of view. It is common knowledge that James Thomson's work is the ultimate in the literary expression of the idea, but just what does the idea of pessimism actually entail? What is its history, its exponents, its ramifications? To answer these questions we must look briefly at a theory which puts in a claim (not presently, of course, but in the Victorian period) to be the accepted system of the universe. We must sketch its beginnings, its development in England, a number of its greatest philosophical as well as literary proponents, and one of its greatest themes — is life worth living? Such examples as are taken from the works of Thomson may seem to be isolated, chosen carefully from context to "prove" something already accepted; but the whole of Thomson's inner life as expressed by his works after the 1860's is pessimistic, making selection at best an arbitrary process. I do not believe it possible to show the whole man by exhibiting snippets from here and there, but it is possible to learn a great deal by a careful study of that from which the man stems. The philosophy of pessimism, though no longer valid, was in the nineteenth century the result of matured reflection on the graver problems of metaphysics, ethics, and religion. We have seen in the chapter on religious pessimism the disastrous results attendant upon the discrediting of religious authority, and history 15

Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 245.

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has provided a succession of prophets, saints and poets for whom the prevalence of pain and sin was an insoluble or overwhelming mystery. The writer of Job, whose days are spent without hope, has already been mentioned, as has Koheleth, the probable author of Ecclesiastes, who saw no profit under the sun. Perhaps contemporary with the Biblical writings was the Brahman philosophy of the farther East which held that the complete cessation of pain was the earthly end of man.18 At later time and under widely different circumstances, Stoic and Epicurean optimism gave way beneath the pressure of events. Suicide, which will be mentioned in the discussion of the value of life, ended man's quest for freedom. Once more, Gnosticism, concurring in the Platonic notion that matter is necessarily accompanied by evil, gave birth to the curious doctrine of God's fall. The whole creation suffered pain because the Creator, by his very act of creation, committed sin. Manichaeism and Augustinianism, each in its own way, sought to explain or to eliminate evil. The so-called dualism of medieval civilization was largely due to a protest against the world and the ills inseparable from it. And its implied conclusion, that if creation was a blunder, procreation was a crime, strangely foreshadowed some of the Victorian pessimistic deductions. It certainly foreshadowed many of the thoughts contained in The City of Dreadful Night. The misery of life, however, did not assert itself unmistakably until near the close of the eighteenth century. Rousseau was the herald of a widespread movement; his Reveries reveal a mental state through which many have since passed. "Every finite Satisfaction by the very fact that it is finite leaves [the Rousseauist] unsatified".17 Sensibility became morbid, egoism determined to be self-sustained, nature willing itself unnatural 16 See M. B. Emeneau, "Indian Philosophy", Collier's Encyclopedia, 1954 ed., X, 450-453. On p. 453 Emeneau describes the categories of knowledge which must be understood by man in order to break the ties to the world. When they are thoroughly learned, "action for the fulfillment of desires then ceases, and with it rebirth. The resulting state is one of absolute painlessness". By rebirth, he does not mean in the sense of rebirth into this world but in the sense of being born out of the transmigrations suffered in this world. 17 Babbitt, p. 236.

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these were the legacy of the Rousseauist. "The Rousseauist seeks happiness and yet on, his own showing, his mode of seeking it results, not in happiness but in wretchedness". 18 It has been said that the optimism of Leibnitz,19 eagerly embraced both by the Deist philosophers and the Christian theologians of the eighteenth century, produced a strong reaction in an opposite direction among philosophic thinkers. Several leading poets of the succeeding age, such as Byron and Shelley in England, Heine and others in Germany, were deeply imbued with a dislike of the then prevalent optimism, and their poems often complain of the misery of human life. Some of them, as we shall see, went even further; and even Herder in some of his poems, notably "Das Ich", expressed sentiments not very different from those under discussion. Goodale holds that although Schopenhauer published his World as Will and Idea as early as 1818, he was little known in England until the seventies and an English author could hardly "have heard of the philosopher before 1872, nor have thought seriously of him until 1876, unless he had a special interest in Germany". 20 Thomson manifestly had just such an interest in German, for he began a serious program of foreign language study, beginning with German, as early as 1854.21 There is no certain evidence that Thomson was well-acquainted with the pessimistic questions then coming into England, but it is certain that he translated the works of Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Heine, and the Italian Giacomo Leopardi. There is sufficient evidence in Thomson's writings that he had a thorough knowledge and an excellent understanding of formal philosophy. Two instances only, I think, will be enough to indicate his interest and understanding. In Thomson's translation of Leopardi is his essay on the "Parallel between Pascal and Leopardi" in which he indicates a close sympathy with Pascal's study of man and his spiritual problems, and at one « Babbitt, p. 237. 18 See the interesting, and contemporary Victorian, discussion in Sully, Pessimism: A History, to which he devotes all of Chapter Three. 2 « Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 242. 21 Salt, Life, p. 18.

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point he asks, "What can be more crushing than this 'tragedy of a powerful and energetic spirit in an imbecile body'?"22 Thomson's essay on Shelley was published in 1860 and probably written a year or two earlier; it is one of the earliest estimates of Shelley's work unreservedly praising the poet. In answer to the question as to whether or not Shelley's treatment of his favorite subjects is great-minded, he says this of the poet: "he proclaims enthusiastically the Idealism of Plato, of Spinoza, of Berkeley, of Kant. Let those who so stolidly sneer at this, expound by what possibility spirit and matter can influence each other without one attribute in common; or let them demonstrate the existence of matter apart from our perception; or let them show, if there be one existing substance, that it is such as we should call matter rather than spirit. How glorious are his expositions of this philosophy in the "Ode to Heaven" and the speeches of Ahasuerus in "Hellas"!23 At any rate, Thomson in his twenties had little use for "old Schopenhauer", and in 1876 he depreciates the "builders of systems" in his essay "On the Worth of Metaphysical Systems".24 Perhaps Thomson was caught up in the nascent English pessimism that Goodale hypothesizes came to the surface in the middle 1800's and demanded Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, both of whom had to wait until the seventies for an English audience. "But much more important is the fact that when English pessimism became 22 James Thomson, Essays, Dialogues, and Thoughts of Giacomo Leopardi, ed. by Bertram Dobell (London, [1905]), p. 91. 29 James Thomson, "Shelley (Essay)", Shelley, a Poem, p. 19. It is in the essay on Shelley together with "The Poems of William Blake", written in 1864, and also included in this volume, and in section iii of "Open Secret Societies", 1865, that Mrs. Walker finds the greatest expression of Thomson's pantheistic belief that reality comprise a single being of which all things are projections and asserts the essential immanence of God in the creatures. See Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 37. 24 Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 257. Goodale also calls attention to a quote in Salt's Life from an essay in which Thomson wrote on Schopenhauer "as evidence of a dislike for the philosopher's 'sullenness and vanity' ", but Goodale could not find the article and an application to H. S. Salt revealed that the biographer no longer had any record of it. Even though Thomson may have had a dislike for Schopenhauer, it is at least negative evidence that he was well-enough acquainted with the German's work for him to form an opinion.

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vocal in 1879 it stated its own griefs in its own way . . . In particular, the writers of the seventies and later knew that the sensitive minds of their poets had for a long period been more or less affected by what they had only recently learned to call pessimism".25 Goodale also points out in the same article that information on Buddhism was entering England after 1850, and the misery of human life is the starting point of Buddhism as well as of western pessimism.2® The philosophic background which gave a ready audience to Schopenhauer in England must be mentioned briefly here, but the emphasis willl be placed on the philosophers who led to the acceptance of Schopenhauerian doctrine, not on a history of the philosophy of the period. Three great rationalistic systems dogmatically affirm one or another among the more impressive aspects of the universe: Descartes (d. 1850) insists upon the originality of self - that is, upon its difference from every other; Spinoza (d. 1677) sees nothing but the essential oneness of things as members of a vast unity which endows them with the meaning that they have; and Leibniz (d. 1716) in a manner combines both these conceptions, but he adds another of his own. He is a rational idealist impressed with the difference among things. Thus, the Englishman George Berkeley's (d. 1753) final universalistic idealism points to a synthesis in which the interrelation of thought and being may be set forth without prejudice to the positive existence of either element. In short, the nineteenth century value of Berkeley's philosophy, taken as a whole is that it supplies a practical exposure of the pessimistic fallacy that things and principles are identical, have no individual persistence of their own, because they happen to be related to one another. " Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 244. 26 Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 242. There is a strong point of resemblance between philosophical pessimism and the Buddhist belief that there is unhappily a great preponderance of evil over good in the world. Buddhism, aligned with the doctrine of Brahma, holds the world unreal and illusory and teaches man to seek changelessness and peace in a state of nirvana. Buddha was a theologian whose Gospel was for sages; Schopenhauer was a philosopher whose teachings were for humanity.

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David Hume (d. 1776), the great Scotch empirical skeptic, seized upon the phenomenalism of Berkeley and converted it to the very end that Berkely dreaded most, that is skepticism, by denying the validity of universal truths. Hume's skepticism had considerable influence on a German philosopher of Scottish descent, Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), by giving Kant good reason for distrusting physical science as a complete explanation of knowledge. The sole defensible theory that can be deduced from Kant, accordingly, is that, as man never tastes perfection, but remains always and everywhere imperfect, the world lies under the compulsion of some irrational Power; it goes on, perhaps, but it does not proceed in any accountable fashion. Schopenhauer's interpretation of Kant may be summarized as follows: the world is my representation. To declare that an objects exists "on its own account" in separation from my thought is an absurdity. To say that my selfhood exists apart from objects in relation to which it makes itself known is, in the same way, impossible. Experience is, therefore, neither of mind nor matter, but of representations (Vorstellungen) which may be referred, if we so choose, to one or to the other.87 Of this Mark Wenley says, "a more drastic system of nihilism could not be devised".28 According to Schopenhauer's theory, then, Will is all from the beginning; there is nothing external to it. Whence then its motive to definite revelation? Here Schopenhauer falls back upon Platonic mysticism; as it rises higher, in organism and selfconsiciousness, Will is causally directed in each operation by archetypal ideas. Behind the imperfect phenomena in the world are pure ideas - Man's body, for example, is a manifestation of Will; therefore it is a mere idea, as it is only the mode in which the Will represents itself in the view of the intellect. Goodale, writing in the twentieth century, agrees with the notion of the "blind, heedless, and remorseless" will, and tells us 27

See the very clear discussion of this material in Benn, History of English Rationalism, I, Chapters IV-VI, and the pertinent chapters in B. A. G. Fuller's A History of Philosophy, 3rd ed., revised by Sterling M. McMurrin (New York, 1955). 28 Wenley, p. 226.

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that "the world is discordant and painful because the central Will is irrational".29 However, by a negation of the limits of reason, that is, of personality, artistic genius is able for a moment to identify itself with the archetypal idea, and thus to escape from the dominion of Will, but such supreme moments are few and only for the select. The other escape is to die, because death, being the negation of individuality, is the one good in life; death alone can in any measure redeem us from the evil, which is the very essence of our present existence. Schopenhauer's doctrine therefore, ends with a negation, for it can only speak of what is denied, surrendered; what is won can only be described as nothing. "Hartmann's theory is similar to Schopenhauer's. He gives his Creative Power reason as well as will, however, though he believes that the will has come to act alone, with disastrous results".30 No attempt can be made in this paper to enter into Hartmann's vast scheme, despite the fact that his Philosophy of the Unconscious is itself but an ouline.31 Suffice it to say that his pessimism originates somewhat as follows. When Will, in its passionate desire for self-satisfaction, threw out the world, Intellect had not yet illuminated it. And at a much later period, when Intellect - in consciousness - was so far freed from Will as to be able to view the universe, the only opinion which it could form was that it was bad. Hartmann, while absolute in his pessimism, is also unequivocal in his justification of life, and in this is opposed to Schopenhauer. These theories emerged at a time when such deftly articulated schemes - both men had a highly developed literary style - came as a soothing remedy to those oppressed by the mystery of life. Life is; let it not be and all will be well. Let life not be, then, for to live signifies to have wants, signifies suffering. Living implies having a body with the iron law " Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 245. Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 245. In its author's own words, taken from the Preface of the French translation, "La Philosophie de l'Inconscient n'est pas un système; elle se borne à tracer les linéaments principaux d'un système. Elle n'est pas la conclusion, mais la programme d'une vie entière de travail", quoted by Wenley, p. 285. 30

31

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of preserving and protecting it against a thousand dangers and pains. Then there is the preservation of the family, which brings every day new sorrows and demands, calling for the exercise of all the powers, though with the full conviction, however, that we must at last lose the game, and that one is steering steadily towards death. If a man casts off all other burdens, he becomes a burden to himself; when cares vanish, man is consumed by ennui, and the greatest efforts have to be made to kill time. Ennui leads to the question: What is the value of life? Schiller calls it "the critical question, par excellence, about life, which marks our characteristic attitude of human reflexion, as contrasted with the unquestioning acceptance of animal instinct".32 Suicide is condemned as prompted, not by hatred of life, but by hatred of pain. It is an obvious question to ask: if existence be so evil, and if death be annihilation, why does not the pessimist put an end, by suicide, at once to life and to suffering? But his answer is, that the suicide is a witness to the value of life, and to the evil of pain only, for he slays himself - not to escape life but to avoid pain. Physical suicide is vain; moral suicide should be tried. Let a man be truly wise, and see the vanity of willing; let him by meditation seek annihilation, which alone is blessedness, and enter Nirvana, which is eternal rest. Thomson discusses the problem in at least two of his poems, "In the Room" and The City of Dreadful Night, and experiences the sense of annihilation in the prose A Lady of Sorrow. When the poet went on his American journey to Colorado in 1872, he left "In the Room" behind to be published in the National Reformer.39 The room is just such that Thomson himself had been inhabiting, small, dingy, with few articles of furniture other than a mirror, a dresser, a work table, and a bed. Late in the evening 32

Schiller, p. 142. In a letter to William Michael Rossetti, dated August 5, 1872, sent from Central City, Colorado, Thomson said that the piece had been published on May 19 and hoped that Rossetti had received a copy. It was written, then, in a particularly black period of his life just prior to the lift he received from the American trip. The letter is included among a number to Rossetti concerning Shelley's poetry in Shelley, a Poem, ed. by Bertram Dobell and privately printed, London, 1884, p. 88. 33

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these pieces of furniture bemoan the fact that their present tenant is much less pleasant in his life and habits than the girl who used to live there. The bed announces that the present tenant lies dead, and an empty phial attests to the fact that he is a suicide; the he became an it: It lay and preached, as dumb things do, More powerfully than tongues can prate Though life be torture through and through, Man is but weak to plain of fate: The drear path crawls on drearier still To wounded feet and hopeless breast? Well, he can lie down when he will, And straight all ends in endless rest.34 Man is able, then, to end his life when he will, but that is no answer which raises questions of even greater dread. Does death bring true oblivion, or is the unknown future - if there is a future - perhaps worse than the present life, no matter how wretched? To some of the doomed inhabitants of the City of Night death does bring oblivion, for through the city runs the River of the Suicides in which "night by night some lorn wretch overweary" finds eventual peace. The question is asked: "When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long,/Why actors and spectators do we stay?" {Works, I, 166), and a number of answers are given. Some stay "To see what shifts are yet in the dull play/For our illusion", while others merely refrain to prevent the grief of the "dear foolish friends" they leave behind. But why take all the trouble to bring on death, for "it is but for one night after all:/What matters one brief night of dreary pain?" {Works, I, 166). There are answers here but none to tell us which, if any, Thomson believed in; and if this poem were his only utterance, it might be easy to believe that he did let himself die by his utter lack of self-regard during his last days. A number of other works of his, however, bear witness that he had the capacity to enjoy life, and the true pessimist is anxious not only to get rid of existence for himself but is actuated still more by a desire to benefit his species. It has been said that he was not a pessimist in the true 94 Works, I, 182.

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sense, that he "did not regard human life as universally, inherently, necessarily evil".35 Thomson states that he is one of a very small minority but nowhere indicates that he wishes to undergo the misery of life in order to benefit mankind by inducing it to deny the will to live. Mrs. Walker believes that Thomson did not commit suicide because he was one of those curious to see what "shifts" life still might have in store,38 and I concur. At the same time, however, I feel it should be pointed out that the conviction was growing in Thomson that all work, all activity, all production was more than useless; and when that point is reached, death has surely come even though the body continues to function. In Section II of The City of Dreadful Night Thomson answers the question: Is life worth living? Take a watch, erase The signs and figures of the circling hours, Detach the hands, remove the dial-face; The works proceed until run down; although Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.37 The theory developed in the Hindu Brahmanas between the eighth and fifth centuries B. C. is that the world and all things in it are Maya or illusion. Man must rid himself of the deceiving idea that he exists as an individual; he must strive to merge himself consciously in Brahma with whom all things are really one. It is pessimistic in character in that it holds that man's lot is one of deception and pain, and teaches him that one earthly effort is to be rid of pain. He is also taught that his soul suffers a seemingly endless repetition of incarnations (or transmigrations) until it cries out for annihilation of self, that changelessness and peace which is reached in the Buddhist nirvana. It is almost as if Thomson were crying out in A Lady of Sorrow for the final oblivion and release from worldly pain, which is promised by the shadow in the third part of the work. He is first visited by an Angel who promises him comfort and a reunion with his lost love, then a Siren, symbolic of his useless despair, and finally by » Benn, II, 382. M Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 110. « Works, I, 129.

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the Shadow. But it was the Angel in Part I, who, he says, "annihilated from me the huge city and all its inhabitants; they, with their thoughts, passions, labours, struggles, victories, defeats, were nothing to m e ; . . . She annihilated so utterly from me the mighty metropolis, whose citizens are counted by millions, that the whole did not even form a dark background for the spiritual scenes and personages her spell continually evoked".88 With the three passages quoted above, especially, Thomson indicates his quietistic pessimism, the pessimism of quiet resignation, of internal recollection of the mind employed in contemplating and submitting to the Will. Here he comes as close as the non-professional mind can come to the pessimism associated with the name of Schopenhauer. Goodale, however, finds only in A Lady of Sorrow the "nearest approach to Schopenhauer's thought" in the works of Thomson. He chooses an introdutory passage "in which Thomson preaches of the beauty of self-renunciation in a world whose essence is death, and implies the unity of all beings in a 'general soul' ". so The passage is a part of the explanation to the reader that the story following was given into the hands of the "writer" by his friend "Vane", who says that "he was at that time wont to declare that he believed in the soul's immortality as a Materialist believes in the immortality of matter: he believed that the universal soul subsists for ever . . . he no more believed in the immortality of any particular soul than the Materialist believes in the immortality of any particular body".40 Although I agreed with Mrs. Walker's supposition that Thomson did not commit suicide because he was curious to see what turn life might next take, I also feel that there is a far deeper and more important reason for his remaning alive - he had that will to be, that will to live which, in the Schopenhauerian ethic, is the cause of all struggle, sorrow, and evil in the world. He knew that the struggle for existence was a struggle which man is bound to lose at last, and he peopled his city with 88 James Thomson, "A Lady of Sorrow", Essays and Phantasies (London, 1881), p. 5. M Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 258. 40 James Thomson, Essays and Phantasies, pp. 1-2.

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those "great in rank and wealth and power . . . And some [who] are poor and mean, who . . . accept all dearth/Of body, heart and soul".41 Man must lose the struggle at last and death must conquer all, making this the worst of all possible worlds. Such is the very essence of Schopenhauer's, and of Thomson's, pessimism. The problem which now confronts us is whether or not Thomson inculcates the idealist appearance-reality (phenomena-noumena) in The City of Dreadful Night.*2 Just as the Shadow in A Lady of Sorrow had "annihilated" Thomson apart from the sights and sounds of the city, so in the City of Night, as Professor Foakes notes, "the dwellers of the city are at once phantom-like and h u m a n ; . . . if in one sense they seem substantial enough, in another, they are 'the flitting Shadows of a dream' ".4S The phantoms of the dreams and the dream itself recur throughout the poem and underlie the description of the city which dissolves with the coming of the dawn "like a dream of night away". Who can "discern that dream from real life is aught? For life is but a dream whose shapes return, some frequently, some seldom" (Works, I, 125). To Professor Foakes in his study the duality of the city represents a "very real condition of men in urban society, the isolation of the individual in the crowd, and a symbol, inherited from the Romantic poets, of a spiritual desert".44 Thomson also saw two aspects of his city, "a terrible and fantastic imaginary world, a limbo of the lost, set in a symbolic landscape and peopled with unreal symbolic figures, and as a real city with its elm-lined river, its streets and squares, its human life [which] are confused and mingled in the poem".45 41

Works, I, 148. It is necessary to give credit here to Professor R. A. Foakes's The Romantic Assertion: A Study in the Language of Nineteenth Century Poetry. Although Professor Foakes states in his Preface (p. 7) that his intention is to "examine the way in which language is used" in the nineteenth-century poetry of metaphor, it is his treatment of the duality, the unreality-reality, of Thomson's city which set me on the track of the poet's idealism. The section on Thomson's masterpiece includes pp. 169-179, and the passage pertinent to my study comprises pp. 172-173 of Foakes's study. 4S Foakes, p. 172. 44 Foakes, p. 173. 45 Foakes, p. 172. 42

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There are other sections to be noted which show that Thomson had two distinct perceptions of the dry neatly interwoven to present a real-unreal representation. At the cathedral in section XII the dreams turn to daydreams as a hooded figure asks each supplicant who enters from whence he came. The answers are real enough; one, for instance, says he came From preaching to an audience fired with faith The Lamb who died to save our souls from death, Whose blood hath washed our scarlet sins wool-white. 46

and, as each of the other entrants do, he ends with the line, "I wake from daydreams to this real night". "The 'daydreams' are various modes of living, those of the poet, ruler, painter, warrior and the like, so that by this device dream and reality are transposed, and the city becomes more real than real life".47 Although the city is a place of solitude, the wanderer meets many during his walks, suicides, the men in the cathedral; and the ear becomes familiar with "the silence vast and deep", while a wagon crashes by on heavy "ironshod feet". And the shades are real men, too, for "the weirdest thing is felt least strange beneath the lawless law/Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king" {Works, I, 131).

Here then, it seems to me, is the careful interweaving of Thomson's apparent world, phenomena; it is his conception of things. It is the formal structuring of reality which we explain sufficiently for our needs as space, time, causality. But there is a real world for Thomson, too, a noumenal world, which is not idea but will. The world-will is very active in Thomson and in us; it is very hard upon us; it makes us strive ceaselessly for what we can never find, that is, peace, rest, and enduring satisfaction. Thus it is a source of pain. Man may find temporary and partial relief from this pain by contemplating works of art. But a more lasting relief comes from resisting Will; from the effort to kill within oneself the desire for continued life, health, property, comfort, friends; from refusing the work of seeking to attain such goals " Works, I, 150. " Foakes, p. 172.

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as eternal rest, heaven, moral ideals. It is this Will that Schopenhauer declared was the very essence of things. This Will is not a force guided by intelligence or reason; it is a blind, irresistible drive. It is not a striving for something as a goal; it is a drive that exists for itself: He circled thus for ever tracing out The series of the fraction left of Life; Perpetual recurrence in the scope Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope.48 The goal of Thomson, as of Schopenhauer, is not to achieve or attain to reality through exercising the Will which constitutes the essence of existence, but to escape that reality through thwarting the Will and attaining thereby non-being or nothingness. Will is the source of all being, the world has come into existence because Will is. The supreme power of the Universe, manifesting itself as the "will to live", is at the root of all evil. To resist death is alike a necessity and a misfortune. The individual man is impelled by the great natural force to dread and to avert the cessation of being, and to use means for the preservation of life - to provide nourishment for the body, and to repel disease and death. Nature thus secures the perpetuation of human wretchedness. To enumerate all the symptoms of pessimistic philosophy which appeared in the nineteenth century is impossible and unnecessary. It must suffice to refer to only one other, the poetical pessimism of the Italian Giacomo Leopardi. Leopardi was born ten years after Schopenhauer and died before the age of forty (1798-1837). In his youth he was devoted to study and acquired considerable classical learning; he was regarded as a man of genius from whom great things were hoped. Though of a noble family, his means were very narrow, and circumstances no doubt concurred with wretched health to sadden and darken his views of life. His reputation rests upon his original poetry, 48 Works, I, 130. The author appended a note to this stanza as follows: "Life divided by that persistent three = LXX/333 = 210". Actually the answer is .21 with the fraction one-third remaining, which simply becomes a series of "three's".

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his translations, and upon some critical works. He himself denied that his philosophical opinions were the result of his misfortunes.49 In 1830, when dedicating his Canti to his Tuscan friends, he thus referred to his ill-health and disappointments: "My sufferings are incapable of increase; already my misfortune is too great for tears. I have lost everything, and am but a trunk that feels and suffers".50 Leopardi was not only a poet who suffered; he was a philosopher despite the fact that his philosophy rested on no metaphysical basis. Soured and dissatisfied, Leopardi evidently embodied in his letters, his dialogues, and his poems, his distorted views of life. Nothing in literature is more sad than his language regarding human existence. Infelicità - misery - is to him, the only explanation which can be given to human affairs; this is universal and irremediable - it is our only certainty. He felt that the happiest state attainable is not to live, that the brute and the plant are happier than man. Charles Edwardes, who made the standard translation of the Essays and the Dialogues, summarized Leopardi's philosophy as follows: "The universe is an enigma totally insoluble. The sufferings of mankind exceed all good that men experience. Progress, or as we call it, civilization, instead of lightening man's sufferings, increases them; since it enlarges man's capacities for suffering, without proportionately augmenting his means of enjoyment".51 Leopardi cannot be suspected of affectation. We can plausibly regard his distressing emotions and his pessimistic doctrine as largely the consequence of bodily weakness and pain, and of disappointed social and literary ambitions, unchastened by any faith in Divine Providence, unrelieved by any prospect of a happier life in the future. He was conscious of abilities which his circumstances would not " James Thomson's "Memoir of Leopardi" in his translation of Essays, Dialogues and Thoughts of Giacomo Leopardi, pp. 1-91, says that at nineteen Leopardi spoke of the "obstinate, black, and barbarous melancholy" which devoured and destroyed him; when twenty he wrote that he "passed years so full of bitterness, that it seems impossible for worse to succeed them" and later he said he was "weary of life, and weary of the philosophy of indifference, which is the only cure for misfortune and ennui" (p. 6). 50 James Thomson's "Memoir of Leopardi", p. 11. 61 Edwardes, p. xi.

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allow to develop and mature. He loved apparently in vain even as did James Thomson.52 Thomson's debt to Leopardi is well-known and accepted from the phrases and lines found in The City of Dreadful Night to his translation of the Italian poet's "Operette Morali" and "Pensieri". Thomson also acknowledged it in the fourteen lines from Leopardi with which he prefaced The City of Dreadful Night, the last two of which are: "Pero ch'esser beato/Nega ai mortali anega a'morti il fato (But in order to be happy/Fate denies it both to the living and the dead). Thomson further dedicated his first volume of poetry, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (1880) to "the younger brother of Dante, Giacomo Leopardi, a spirit as lofty, a genius as intense, with a yet more tragic doom". Mrs. Walker in her study of Thomson says that she is less interested in Thomson's debt of poetry than she is in the amount of influence the Italian might have had on his thinking and in the possibility that Thomson's knowledge of Leopardi might have started him writing The City of Dreadful Night. She notes that many of Leopardi's extremely negative attitudes can be found in Thomson's works before he could have read Leopardi, in "The Doom of a City", "To Our Ladies of Death", and that these ideas were considerably expanded in A Lady of Sorrow and "Vane's Story" at a date when it was possible for Thomson to have become acquainted with the Italian. Her conclusion is that "when Thomson did start reading Leopardi he became interested not because he found new ideas, but because he discovered affirmation of his own. And it may well have been this affirmation, this authority, which so strengthened and encouraged him in his ideas that he started 'The City' ",53 A work omitted from Mrs. Walker's 52 The story of Leopardi's unhappy love is told in Iris Origo's biography, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (London, 1953), p. 48 ff. There is no parallel between the story of the loves of Leopardi and of Thomson. Leopardi's affair had a more Petrarch-Laura or even Dante-esque flavor, for thé only time his inamorata saw Leopardi was during a brief visit to his home in Rencanti. She saw only a small, self-effacing youth in priest's garb deep in his studies for the priesthood. His own account is contained in his diaries. M Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 89. Mrs. Walker's excellent discussion is contained principally between pp. 87-89, but there are other

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critical bibliography is Lyman A. Cotten's "Leopardi and The City of Dreadful Night", in which Cotten analyzes Leopardi's influence on Thomson's chief poem, the existence of the influence being already established by Thomson's dedication at the beginning of the poem. Cotten draws several parallels between the two men. Each felt a horror of his native town, and Cotten quotes a letter by Leopardi in which he says that he must return to the "dreadful night of Rencanti". 54 Both men shared a melancholy, a lost beloved, a conclusion that "all is nothing", and they shared "a condition of both body and mind which has been given many names: the medieval acedia, Ecclesiastes' 'Vanity and vexation of spirit', taedium vitae, William James's anhedonia, the German Weltschmerz, and Leopardi's noia".55 Both men believed that the primal curse of man is consciousness; they both believed that the mechanistic indifference of nature to man's desires is a basic source of misery; and both men felt that they were "Irresistibly impelled to accept" their doctrines of despair. Of interest is the fact that Schopenhauer, who denied the existence of happiness for man, felt that the best man could hope for was an occasional relief from pain: "life is a path of red-hot coals, with a cool spot here and there".59 Because of his belief that this is the worst of possible worlds, Schopenhauer was saddened by the pain that men must endure through the harsh and profitless drive of world-will. However, there are no "cool spots" in the complete bitterness of Leopardi and few in Thomson's City: I never knew another man on earth But had some joy and solace in his life, Some chance of triumph in the dreadful strife: My doom has been unmitigated dearth. * • *

references to Leopardi in her treatment that indicate Thomson's debt to Leopardi even though she disclaims that as a purpose. 54 Cotten, p. 678. " Cotten, p. 685. M Quoted by Barlow, p. 11.

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The world rolls round for ever like a mill... Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death." In Thomson's City, as in his world, thought makes the wanderer sensible of dissatisfaction and pain and rouses in him desires, demands, dreams, and ideals to which he cannot attain. And in this sense of manifold disillusionment all the countless woes of man lie in germ. Pessimism and the problem of pessimism seem to arise from the conflict and disagreement of the real with the idea. The consciousness of this disillusionment may be so intense as to lead to a settled conviction that the conflict and disagreement are irremediable, that disillusionment is the primal and the final fact of life. This conviction, if reasoned, provides the texture of pessimistic philosophy, which may go to such an extremely painful sense of despised actuality that the cherished ideal is pronounced illusory; the world is conceived in terms which consistently preclude the reality of positive worth. Pessimism becomes the fundamental reality pictured in the allegory of section XX of the City. In this section the wanderer sinks down against one of the cathedral pillars and sees two figures of a size sufficiently imposing not to be dwarfed by the edifice, a crouching sphinx partly in the shadow and an angel clear in the moonlight. The angel, man believing in God, is in obvious conflict with the sphinx as they silently face each other. There is a sudden sharp, clashing noise, and "The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone,/And lay there shattered" (Works, I, 168). The fallen angel left a warrior leaning on his sword, the warrior representing man believing in his own powers, facing the sphinx: Again I sank in that repose unsweet, Again a clashing noise my slumber rent; The warrior's sword lay broken at his feet: An unarmed man with raised hands impotent Now stood before the sphinx, which ever kept Such mien as if with open eyes it slept.88 « Works, I, 141-143. Works, I, 168.

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The unarmed man represents man believing in nothing, and he too falls beneath the changeless sphinx, "changeless as life's laws". The moon had circled westward full and bright, And made the temple-front a mystic dream, And bathed the whole enclosure with its light, The sworded angel's wrecks, the sphinx supreme: I pondered long that cold majestic face Whose vision seemed of infinite void space.59

What of the sphinx; what does it symbolize? It is simply that against which man destroys himself, that is, life. Life - that force spoken of by the voice in "A Voice from the Nile", which calls man "the admirable, the pitiable" and the alien of all the family of the Nile. But man Has fear and hope and phantasy and awe, And wistful yearnings and unsated loves, That strain beyond the limits of his life, And therefore Gods and Demons, Heaven and Hell.· 0

The sphinx, then represents the immutable laws of nature and has nothing to say of the genesis of evil, nor yet of its possible cure.81 We have come far afield from the subjective idealism which Schopenhauer accepted in part. With a God who is constrained to take upon himself the severest sufferings in order, if possible, to alleviate or shorten still sharper pangs, every human heart must beat in sympathy, even if he fails to recognize the fact that he himself is the Being who endures it all. A philosophy which tells us, furthermore, that it is our duty to remain in life ourselves, and to continue the human species, in order, by our suffering, to alleviate the Divine misery which is also our own 58

Works, I, 169. " Works, II, 9. " Professor Fairchild, from whom I have borrowed the mechanical breakdown for this section XX, says that the sphinx represents "Necessity Supreme" and "infinite Mystery" as well as Demogorgon and "the black void which enshrouds Demogorgon." He also says that "she means knowing too much, and she means knowing nothing at all. In the next section she melts in the figure of Melancholia" (p. 471).

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misery. The sphinx is closer to a representation of Schopenhauer's Will, which is primary, timeless, spaceless, uncaused activity that expresses itself in man as impulse, instinct, and craving. It is represented in the following description of Leopardi's pessimism, a description which could fit equally that of James Thomson: "He traces [his pessimism] back to no principle, as . . . both its German expounders do, nor does he work out any scheme for its annihilation, as [Schopenhauer and Hartmann] both elaborately attempt. He accepts evil as a fact, without making any effort to explain it. He opposes to it nothing but despair and contempt. 'Nostra vita che val?' he asks, only to answer, 'Solo a spregiarla'".92 (Our life, what is it worth but to despise it?) There are definite indications here, I believe, that while Thomson's pessimism was centered about the melancholy induced by dipsomania, it is based firmly on the nineteenth-century system of philosophic pessimism. In establishing this system two distinct lines of reasoning have been employed, for desire and striving breed frustration in our social world; in all desire, then, lurks the soul of evil. One of these, founded on the psychological laws of pleasure and pain in relation to the Will, aims at showing the necessity of an excess of the latter. Social cooperation or traditional morality hardly enter into Schopenhauer's hypothesis at all. Since man knows things only through himself (the subjective), he is altogether egocentric, selfish, and ruthless by his very nature. Since life is simply a manifestation of this Will, there can be nothing in life that is not wholly subjective; every concrete thing and every event in time can be understood only as separate illustrations of one or another of the external forms which the Will may assume - another way of confirming the dictum in Ecclesiastes that there is no new thing under the sun. The other line of reasoning is more of an empirical character, tracing as exhaustively as the field permits, the indications of the actual existence of an excess of pain in the world, a sort of a posteriori verification of the psychological laws. For Thomson there was an excess of pain; for Leopardi there was only pain: 62

Tulloch, p. 187.

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Great-souled I cannot deem That creature, but a fool, Who born to perish, reared in misery, cries, "For joy was I created".83

Goodale sums up Thomson's pessimism this way: "His disorder begins to make itself felt in verse composed in 1857; and by 1861 its subjective signs are clearly defined as a painful depression, an abnormal persistence of grief (for a dead sweetheart), tedium, and longing for death. This affliction caused him - or at least disposed him - to crystallize within his mind all the forms of pessimism known in his times".*4 Thomson was not a trained philosopher; but as all men of intelligence and learning, he had a philosophy of life. That he could not have had a thorough knowledge of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy but that he was aware of the philospher's work can be concluded, I believe, with some degree of certainty. Nevertheless, there is an amazing similarity between the pessimism expressed by the poet and the philosophy systematized by Schopenhauer. Significantly, as much as Thomson desired oblivion, he did not end his life, for the will to exist convinced him that to commit suicide was to place too high a value on life, no matter how wretched and miserable. All of his biographers have noted his intense interest in life and, until the last year, desire to live. Whereas the philosopher was, for the most part, speaking from the mind, the poet was speaking from the heart; and not surprisingly he found a kindred soul in the unhappy Italian poet Leopardi. The two poets had many more points of similarity than had, for instance, Thomson and Schopenhauer. There was a similarity in their outward physical circumstances - the near 03 "The Broom", by Leopardi, trans, by R. C. Trevelyan in World Literature: Art Anthology of Human Experience, ed. by Arthur E. Christy and Henry W. Wells (New York, 1947), p. 417. Broom is the only plant that grows on the ruined earth around Mount Vesuvius; its sweet scent a sharp contrast to the barren lava desert. Leopardi is impressed by the once-proud civilization now buried under the sterile cinders and "lava turned to stone", and he warns us of the pain in the world: 'To these bare slopes / Let him come who is wont to exalt with praise our human state". 64 Goodale, "Schopenhauer and Pessimism", p. 251.

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poverty, the drudgery of having to live at the beck and call of others, the loss of love - but there was a closeness in their mental outlook and a close spiritual likeness, and the latter enabled Thomson to translate the Italian's work with great sympathy. So great was the sympathy between the two poets that even though Thomson left his translations unrevised and uncorrected at his death, Dobell had little trouble preparing them for publication some years after Thomson's death. In his own works Thomson expressed not only his personal grief but reflected to a remarkable extent the strong undercurrent of pessimism so prevalent in his portion of the Victorian Period.

IV. THOMSON AND EMOTIONAL PESSIMISM

Once in a saintly passion I cried with desperate grief 0 Lord, my heart is black with guile, Of sinners I am chief. Then stooped my guardian angel, And whispered from behind, "Vanity, my little man, You're nothing of the kind". James Thomson (B.V.), quoted by Bertram DobeU, The Laureate of Pessimism. Alone by my midnight lamp 1 rhymed my groans and my sighs: They're published by Hoffman and Campe In small octavo size. Heinrich Heine, quoted by R. Tsanoff, The Nature of Evil, p. 207.

In its widest sense emotion applies to all affective phenomena, including such familiar "passions" as love, anger, and fear, as well as the feelings of pleasure and pain. Walter E. Houghton in his study of Victorian thought divides the emotional attitudes into Optimism, which included the benefits expected from science and a feeling of release from the shackles of outmoded institutions, and Anxiety, which emanated from the fear of revolution, atheism, boredom, and loneliness. He says that "at the threshold stand two emotional attitudes, in the broad sense of pleasure-pain responses, which were bound to occur in a period of conscious and radical change, and which were nourished by many of the same social and intellectual developments. The Victorians reacted

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to their age with hope and dismay, optimism and anxiety".1 Our task in this chapter will be to number Thomson among those who valued earthly joy in itself but who felt cut adrift from mankind and who were inclined to despair of its transitoriness, for to them no joy existed beyond this world. To Thomson's emotional, rather than his intellectual, reaction to life we must turn, for we find that Thomson's nature "was a compound of two diverse and warring elements - a light-hearted gaiety and rich sensuous capacity for enjoyment being set side by side with a constitutional and ever-deepening melancholia".2 Because the poet was unable to find a substitute for the religious and intellectual beliefs which he lost during his lifetime, he was prey to the despair and pessimism which resulted; nor could he find anything to take the place of the love that died with Matilda Weiler, which resulted in his being, in part at least, a poet of a broken heart, a sufferer of romantic melancholy. What must we seek, then, in the period of Thomson's writing to indicate that he was subject to emotional pessimism? The conversion from Classicism to Romanticism "was clearly much facilitated by the influence of another idea which has its own pre-history, but was especially potent in the Romantic decades: the idea that a man - and especially an artist - ought to be of his own time, to express in his life or art the characteristics, the ideas, the spirit of his age".3 The naturalism of the Rousseauistic movement had passed, although it was not completely forgotten; the Weltschmerz, classically so called, had died down; and positive science had accomplished great achievements. Population had increased, and along with this, the rapid rise of the middle class, and the incentives to a certain modicum of education, had crowded the "genteel", and often half-cultured, professions. Thomson, who was born in 1834, held Byron as his favorite poet in 1849, but came under the spell of Shelley in the following year.4 Other writers who had a bearing on his early works are 1

Houghton, p. 23. Salt, Life, p. 5. ® Arthur O. Lovejoy, "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas", JHI, Π (June 1941), 267. 4 Similar listings of poets who influenced Thomson can be found in 2

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Smollett, Fielding, Defoe, and DeQuincey, who was certainly one of the brotherhood in the City of Night. "In latçr years romance and renunciation of romance would combine in his admiration for Heine".5 Of the German romantics, probably the most important to this study are Goethe and Heine; the former because of his pessimism and the ultimate influence he had on romanticism, and the latter because of his influence on Thomson. Of the English poets, Byron may be mentioned briefly but Shelley in more detail because of the veneration in which Thomson held him throughout his life. Some accounting must be made of the various interpretations of the effects of Thomson's love for Matilda Weiler, the slight strain of mysticism, and the pathological turn taken by his dipsomania. There will be no attempt here to discover what romanticism is, for the term has come to mean so many things that by itself it means nothing. Professor Lovejoy suggests that we learn to use the term in the plural, that not only are there romanticisms divided by country but there are also those distinctions of the term based on thought-complexes in a single country.® The term will be treated as a general attitude toward art and its function, as an interpretation of the goodness, beauty, and purpose of life; romanticism has always existed and can be confined to no one period. Its essence is an intense interest in nature and an attempt to seize natural phenomena in a direct, immediate, and naive manner. The term will be coupled frequently with despair, pessimism, or melancholy, all of which have, in this context, similar meanings. Melancholy is not to be thought of in the sense that Shakespeare uses it in As You Like It: "More, I prithee more, I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs . . . Imogene Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 9; Fairchild, p. 455; scattered throughout Dobell's "Memoir", I, xvi, xxx, and xli, for instance; and in Salt's Life. 5 Fairchild, p. 456. « Arthur O. Lovejoy, "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms", Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1948), p. 228. In the sixteen essays by Professor Lovejoy collected in this volume, the main discussion is centered around the presence and influence of a recurrent idea in various areas of thought and the tremendous variety of meanings often found behind such "catchwords" as primitivism and romanticism.

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I do love it better than laughing", nor in the thoughtful sense employed by Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Romantic melancholy combines the cause and effect of the shift beginning in the eighteenth century from a reasoned vindication of the justice of God for permitting the existence of evil to a period of revolt and despair.7 The two leaders of this revolt were French, the bitter Voltaire and the more radical Rousseau: Voltaire scorned the idea of benevolent Divine Providence as a superstition but retained a faith in progress through tolerance; Rousseau said that God is good and that evil stems from man's corruption through civilization. According to Irving Babbitt, the poet of romantic melancholy in his greatest misery and in his most passionate wretchedness is in reality seeking happiness. "No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism".8 One type of poet posed and felt such wretchedness exquisitely from which he suffered - particularly in public - because his sensitive nature had become far keener than that of the dross of society; he lionized a youthful suicide, a "marvelous boy", as the victim of society; or he paraded his bleeding heart across Europe. But there is another side to the coin, the obverse if you will, for Byron's gloom and satiety were none the less sincere for being theatrically portrayed, to choose but one example. The distinction, then, between Byron the poseur and the saddened man of the world can be made. The distinction lies in the feeling of irreparable loss sustained when man's reasoning power could no longer provide him with belief, with faith in God; and he was forced to turn in upon himself for answers no longer obtainable from without. The poet Thomas Gray wrote in 1742 poems pensive and melancholy, "Ode on the Spring", the Eton College Ode, "Hymn to Adversity", and the sonnet on the death of his friend Richard West, which were colored by his personal experiences. They expressed his feeling of sorrow at his estrange7 The use of the word "cause" stems from an argument that "something called Romanticism is the chief cause of the spiritual evils from which the nineteenth century and our own have suffered". Cited by Lovejoy, "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms", p. 233. My italics. 8 Babbitt, p. 237.

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ment from his friend Horace Walpole and his grief at the death of West, but they were not planned as a direct expression of personal feeling. Nor did he make his chronic low spirits into a lyric theme: "Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part, but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt".» Black indeed is the romanticist whose pity for the woeful creature man causes in him hatred for the Creator of woe, and he curses the Author, in whom he no longer believes, for the misery of himself and of his fellow-wanderers in the City of Night: "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace. "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred, Malignant and implacable! I vow "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled, For all the temples to Thy glory built, Would I assume the ignominious guilt Of having made such men in such a world".10

One of the fundamental marks of melancholy, Babbitt tells us, is the feeling of solitude, of isolation the melancholiac feels; there is no escape from the loneliness imposed by self even in a crowd except by work "in the Aristotelian sense".11 But work which carries with it no inner satisfaction can only be undirected activity and can lead to nothing but frustration and misery. George Eliot in a letter to Thomson praising his City of Dreadful Night tempered her praise with the adjuration that he write on less gloomy subjects, for the poet is responsible for adding a large share to the good of humanity by writing more pleasant poetry. In his reply Thomson said, "I certainly have an affectionate and even joyful recognition of the willing labours of those who have striven to alleviate our lot, though I cannot see that all their • Letter to Richard West in 1742, quoted by Babbitt, p. 248. » Works, Π, 142.

» Babbitt, p. 252.

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efforts have availed much against the primal curse of our existence".12 Thomson was not the only man of the time to recognize the misery of human existence and the futility of making any attempt to alleviate the suffering, for Richard Jeffries in a novel of 1883, writes: "Human suffering is so great, so endless, so awful, that I can hardly write of it. I could not go into hospitals and face it, as some do, lest my mind should be temporarily overcome. The whole and the worst the worst Pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of truth, so immense is the misery of man". 13 In his attempt to find the origins of pessimism in German romanticism, Eugene Anderson says, "The individual became uprooted, isolated, anxious. The uncertainty excited his nerves and strained his emotions. He confronted a world of turmoil and danger, the harsh impact of unexpected forces. He became remarkably sensitive to the problems of relationship with elements - human and otherwise - which affected him, and he craved unity with those capable of aiding him".14 When set over against the world, mind is powerless to answer any question respecting reality. Similarly, in the moral sphere, men, because they are impervious individuals, appear to be subject to limitations which, over a period of time, press heavily on them and crush any aspiration and hope of self-satisfaction with which humanity constantly deludes itself. Human nature cannot escape misery, sin, and death - evil in all kinds - any more than finite intellect can grasp truth or know reality. The answer was that the universe was the product or manifestation of the power of some devil, and this world the worst of all possible worlds. "The cultural crisis produced sinister effects [of which this is one] as well, 12

Salt, Life, quoting a letter written June 18, 1874, p. 82. Richard Jeffries, The Story of My Heart (London, 1883), p. 135. Arthur Symons in Studies in Two Literatures, VIII (London, 1924), 27 ff. makes no mention of Jeffries' pessimism but tells us that the author possessed "quickness of eye and faithfulness of hand . . . in the impression of absolute veracity, not coloured with prepossessions, not distorted by an artistic presentment", and thus he seems always to write the truth as he sees it. 11 Eugene Anderson, "German Romanticism: An Ideology of Crisis", 1H1, II (June 1941), 307. 13

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15

and these had to be overcome". The nineteenth century German poets chose to face these spiritual issues, and Goethe did not avoid this one although he did not address himself to it directly. "It furnishes a leit-motiv that recurs again and again with identical tone in varied themes, from the first clear suggestion in the sufferings of Werther till its final disappearance in Faust's apostrophe to the 'fleeing moment,' I heard a voice, 'believe no more,' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the godless deep". 1 «

The pessimistic element in Goethe assumed distinct phases at different stages in his career, and although it is not altogether desirable to treat the subject by reference to strictly defined periods, a clear sequence must be noted.17 During his formative years there was little positive thought with a consequent vagueness of aspiration, little more than the setting of a problem in Young Werther (1774). The lionization which followed at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar all but stifled any inner misgivings, and in Italy the acquisition of new ideas and the output of his more literary and less philosophical works pushed aside interest in higher moral issues. His discontent upon his return to Germany and the cool reception accorded his new dramas threw him back once more upon self, which led him to a careful study of natural phenomena and a new perception of the inner unity of the world. 13

Anderson, p. 307. " Wenley, p. 131. 17 For the bare outlines of Goethe's life I have depended on Barker Fairley's A Study of Goethe (Oxford, 1947). Although it is true that of the German poets Heine had the greatest influence on Thomson, a fairly complete discussion of Goethe is needed. His Faust was the summation of man's search for his soul, or so it seemed to the generation of Carlyle and Emerson. The intensely contemporaneous character of his work best epitomizes that explosive period of transition from classicism to romanticism in the arts, and from rationalism and deism to individualism. The very comprehensiveness of his interests and experience, his versatility as a thinker and writer, and the tremendous span of his creative career - from the 1770's to about 1831 - stamp him as the figure most expressive of his time. Translations of Goethe by Thomson are an undated poem "Prometheus" and a fragment "From the 'West-Ostlicher Divan' " in Works, I, 357-360.

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He approached a solution in Wilhelm Meister and The Elective Affinities and finally arrived at an answer in the second part of Faust to the life-question in which there is always a pessimistic admixture. Like other sentimentalists, of whom Byron is the type, Goethe did not fly to the conclusion that this is the worst of all possible worlds, but the social conventions and the aims which the world forced upon the solitary individual caused him much soul-searching. Faust at once sums up and supplements all that had preceded. The temporary pessimism, especially of the first part, is even deeper than that of The Elective Affinities, for it is experienced by a person, not a mere general term. The thought which pervades Goethe's lifelong work is that of the soul isolated at first, and of its self-wrought salvation achieved at length by abandonment of selfishness. The hero is at once a person, hence our interest in him; a type, hence his rapid transitions; and an allegorical embodiment of the struggles of humanity as recorded in the history of the race, hence his puzzling immensity. In the first a large pessimistic element is present; the individual is necessarily self-seeking, and accordingly, doomed to failure. In the second, too, pessimism has a place; man passes once and again through the valley of the shadow. In the third, pessimism at length finds its proper office as an indispensable portion of a greater unity. First the conflict is within the hero himself, then it is with the social shapes around him, but finally he brings himself in line with his fellows; the first two end in disaster. The next most important contributor to Thomson's style and thought after Leopardi, who was discussed at some length in the last chapter, and Shelley, who will follow shortly, is Henrich Heine. Thomson did, however, translate the works of another German poet, Novalis's "Hymns to Night", which remained unpublished, but the kinship Thomson thought he recognized with von Hardenberg never materialized, for the only parallel between the two was the loss of a sweetheart.18 We will perhaps find of 18

Salt, Life, p. 152, calls the slight parallel the result of a "spiritual relationship and the similarity between their lives". It need be repeated here only for the record that Thomson chose as his pen-name the name and then the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis". The "Bysshe" for his lasting admiration of Shelley and the "Vanolis" as an anagram of the name Nova-

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all the authors whose ideas resemble those of Thomson, the greatest similarity is in the works of Heine. We know that Thomson professed all his life an ardent admiration for the author of the Lieder, and most of the translations are taken from Heine's Buch der Lieder. Thomson began to read Heine in German about 1850 or 1857; he wrote a series of articles on Heine in the Secularist; and he even conceived the project of publishing a book on his favorite German poet, a project which the habits of intemperance prevented him from executing. He translated a number of Heine's poems, at least, in English 19 and succeeded in rendering the spirit and the music of the originals with a remarkable fidelity.20 Heine is also a pessimist and his pessimism resembles in every respect that of Thomson.21 His pessimism can to some extent be explained by psychological reasons, also: the small boy of Düsseldorf had suffered from headaches and from neuralgia which had, six years before the end of his life, transformed themselves into a progressive, disabling, and utterly pain-wracking disease of the spine; he was confined to his house, then to his bed, his "mattress-grave", for eight years, until his merciful liberation in 1856. And this natural source of wretchedness was increased by the sentimental deceptions from which Heine suffered in his youth when he saw the two young girls lis from the poet von Hardenberg. Novalis lost a young sweetheart named Sophie von Kühn, but his grief was not long lasting. Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 61, suggests that Thomson took the name without ever having read the German's works, and the fact that the translations of Novalis by Thomson were never completed suggests that he lost interest after having learned more of the details of Novalis's love affair. 19 Imogene Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 59, estimates that Thomson translated about fifty of Heine's poems, some of which were never printed; about twenty-five are in Works, I, 321-356. 20 Salt, Life, p. 161, tells us that "in a letter addressed to Thomson, shortly after the publication of his first volume, Dr. Karl Marx expressed his delight at the versions from Heine, which he described as 'no translation, but a reproduction of the original', such as Heine himself, if master of the English language, would have given". 21 See the excellent study on Henrich Heine as a thinker, Max Brod's Heinrich Heine; the Artist in Revolt, trans, by Joseph Witriol (New York, 1957).

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whom he loved, his two cousins Amelis and Theresa Heine, one after the other destroy his hopes of happiness by marrying his rivals. Even as the death of Matilda Weiler inspired in Thomson several of his saddest songs, Heine, after the marriages of his sweethearts, poured out his sadness in the short and moving lyrics of Die Heimkehr, The Return Home, which mourned the vanity and the cruelty of love. And yet another characteristic of Heine, which he shares with many of the pessimists and with Thomson in particular, is an ardent love for this life which he never ceased to overcome with his scorn and with his sarcasms - he was the tender lyricist and the cynical satirist at one and the same time. Thomson knew at certain times the joy of life or at least pictured it with fidelity as the poems "Sunday up the River", "Sunday at Hampstead", and "At Belvoir" amply prove, but the relapse into discouragement and despair is without doubt more overwhelming to the one who recalls several moments of pleasure, who knows that this life offers to others joys from which he himself is most often excluded. The Lebenslust of Heine is a constant trait of his nature. He kept it even on his bed of pain and in the midst of the horrible physical tortures which infected the end of his existence, and it is just this enjoyment of life, so ardent and passionate - the marks of the morbidity in the works of the young man who believes his suffering to be the first attempts on him of a cruel disease - it is this love of life which inspired him to his saddest songs. His voluptuous nature, which was always in quest of new pleasures, always ready to plunge into new disillusionments of love, the only religion of poetry, became also the great cause of his unhappiness. Woman is an attractive sphinx whose beauty hides a cold and cruel heart: I know not what evil is coming, But my heart feels sad and cold; A song in my head keeps humming, A tale from the times of old.22 12 The opening stanza of Thomson's translation of Heine's "The Loreley", a beautiful maiden who catches the boatman and binds him "In the spell of a wild sad love", Works, I, 325.

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Love brings with it its own disenchantment; happiness is a chimera. The soul of Heine felt itself invaded by a bitter and sarcastic nihilism which in the Romanzerò (1851) and the Letzte Gedichte und Gedanken (1869) were based on the emotions and memories, for when he settled in France he had married a Frenchwoman and was reasonably happy. He scoffed at all of the pretentious systems of metaphysics and thought him crazy who tried to force from nature its secrets: by the sea a youth demands of the waves an answer to the question, "What is the meaning of Man?" The waves murmur their everlasting murmur, The wind sweeps, the clouds scud, The stars glitter indifferent and cold, And a fool awaits an answer.23 Beneath all the deceiving appearances, the poet attains the sad truth which Heine proclaims in his famous "Twilight of the Gods": I have seen through you, Nay; I have seen through The world's vast plan—and I have looked too long, And much too deep; for all my joy has vanished, And deathless troubles rankle in my heart.84 If Heinrich Heine could weep, he could also as Thomson did on occasion, laugh at his own tears; but in the end he wept that life was not even worth his tears. Cotten tells us that G. W. Foote, Thomson's editor on the Secularist, once went to speak to Thomson about his work on Heine, and Thomson, "pain in every line of his face . . . said with a strange shudder, 'He has been lying beside me all nights' ",85 Aubrey de Vere in 1882 remarked that the religion of nature, the religion of beauty, and the religion of humanity, then so potent, had all been launched sixty years before by Shelley.28 "The poet, says Shelley, is a nightingale singing in the dark. The a

Heine's "Questions" translated by James Thomson, Works, I, 335. Heine's Die Heimkehr: Götterdämmerung, trans, by Louis Untermeyer in Poems of Heinrick Heine (New York, 1917), p. 144. » Cotten, p. 667. M Aubrey de Vere, Recollections of Aubrey de Vere (New York, 1897), p. 336. M

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poetry of the Romantic Revival, or the greater strain of it, is intensely conscious of the cruelty of things and the dejection of the times".27 Whereas Byron's consciousness of the "cruelty of things" is intensely personal and his sufferings are concerned with self, Shelley, who ever retained a hope for the eventual possibility of happiness, "more fully effects an identification between the poet and his fellow men, so that their pain becomes his pain, their martyrdom his own: Me—who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth . . . " 2 8 Thomson was neither so completely subjective as Byron nor so sensitive to a truly world sorrow as Shelley. The City of Dreadful Night was written in an attempt to put sorrow into "living words", but they are not for the "hopeful young" nor those who believe in happiness nor those who retain a belief in the glory of God. Nor are the words for Thomson alone but for a sad, small fellowhip who are "desolate, Fate-smitten/Whose faith and hope are dead, and who would die".29 But it was the fact that Shelley's intellectual speculations rose far above the petty interests of the hour that so impressed Thomson. He could not understand a world that would turn on such a man as Shelley, who gave all of himself in his love of mankind; and Thomson has Shelley say this in his own defense when he has returned to the gods beaten and destroyed by the men he tried to help: Their gods seemed hideous monsters only great In power and malice, or such phantoms vain As self-bewildered thought might evocate To mock the yearning heart and weary brain. 27

Hughes, p. 228. Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist (New York, 1932), p. 328. The lines of poetry are from Shelley's Julian and Maddalo/A Conversation and are from the conversation of a maniac visited by Count Maddalo (Byron) and Julian (Shelley). The only peace either Shelley or the maniac discovered was in death. Shelley's miseries are catalogued in his Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples, which recounts the haunting of the poet by the deaths in his circle of family and friends, the loss through the courts of his children, the disease which caused him great physical pain and prevented him from composing, and his isolation from humanity and neglect of his works by the public. 29 Works, I, 123. 28

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I strove to teach them the true God, Whose reign Is infinite love for all things that exist; And I was branded as an Atheist.»0 In his essay "Shelley", dated 1860, Thomson asks and answers four questions: the favorite subjects of Shelley's song are great, not small; his treatment of these is great-minded; it is great-hearted; and it is such as to entitle him to the epithet inspired.31 Much of Shelley's loftiness of thought is contained in his greatest poem on death A donáis, of which Benjamin Kurtz says: "This synthesis of life and death is the product of despair; a hope created out of the wreck of hope. Coleridge has said that hope and despair meet in the porch of death. They have met in this poem on death. Shelley's despair was the result of his attempt to square his conduct with his idealism, to harmonize the hubbub of the mundane with celestial song".32 Dobell says that "not one of Shelley's admirers . . . ever surpassed James Thomson in affectionate devotion to his memory, or ever studied his writings with more minute and loving care. His poetry inspired Thomson in his youth, at a time when Shelley's reputation had not yet risen above the fogs and clouds that so long obscured its radiance".ss It should be noted, too, that despite Thomson's close study of and admiration for Shelley's works, it can be said in his favor that he is nowhere in his greatest works an imitator of Shelley's style nor a plagiarist of his ideas. I believe that an intensive study of Shelley's poetry would reveal that he could express in sublime poetry the irony of life and the bleak, bitter pessimism found later in Thomson, and that, although it is not dominant, there can be found in Shelley's poetry a definite, and often beautiful, expression of the "romantic melancholy" of Weltschmerz of Byron. There were moments when it seems that Shelley believed that life held an inevitable preponderance of unhappiness over happiness the belief of the confirmed pessimist. Contentment can only * James Thomson, "Shelley (Poem)", Shelley, a Poem, p. 110. 31 James Thomson, "Shelley (Essay)", Shelley, a Poem, p. 17. M Benjamin Kurtz, The Pursuit of Death (New York, 1933), p. 290. M Bertram Dobell, "Prefatory Note" to Shelley, a Poem by James Thomson, p. vii.

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come from the fulfillment of desire, and "he who would be content must not ask more of life than life has to give, must adjust his desires to the capabilities which the world allows for their satisfaction. Such an adjustment Shelley was very reluctant to make; consequently his life, turbulent with exuberance of hope and now cheerless in defeat, offered little opportunity for deep and lasting happiness".84 My intention has not been to present Shelley onesidedly as a poet of despair, for there is another strain equally noticeable in his poetry, that of hope. Shelley was greatly affected by the stupidity and horror of actual life, but his attitude to existence can be summed up, I believe in the last nine lines of Prometheus Unbound: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death of night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor faulter, nor repent; This, like thy Glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory! 85 Thomson's full realization of "death-in-life" came, it would appear, near the end of the year 1869. Dobell inserts an entry from "a fragmentary diary which Thomson kept", the entry dated Sunday, November 4, 1869: Burned all my old papers, manuscripts, and letters, save the book MSs which have been already in great part printed. . . . I was sad and stupid—scarcely looking into any... All the letters; those which I had kept for twenty years, those which I had kept for more than sixteen. [Matilda Weiler died in 1853, sixteen years before.] I felt myself like one who, having climbed half-way up a long rope, cuts off all beneath his feet he must climb on, and can never touch the old earth again without a fall.3" Thomson may have been sorry for this sarcrifice at a later time, but the act seems almost a mystic rite in which he cut himself 34

Stoval, p. 291. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harry Buxton Forman, II (London, 1882), 263, hereafter cited as Shelley's Works. 36 Dobell, "Memoir", I, Iii. 35

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off from all the old ties and from this point, I believe, was never to regain completely any strong sense of optimism other than the hope engendered by the return of his poetic powers a year before his death. The note of mysticism is not strong in Thomson, but it does appear to a limited extent in his interest in Orientalism 37 and in his reverence for the memory of his beloved Matilda Weiler. The woman worship of the Victorian period held that a woman's true function is to guide and uplift her more worldly mate; "the angel in the house serves, or should serve, to preserve and quicken the moral idealism so badly needed in an age of selfish greed and fierce competition".38 This placing of the woman on a pedestal was a resurgence of certain secular social conditions of the Middle Ages which helped prepare a place for medieval mysticism and provided a sympathy for the reception of its doctrines. The chivalric code, which was at once in sympathy and antipathy to the Church, originated a kind of love which turned man towards an ideal - a human ideal. Whatever the deplorable defects of amour courtois, it joined the chivalric spirit with that of the Church in moulding a spiritual réévaluation of the role of woman in the world, giving her a place formed by adoration rather than affection and contemplation rather than action. The Victorians felt again a sort of reaching forth in spirit towards idealized womanhood. Mystical in essence and in exercise, this fruit of a bygone age ripened again in the Victorian ideal of the woman as the keeper and comforter of the home. So strong was this attitude that Dobell thinks it likely that had Matilda lived, Thomson "might so far have overcome the fits of gloom and life-weariness from which he suffered as to be afflicted by them only at intervals, and then not to an intolerable degree".39 Roden Noel feels that Thomson's early poetry is "all idealistic, 37 Esther Kaufman in her dissertation "The Use of Oriental Material by James Thomson, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling", Cornell University Abstracts of Theses (Ithaca, N. Y., 1947), notes that although Thomson's oriental detail is "relatively sparse", it is nonetheless "authentic" and indicates a thorough knowledge of oriental life and of the people. 58 Houghton, p. 352. 39 Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism, p. 5.

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mystical, exhaling impassioned affection, and breathing the 'difficult iced air' of Faith's mountain top".40 "Tasso to Leonara/ From His Dungeon; in Misery and Distraction" is dated November, 1856, and is essentially a lament from the poet to his unattainable love, unattainable in this life But, you cannot scorn me, Dear, Though I sink in doubt and fear? You too know, this mad Mime done We shall evermore be one?41 Perhaps Dobell was correct in his assumption that Thomson's love, had it been fulfilled, would have lessened his despair and "All glorious dreams that beautified and blest/My fervent youth were realised in Thee".42 It is, then, infinitely probable that the regret for the death of Matilda, so often expressed by Thomson, was in great part the creation of his imagination, the occasion and not the cause of his pessimism. The author of The City of Dreadful Night did not become a pessimist solely because at nineteen he lost the young girl, one could almost say the child, of fourteen with whom he was in love. While this sentimental motive does not by itself provide an explanation of Thomson's pessimism, it nevertheless contributes to the explanation; for the sufferings produced by the imagination are often not less acute than those caused by reality. A yearning for the past inclining one to escape far from the sorrows of the present by meditating on that which could have been becomes, before long, a habit deep-rooted in the works of the poet and accentuates the pessimistic tendencies of which it was at the beginning an effect more than a cause. The death of Matilda Weiler furnished Thomson a logical reason for accusing destiny and for lamenting about his lot; it gave him above all a knowledge of the cruel experience of grief. Just as Thomson had found it in the poetry of Leopardi, love and death came into his own life together as 40

Roden Noel, "James Thomson" in The Poets and Poetry of the Century, ed. by A. H. Miles, V (London, 1893), 673. 41 Works, Π, 318. a "Bertram to the Most Noble and Beautiful Lady Geraldine", dated January, 1860, Works, II, 319.

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brother and sister and remained from then on united in his thoughts: Athwart the gloom of haunted years, Whose phantoms mock my lonely woe, I gaze, and see through glimmering tears A Vision of the Long-ago; From out the waste verge dim and far How purely gleams that single star! 43

More than once he will sing in his poems, with a deep personal accent, of the fragility of love and the unbreakable bonds which hold him until death. Moreover his pessimism will be something more than the cold expression of philosophic ideas; underlying the arguments and the more general themes we listen always to the echo of the plaint of a bruised heart: Then fade, dim dream! and Sorrow, cease! While I can trust, where'er you be, That you are waiting my release To live out to its depth with me, In bowers or dens through noble spheres The love suspended all these years. 44

The death of Matilda and the painful memory of his lost love, then, furnished the sentimental base necessary for Thomson's pessimism. More perhaps than all other philosophical doctrines, true pessimism is, in effect, always a personal belief, which springs from contact with a sensibility of life. In the works of almost all of the pessimists, the experience of life and of sadness, the pessimism of the feelings - the Stimmungspessimismus of the German philosophers - comes first, and their metaphysical theories are born of the desire to justify their sentimental tendencies and to apply to humanity in general the conclusions drawn from their personal sufferings.45 Such in part was also " "The Fadeless Bower", dated 1858, Works, Π, 359. 44 "The Fadeless Bower", Works, Π, 367. 45 LeRoy, p. 105. LeRoy conjectures that "in part, surely, Thomson the man was the tormented victim of some inner and purely personal disorder. He spoke of himself as 'mad with self-consciousness of guilt and woe, accurst, his breast seared with remorse, his brain gnawed on by hopeless doubt and anxiety' [quoted from Walker, James Thomson (B.V.), p. 28]". LeRoy goes on to "suppose that the truest origin must have lain

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the case for James Thomson. On the other hand, a pessimism which remains purely sentimental runs the risk of being regarded as a poetic or romantic doctrine, and not as a coherent and reflective view of life and man. For the sentiment, however profound it may be, is also the element which varies the most easily, that is, pessimism based upon pure sentiment cannot constitute itself as true pessimism. It is clear that the philosophic arguments to which a pessimist has recourse to fortify his tendencies or his convictions can scarcely be attributed to religion, especially the Christian religion. For all the pessimistic elements that one can discover in certain of its dogmas, Christianity is, in general, a religion of hope - if not in our existence here on earth, at least in a future life. Buddhism, on the other hand, recognized the universality of suffering and has as its law karma, the law of retribution which works with equal precision in both good and evil deeds and thoughts. The distinction between appearance and reality contains within it a further distinction between the spiritual and the non-spiritual. Reality is formed of the non-spiritual substances of time and space, rest and motion, and an infinitude of indestructible souls which are spiritual entities. Appearance is made up of matter capable of being apprehended by the sense; Thomson senses this duality in The City of Dreadful Night, when he says: I have seen phantoms there that were as men And men that were as phantoms flit and roam; Marked shapes that were not living to my ken, Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea Foam: The City rests for man so weird and awful, That his intrusion there might seem unlawful, And phantoms there may have their proper home.48 rather in some repression of instinctual drives that took place long before he reached the age of conceptual thinking". There are numerous instances in Thomson's life to indicate that on the surface, at least, he was a normal and pleasant companion to his friends, but LeRoy feels that "one need have no hesitation in attributing mainly to psychic abnormality his habitual melancholy, his alcoholism, and his suicide impulses - not to speak of the philosophical pessimism of his great poem". 48 Works, I, 141.

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A more practical, or better a more realistic, portrayal of the life-dream confusion in the poetry of Thomson can be found in "Insomnia", written in March 1882. For the poet an hour becomes an eternity as he climbs down one steep side to the valley of the half-hour and up the other steep side to the height of the clock striking the next hour. There is no describing the emotional impact of that sleepless hour this side of poetry: at one o'clock Thus I went down into that first ravine, Wearily, slowly, blindly, and alone, Staggering, stumbling, sinking depths unseen, Shaken and bruised and gashed by stub and stone; And at the bottom paven with slipperiness, A torrent brook rushed headlong with such stress Against my feeble limbs, Such fury of wave and foam and icy bleakness Buffeting insupportably my weakness That when I would recall dazed memory swirls and swims. How I got through I know not, faint as death; And then I had to climb the awful scarp, Creeping with many a pause for panting breath, Clinging to tangled root and rock-jut sharp; Perspiring with faint chills instead of heat, Trembling, and bleeding hands and knees and feet; Falling, to rise anew; Until, with lamentable toil and travel Upon the ridge of arid sand and gravel I lay supine half-dead and heard the bells chime Two;47 And after such a night the poet stumbled out into the rainy false dawn and leaned against a bridge while he saw, briefly, a moon as sickly "as the swoon of featureless Despair". As a workman walks past on his way to the factory, Thomson stepped back and "I felt a ghost already, planted watching there". At a loss to know how men return from such conscious-unconsciousness, he ends the poem Who can the steps and stages mete and number By which we re-emerge from nightly slumber?— Our poor vast petty life is one dark maze of dreams.48 » Works, 48 Works,

Π, 36-37. Π, 43.

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There are many other examples of Thomson's comparing life to a dream, and it might be well to note the emphasis on the dream in "Vane's Story", in sections I, IV, XII, and XX of The City of Dreadful Night, and in the prose-poem A Lady of Sorrow. In the section of the last work in which the Lady of Sorrow takes the guise of an Angel, he says that "she revealed to me (if in this, also, I do not dream, as mainly in my life I have dreamed) that she was resting in a sphere divine and tranquil"; and that she was permitted, in the form of dreams no doubt, to visit her "twin-soul" with heavenly consolations "until death's consummate beatitude should remove all need and possibility of consolation".49 One method, then, of avoiding the sufferings of the world is to delay reality, that is to prevent the futility of the soul's endless cycle of births and deaths (samsara), and Thomson's longing for the dreamless sleep, the "beatitude" of death, parallels the Buddhist desire for nirvana: and m y breath Of noble h u m a n life u p o n this earth So racks m e that I sigh f o r senseless death. 5 0

Thomson's interest in orientalism, rather than in its philosophical implications, appears in his narrative poem "Weddah and OmEl-Bonain" in ottava rima, a poem highly suggestive of Keat's "Isabella; or the Pot of Basil". Thomson tells us in a note preceding the poem that he took his story from a suggestion found in the De l'Amour of Stendhal (Henri Beyle), and although he depreciates his translation, I suspect that any promise of color or variety in the poem was reduced to its own sombre tone not by his lack of ability as a translator but by the deep melancholy within him. The story concerns two young lovers of the tribe of Azra, an Arab tribe whose people perish when love is unrequited. While Weddah is fighting their enemies, Om-ElBonain is persuaded to marry Wallid, a leader of an ally tribe, to bring aid to her people. When Weddah came to visit his sweetheart, now married, he is hidden in a trunk which Wallid buries. 49 James Thomson, "A Lady of Sorrow", Essays and Phantasies, p. 9. My italic:). 50 "The City of Dreadful Night", Works, I, 159.

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Om-El-Bonain dies over the grave, and the poem ends with this plea from the poet: May Allah grant eternal joy and youth In fateless Heaven to one and all of these. And for himself a little grain of ruth The bard will beg, this once, while on his knees;51 Esther Kaufman says that Thomson, Wilde, and Kipling "are aware of the evil in the universe and of nature's indifference to man. Like many of their contemporaries all three lack that unequivocal faith in God, in the goodness of nature, or in absolute reality which had been possible earlier in the century, while they retain the need for an absolute. Thomson was unable to find an even partially satisfactory absolute, and he used oriental material primarily to express his sense of helplessness and futility".52 Only one other aspect of Thomson's emotional pessimism need be discussed in detail in this chapter, the aspect of the melancholy introduced by the evils attendent upon the industrial revolution; the impression made by the New Science, evolution, will be mentioned only briefly. Thomson, it must be stated at the outset, was not a poet of social protest, but he was intensely aware of what Eleanor Sickels called "the distressed contemplation of the degenerate present" stemming from "the devastating French wars and the ruthless advance of the Industrial Revolution".53 Among the causes of human wretchedness Arnold Toynbee notes, in lectures on the mercantile system and on the growth of pauperism, that "side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism; and production on a vast scale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers".54 The progress which man made purportedly for the betterment of mankind, railroads spread from zero miles in 1830 to 20,000 miles in 1849 for instance, seemed to many to bring greater » Works, I, 104. 52 Kaufman, p. 33. 53 Sickels, p. 277. 54 Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England (London, 1912), p. 64.

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misery and greater human wretchedness than had ever been deemed possible in a free society. When such an experience is seen in its unity and receives a reflective expression, there results pessimism as a philosophic system, which, whatever be the speculative affiliation of its various forms, is no more than a description of existing facts and the assertion that these constitute the whole inevitable truth of life. And it calls forth the following statement from Richard Jeffries, not an avowed pessimist, writing in the nineteenth century: It is the duty of all rational beings to acknowledge the truth. There is not the least trace of the directing intelligence in human affairs... Any one who will consider the affairs of the world at large, and of the individual, will see that they do not proceed in the manner they would do for our happiness if a man of human breadth of view were placed at their head with unlimited power, such as is credited to the intelligence which does not exist. A man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner.55 Such social protest as is in Thomson's poetry is implied in the wretched condition of many of the inhabitants in The City of Dreadful Night and is contained in the "burden of the message" which the poet brought from the City in the earlier, less concentrated poem, "The Doom of a City". In this early poem, dated 1857, the poet is taken by a self-propelled boat, similar to the one used by the youth in Shelley's "Alastor", to a City filled with statues - people who once inhabited it in life are now prey to Death and Sleep - and he hears their judgement, their doom. In part IV, "The Return", the message he brings from the doomed city includes the grim warning to "Repent, reform, or perish", But thy chief social laws seem strictly framed to secure That one be corruptingly rich, another bitterly poor, And another just starving to death.58 Thomson, however, despite his admiration for Shelley did not believe in the ultimate self-perfectibility of man, and in fact laughed at the "inconsistency of those who, after premising that man is the creature of circumstances, proceed to lay down the corollary that circumstances may in their turn be improved by 55 58

Jeffries, p. 136. Works, Π, 184.

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57

man". Although he took the part of the unfortunate victims of the social and political inequalities of his time, Thomson had no belief in the efficacy of social reform. In his essay "Bumble, Bumbledom, Bumbleism" (1865) he shows that the power of money rules with a hand heavier than that of any tyrant; and in an essay dated January, 1877, called "In Our Forest of the Past", Thomson and his "companion" come upon this scene: We came upon an immense multitude, many shivering in thin rags, many nearly naked, all gaunt and haggard, with hollow eyes and famished faces; and some huddled together as for warmth, and some moved restlessly hither and thither, and in their moaning was eternal hunger. And my leader said: Rich men grew richer with their toil; kings and priests and great lords were fed fat with the flesh that fell away from their bones; they starved in body and in mind; their existence was a long need.58 Salt quotes at length from Thomson's "Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery" to indicate Thomson's conviction that social reform is futile: Thomson says that "this great river of human Time, which comes flowing down thick with filth and blood from the immemorial past, surely cannot be thoroughly cleansed by any purifying process applied to it here in the present;... In fine, to thoroughly reform the present and the future we must thoroughly reform the past".5e The interest and the strength of pessimistic systems lie, accordingly, in that individualism which is their unquestioned presupposition, and which, if it be granted to them, constitutes a quite impregnable position. They make, indeed, the profession which every system that pretends to be philosophical must make, of starting from experience and aiming at nothing more than a comprehension of its meaning, a grasp of its reality, in the unity of some intelligible principle. The answer Thomson gives to the question of why he works for the betterment of man if he does not believe in it, is the same answer he gives to the question of why he does not " Salt, Life, p. 146. 38 James Thomson, "In Our Forest of the Past", Essays and Phantasies, p. 315. 58 Salt, Life, p. 147. The passage is taken from page 94 of the essay which has been printed in the volume Essays and Phantasies. Italics are Thomson's.

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commit suicide if life is so insupportable: "One works, one cannot but work, as his being ordains, exercising the faculties and attempting to gratify the desires thereof, whether he thinks that such exercise will produce what other people call good or ill, that such gratification implies what other people call happiness or misery".60 In other words he is saying, too, that one lives, one cannot but live, as his being ordains. The self-conscious grinning of the cynic at the weakness of humanity has nothing to do with God. Such grinning is the acknowledged futility of self. One of the important developments in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century was the application of the science of the physical world to the whole life of man, and the emotional result was an optimistic belief that positive scientific laws could correct the evils of the world which were effects of causes. By the laws of cause and effect, the causes of the evils could be determined and ultimately corrected; and a glorious prospect of a world of predominant good opened before mankind. However, a large number of Victorians feared lest the rationalism thus engendered would lead to atheism and a consequent breakdown of moral obligations. In a recent article, R. A. Forsyth considers Thomson's close connection with events of his own time and, in some detail, describes the emotional force of the "unmitigated clash between spiritual aspiration and intellectual integrity".·1 This clash was brought about by the breakdown of traditional beliefs in religion and nature which, in turn, stemmed from the acceptance of the theories of evolution. "Their dichotomous attitude, at once revering the standards of Science and yet being unable to bear fully its implications for themselves as individuals, made the Victorians great admirers and describers of the natural scene, but prevented them from acknowledging, as Dylan Thomas did much later, that "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer ,0

James Thomson, "Sayings of Sigvat", Essays and Phantasies, p. 215. " R. A. Forsyth, "Evolution and the Pessimism of James Thomson (B.V.)", Essays in Criticism, XII (April 1962), 150.

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And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever".«2 Thomson, then, who had suffered from a loss of belief in a beneficent Divinity was unable to transfer that faith to a belief in the powers of nature, for nature had been destroyed by the new science which seemed to say that man was but one of the lower animals after all, that the laws of nature were immutable forcing man to conform. The times in which Thomson lived were marked, or perhaps scoriated, by several emotional attitudes. There was still a strong aftermath of Rousseauism, romantic melancholy, a doctrine which caused its followers to seek happiness in extreme expressions of grief. The German Weltschmerz had penetrated to England through its greatest exponents Goethe and Heine. A great world-sorrow mixed with a powerful Lebenslust, a love of life, caused in its adherents an intense feeling of futility and pessimism. Byron exemplified it in England with his sincere cry of pain and his biting satire which came from his inmost heart; Shelley felt, and expressed in sublime poetry, the misery of the whole human race. Thomson's life was overshadowed by two major tragedies: the premature death of his sweetheart and his dipsomania. The City of Dreadful Night is a poem of profound emotional force and is a fitting tribute to A woman very young and very fair; Beloved by bounteous life and joy and youth, And loving these sweet lovers, so that care And age and death seemed not for her in sooth: Alike as stars, all beautiful and bright, These shapes lit up that mausolean night.·3 But the most apt summation of his life from 1853 until his death in 1882 is contained in the following three lines from the same section of the poem: While thou dost not awake I cannot move; And something tells me thou wilt never wake, And I alive feel turning into stone.64 92 Forsyth, p. 155. « Works, I, 145. " Works, I, 147.

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The other facet of Thomson's life can be summed up in the following statement: Thomson had no vices - not even any faults. He was always gentle, always spirited; almost to the last moment, with dogged persistence trying to find some footing somewhere, always generous, always sensitive, but he was a dipsomaniac and at the mercy of the disease. But in the best of the later poems, and one of his best from any period, in "Insommia", Thomson records the wretchedness of the insommiac, a state of misery that can barely be imagined by those who have not experienced a least a taste of it. Tired, ready for sleep, the sufferer looks to the comfortable bed and the peace which comes with oblivion, only to find sickness and wakefulness which grow more acute as the clock ticks the endless night away. It does not take much of this peculiar sort of torment before he becomes too weary to think, too uncaring for work, and too restless to rest. Thomson had captured it all in one final, one furiously energetic, one cruelly prophetic outburst: The day passed, and the night; and other days And other nights; and all of evil doom; The sun-hours in a sick bewildering haze, The star-hours in a thick enormous gloom, With rending lightnings and with thunder knells; The ghastly hours of all the timeless Hells:— Bury them with their bane! I look back on the words already written, And writhe by cold rage stung, by self-scorn smitten They are so weak and vain and infinitely inane. . .®5

85

"Insomnia", Works, II, 42-43.

V. EXISTENTIAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE CITY OF DREADFUL

NIGHT

It appears that all things exist only that they may die. That which exists not cannot die, and yet all that exists has sprung from nothingness. It is certain that the ultimate object of existence is not happiness, for nothing is happy. It is true that animated creatures propose this end to themselves in all their actions, but they obtain it from none; and in their whole existence, always toiling, striving, and enduring, the sole result of their labours and sufferings is to attain that which seems to be Nature's only object, namely death. Giacomo Leopardi, Canticle of the Wild Cock, translated by James Thomson (B.V.), 1882, Leopardi, p. 250.

In the preceding chapters Thomson has been considered within a framework of concepts having their origins in either the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and the man and his work have been studied from a strictly Victorian point of view as nearly as it is possible to do in the twentieth century. My contention here, in order to add balance to this study, is to consider his masterpiece, The City of Dreadful Night, in the light of a modern philosophical doctrine, that of existentialism. But it should be pointed out again that James Thomson was not a philosopher, and that he did ante-date existentialism, so that a professional philosophical discussion is not called for. The existential philosophers, Sartre in particular, have shown that there is a close alliance, also, between their philosophy and literature. Although the general term existentialism has been applied to a set of philosophies not systematized until the twentieth century, I

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contend that certain major concepts contained in these philosophies can be demonstrated as valid in Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night. Nor is my contention without precedent, for two articles on the subject have been listed in a recent issue of College English under "News and Ideas". 1 One of the articles, William J. Sowder's "Colonel Thomas Sutpen as Existentialist Hero", attempts to show that "Sutpen's actions, just as those of Sartre's heroes, dramatized existential choice and the related elements - abandonment, anguish, possibilities and bad faith". 2 My purpose in this chapter, however, is to examine Thomson's poem in terms of the ways in which it reveals certain fundamental existential tenets as they are held by Kierkegaard and Sartre and their various interpreters. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constituted in literature an intensely introspective age - an age which, for the first time in centuries, there appears in literature the spectacle of men consciously and purposefully worrying about themselves, with this as the main content of their writings. The early eighteenth century had been content with tradition and carefully constructed ideas and beliefs, and these had been inculcated in the youth of succeeding generations on into the nineteenth century. The self-doubtings, the self-questionings, and the self-listenings came as the result of the new scientific truths which questioned the old traditions, and a complete breakdown of many of the traditions followed the French Revolution. "One finds himself caught in a maze of introspection; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced".3 It is the doctrine of a sick society, as Carlyle has already labelled it in his Characteristics, 1

"News and Ideas", Louis Reiter, ed., CE, XXIII (May 1952), 680. Sowder's article, according to College English, has been printed in American Literature for January 1962, and concerns Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! The other article listed is Alexander Scharbach's "Aspects of Existentialism in Clackamos Chinook Myths", JA F (JanuaryMarch 1962), and shows a resemblance between the myths and Sartre's dramas. 3 Houghton, p. 71. He is speaking primarily of the beginning of the Victorian period or roughly of the period following 1831. He quotes Macaulay and Carlyle, both of whom are troubled by the new feelings of doubt and introspection. 2

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the society that has become so painfully aware of itself and its shortcomings that it is paralyzed and cannot act. It cannot act and the writers of the time were constantly denouncing idleness which to Carlyle was a thing worse than sin and to Tennyson "the persevering performance of daily duty was the best medicine for paralyzing doubts, and the safest shelter under storms either of practical or of speculative life". 4 Here is no longer the faith in a great idea to sustain the confidence of the period, nor the exhilaration of an age of physical discovery, nor the intoxication of the belief in reason. "The two major poems of the age, In Memoriam (1850) and 'Empedocles on Etna' (1852), are subjective accounts of the Victorian soul, in which the poet Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs, And how the dying spark of hope was fed, And how the breast was soothed, and how the head, And all his hourly varied anodynes". 5

Against this situation the new existentialism comes into its own. We shall see that James Thomson failed in respect to action, for Sartre's existentialism is a doctrine opposed to quietism and holds that there is no reality except in action. The existentialist's point of departure is the immediate sense of awareness that man has of his situation. A part of this awareness is the sense man has of meaninglessness in the outer world; this meaninglessness produces in him a discomfort, an anxiety, a loneliness in the face of man's limitations and a desire to invest experience with meaning by acting upon the world, although efforts to act in a meaningless, "absurd" world lead to anguish, greater loneliness, and despair. 6 That is, this sense of 4 Houghton, p. 259, quoting W. E. Gladstone, " 'Locksley Hall* and the Jubilee", Nineteenth Century, XXI (1887), 4. 5 Houghton, p. 335. Professor Houghton believes that in this quotation from "The Scholar-Gypsy" Arnold is describing Tennyson's In Memoriam and that Arnold rejected his own "Empedocles" because it was "a story of inner suffering unrelieved by action". * In all fairness it should be pointed out that Marjorie Grene in Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism (University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 57, states that "there is some confusion between the absurdism of Camus and the existentialism of Sartre. 'Absurdity' is an existential concept but not to the exclusion of other factors in the human situation".

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awareness in man indicates that existence precedes essence, which means, according to Sartre, that "man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. . . Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence".7 Thomson's view of life corresponds amazingly well to the modern existential perspective. In The City of Dreadful Night one can trace a fairly clear development of that view. On the basis of it, one can find, as well, in the same poem Thomson's reaction to the existential perspective and, blended with it, his futile attempts to resolve the problems involved. For the sake of clarity, I will describe first the elements of the Thomsonian-existential view, demonstrate how they lead naturally to his reaction to the dilemma of life, and show from there how he failed to find satisfactory answers. Looking first at Thomson's basic view of life, I find that he is concerned in The City of Dreadful Night with two primary aspects: the loss of absolutes and the encounter with nothingness. The recognition of these two aspects brought about for Thomson a personal and philosophic response to the consciousness of a loss of absolutes. Thomson responded with the existential dread, the fear of meaninglessness which appears with the forfeiture of ultimate values. His reaction to the experience of the encounter with nothingness was the existential despair, the fear of nothingness or non-being. To this dual dilemma and double reaction Thomson might have also discovered the existential solution. The tragedy of his life is that he did not. One finds, it is true, two elements in The City of Dreadful Night which indicate Thomson's concern with something approaching the existential answer; namely, that he explored the potentialities of the concept of reason and the concept of individual freedom. As we shall see, however, neither of these served its purpose. Reason did not suffice to explain life and could, therefore, not remove dread, could not rid Thomson of the fear of meaninglessness resulting from the fundamental loss of absolutes. Similarly, Thom7

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism 1957), p. 15.

and Human Emotions

(New York,

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son could not attain to a belief in the freedom of the individual which would release him from despair, from the deadly fear of non-being which was the fruit of the encounter with nothingness. From a twentieth century perspective, then, Thomson's angle of vision and his reaction to that revelation (perception) were existential, were honest, incisive interpretations of man's situation in life; but with the third step he abandoned, or better said, never broke through to the existential solution. In the next pages I will be concerned with pointing out how Thomson's view actually did consist of the two elements named above, how his personal reaction entailed the aspects of dread and despair, and how he was finally led to abandon reason and freedom as potential answers. No fact of consciousness seems to rest more securely on an intuitive basis than the complete isolation of the consciousness of each human being from that of every other individual of his species. Thomson was fully convinced that he had but one life, that there was no "personal life" after death; and he was aware that "In all eternity I had one chance", and upon the loss of that chance for inner happiness in this life he came to see that he had lost all. Nowhere else in his works does Thomson show his gradual but inexorable loss of faith in religion, in God, in all reality as he does in The City of Dreadful Night. There are those who profess to believe in a God which is no more than an idol of their own minds' making; and there are those who, while professing disbelief, retain an inarticulate belief, which prevents their lives from becoming a mockery and a delusion. Thomson, we find, could hold neither of these, and the void is nowhere more clearly brought home to us than in his masterpiece. In section VIII, after cursing the "Creator of all woe", he cries: As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign, At once so wicked, foolish, and insane, As to produce men when He might refrain! 8 But even here he still admits to some sort of supreme being, fiend 8

Works, I, 142. Unless otherwise stated, all poetry cited in this chapter will refer to The City of Dreadful Night.

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though it may be, whom he may blame for having made "such men in such a world". It is not until we get to section XIV that we find the full expression of his loss of hope, of belief. With a reversal of the triumphant announcement of the birth of Christ, the priest with "Two steadfast and intolerable eyes/Burning beneath a broad and rugged brow", 9 tells the quiet congregation: And now at last authentic word I bring, Witnessed by every dead and living thing; Good tidings of great joy for you, for all: There is no God; no Fiend with names divine Made us and tortures us; if w e must pine, It is to satiate no Being's gall. 10

One of the supplicants breaks into the sermon with the cry that the priest speaks the truth and echoes "There is no God", 11 and proceeds to tell a story that outlines the life of the poet. He says that he had but one chance of a few years to enjoy life's pleasures, pleasures that he has seen others enjoy - a home, children, "various wealth". It is not surprising that Thomson's most pessimistic poetry was written after he left Charles Bradlaugh's home in 1866 after having known four years of pleasant home-life. He had known few such pleasures in his life: the first five or six years were blighted by the death of a sister and his father's illness; the joy he had of the Barnes family at Ballincollig, Ireland, between his sixteenth and eighteenth years was destroyed by the death of Matilda Weiler; he left the Bradlaughs as a friend but quarreled bitterly later with his former mentor; the Barrs family of Leicester befriended him in later years, but he ruined that happiness by succumbing to an attack of dipsomania.12 He had but one chance for the pleasures of youth, the meaningful endeavors of manhood, and the memories of "reverend age", 9

Works, I, 154. ·» Works, I, 155. 11 Works, I, 158. The man in the congregation does not break in until we reach section XVI, and it is this section which contains his story. 1! See Salt, Life, pp. 137-138, for the story of "the death-blow to his last chance of happiness" and the touching letter he wrote to the host he had wronged during a visit.

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and this sole chance was frustrate from his birth; there was no other. The only comforting thought that he can find is that we knew nothing of life before birth nor can we know anything of it after death.13 Thomson has lost more than the delusion of the existence of a God, an idol of his mind; he has lost more than the inarticulate sense of knowing; he has been deprived of the existentialist's "perfect true gift", existence itself - the absolute. In Thomson's existential view of life, then, he has suffered the loss of the absolute for which he could find no replacement. "For the man alienated from God, from nature, from his fellow man and from himself, what is left but Nothingness? The testimony of the existentialists is that this is where modern man now finds himself, not on the highway of upward Progress toward a radiant Utopia but on the brink of a catastrophic precipice, below which yawns the absolute void, an uncompromised black Nothingness".14 It is Thomson's own encounter with Nothingness which we find symbolized by the "shadowlike" wanderer of the City in section II, and we also find the encounter appearing again and again in the many repetitions in the poem of darkness, blackness, blankness. Thomson follows the shadowy figure for part of its perpetual circle to the places where Love, Hope, and finally where Faith died. He asks if these three be dead, can life still live and is told of the handless, faceless watch in which "the works proceed until run down; although/Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go".15 Of the many expressions of the gloom of Nothingness which "lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm," 16 the best examples I have found follow the final 1S

Works, I, 160. The priest of the cathedral tells him that; the full stanza is as follows: My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus; This life holds nothing good for us, But it ends soon and nevermore can be; And we knew nothing of it ere our birth, And shall know nothing when we are consigned to earth: I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me. " Gordon E. Bigelow, "A Primer of Existentialism", CE, XXIII (December 1961), 176. 15 Works, I, 129. " Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans, by Hazel E. Barnes (New York, 1956), p. 21.

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declaration of disbelief. The supplicant in the cathedral as he tells his story says, This chance was never offered me before; For me the infinite Past is blank and dumb This chance recurreth never, nevermore; Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.17 But for sheer repetition and piling up of image, the priest's lament for the wanderers cannot be surpassed: O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark! O battling in black floods without an ark! O spectral wanderers of unholy Night! My soul hath bled for you these sunless years, With bitter blood-drops running down like tears: Oh, dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!18 Professor Bigelow in the article quoted above uses as an example of the encounter with Nothingness Leo Tolstoy's experience of the loss of the absolute. The story is familiar; it tells of Tolstoy's reaching the height of fame, fortune, family happiness, only to be struck down by a "growing uneasiness, a nameless discontent", which he realizes is the knowledge that nothing is before him but "absolute annihilation". He goes on to say that "to stop was impossible, to go back was impossible; and it was impossible to shut my eyes so as to see that there was nothing before me but suffering and actual death, absolute annihilation".19 For a startling parallel in Thomson's own encounter with Nothingness, we must turn for a moment from The City of Dreadful Night to look at the diary entry made by Thomson for Sunday, November 4, 1869.20 In the entry he tells of burning all of his papers and letters save those manuscripts already partly in print. He goes on to say, like Tolstoy, that "I felt myself like one who, having climbed half-way up a long rope (thirty-five on the 23rd inst.), 17

Works, I, 159. Works, I, 154. " Quoted by Bigelow, p. 176. 20 Dobell, "Memoir", I, iii. The entry has been quoted in greater detail and in a different context in Chapter ΙΠ of this study. The emphasis there was the destruction of the letters from Matilda Weiler; the emphasis here is on the total destruction of all that he valued. 18

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cuts off all beneath his feet; he must climb on, and can never touch the old earth again without a fatal fall". The deepest and farthest reaching implication of dread in the existentialist sense is found in these utterances. This kind of dread is what Kierkegaard called the "Sickness Unto Death",21 and what Paul Tillich had defined as man's fear of his own finitude or his fear of non-being; it is contained in Karl Jasper's third level of evil "the will to destruction as such, the urge to inflict torture, cruelty . . . the nihilistic will to ruin everything that is and has value".22 Thomson's reaction to this view of life was twofold. We find in him the feeling of dread, not the anguished dread Tolstoy felt on the threshold of his thrust into existence but the fear of meaninglessness. Thomson's dread is related to guilt and, turning to Kierkegaard once more we find that he states that while guilt is something, "so long as guilt is the object of dread it is nothing. The ambiguity lies in the relation; for so soon as guilt is posited dread is gone, and repentance is there . . . This again seems paradoxical, and yet it is not; for though dread is afraid, yet it maintains a sly intercourse with its object, cannot look away from it, indeed will not, for if the individual wills this, then repentance sets in".2s In Thomson's poem, however, repentance does not "set in"; there is only the feeling of terror, horror, fantasy, words winging on horrible creatures of the night, the sun rising "A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim";24 until we meet the central figure of section IV - a woman in the desert carrying her burning heart for a lantern - with the whole in21

S0ren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, trans, by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N. J., 1941), p. 23. Although Professor Bigelow must be given full credit for including this concept in his article, I feel it is only fair to note that I had come upon the same idea in the summer of 1961 while preparing a seminar paper on the "Concept of Dread in Certain Renaissance Dramas". I appreciate Professor Bigelow's weight of authority behind my half-formed ideas and only wish that I could have had the benefit of his article before now. 22 Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, trans, by Ralph Manheim (Yale University Press, 1951), p. 145. 23 S0ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans, by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N. J., 1944), p. 55. 21 Works, I, 133.

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tensified by the repetitive two-line refrain beginning each stanza: "As I came through the desert thus it was/As I came through the desert". For a time at least the horror of the desert does not touch the wanderer, for the tail-rhyme of the beginning stanzas is "Still I strode on austere; / N o hope could have no fear", until he beholds the woman with the lamp and sees himself, as from a distance, fall on the sand by the sea: She knelt and bent above that senseless me; Those lamp-drops fell upon my white brow there, She tried to cleanse them with her tears and hair; She murmured words of pity, love, and -woe, She heeded not the level rushing flow.25 The sea swept over the two and they were borne away, and the vile thing that was left forlorn knew that the whole sea cannot quench that heart, Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart: They love; their doom is drear, Yet they nor hope nor fear; But I, what do I here?2« Here, then is the basic mood overtaking a man when he first comes to realize the contingency of present existence and in its totality, as well as its complete otherness from being. The total response of man to the contingency of the world, including himself, is not terror of annihilation but a sense of having been thrust meaninglessly ("But I, what do I here") into a meaningless universe and of having a sense of distance from being. The fundamental stance of the existentialist as he faces society (and traditionally-understood existence as a whole) is that of rebellion. Since the existentialist believes in existence before essence and thus action before idea - he is bound to reject the normal strictures of society (because it is not his society) and any preconceived idea of being (because it is not the being that he has realized through his own action) in order to assert his individual freedom. It is this that Thomson indicates by his dreadful anguish before the withdrawal of being: " Works, I, 135. · Works, I, 135.

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The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.27 "The one who realises in anguish his condition as being thrown into responsibility which extends to his very abandonment, has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse",28 but because Thomson did not have the advantage of reading either Kierkegaard or Sartre, he is, of course, not the completely representative type of existentialist in rebellion against being and against society as a structured reflection of being. Yet his rebellion closely parallels the existentialist's rebellion; parallels it so closely, in fact, that it can be called existential in the wider, literaryphilosophical sense of the word. Being opens itself to man as a kind of Nothingness, and it is this fear of Nothingness which is Thomson's second reaction to his existential view of life. The fear of Nothingness can be called existential despair, which expresses itself in two ways in Thomson's poem: in the death of Hope and in the torment of the inability to die. Kierkegaard carefully and lucidly explains the concept of the sickness unto death. Ordinarly, when we speak of a sickness unto death we mean by that a fatal or mortal illness which ends in death - the cessation of life here on earth. The teachings of Christianity, however, explain that cessation of life here below is simply the moment of translation to everlasting life above. We can see that as Christians we deny such a thing as a bodily sickness unto death here on earth. "For death is doubtless the last phase of sickness, but death is not the last thing".29 What we find here in Thomson is not so much a denial of the Christian ethic, but the lack of its application, for to him death is the last thing. Hope underlies action and is the prolongation into the unknown of activity which is rooted in being; when the action is spent, hope dies just as the works of the faceless watch run down, and in the end there is nothing. Anxiety and fear of the future, which are somewhat more restrained feelings, are « Works, I, 141. 28 Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 59. ** Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans, by Walter Lowrie, Doubleday edition (New York, 1954), p. 150.

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diseases caused by possessiveness; but one who has lost hope has lost the ability to count on anything or anybody: We stood before a squalid house at length: He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair, Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.30 To explain the despair attendant upon the inability to die, we must turn again to Kierkegaard. He understands that the sickness unto death does not cause, in a literal sense, cessation of life. "On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this, not to be able to die".31 This Thomson speaks of as "Death-in-Life", as when he says, No time abates the first despair and awe, But wonder ceases soon; the weirdest thing Is felt least strange beneath the lawless law Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king.32 "So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die - yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die".38 Thomson would have passed through the gate of Hell 3» Works, I, 129. 31 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Doubleday edition, p. 150. It is not surprising to find much of Kierkegaard's torment of despair reflected in Thomson (there is no record of Thomson knowing his work nor is it possible that Thomson had any knowledge of his Danish contemporary), for Kierkegaard experienced an unsuccessful love affair almost as intense in its tragedy as Thomson's loss of Matilda Weiler. Following the breach with his sweetheart, Regina, Kierkegaard wrote his great Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, which recounts "his desperate struggle in renouncing every hope of earthly happiness when he gave up the prospect of marriage with the woman he loved". Walter Lowrie, in the "Translator's Preface" goes on to say that his story of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham is a "symbol of S. K.'s sacrifice of the dearest thing he had on earth", and that he made himself a monster in Regina's eyes in order to liberate her from any attachment to him and thus insure her happiness with the man she was to marry. 32 Works, I, 131. 33 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Doubleday edition, p. 151.

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gratified to gain That positive eternity of pain Instead of this insufferable inane.34

To die, then, is to reach an end, and even the fear of Nothingness is extinguished; but death-in-life means living to experience death. A man might die of cancer or slowly kill himself with dipsomania, but he cannot die of despair; it is this fact that makes his despair even more acute, for he manages to remain alive that much longer and live with his despair. This is the malady, the sickness, Thomson speaks of when he tells us that the grim inhabitants of the City of Night often murmer to themselves, they speak To one another seldom, for their woe Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak itself abroad.35

"This preciesely is the reason why he despairs - not to say despaired - because he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot become nothing".39 It is this despairing which leads Thomson to cry to Time which crawls like a snake, "Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean/Distilling poison at each painful motion",37 to fly for him as it does for others. For Thomson and those few who live dying, time cannot move fast enough: We do not ask a longer term of strife, Weakness and weariness and nameless woes; We do not claim renewed and endless life When this which is our torment here shall close, An everlasting conscious inanition! We yearn for speedy death in full fruition, Dateless oblivion and divine repose.38

Turning to the existential dilemma in which a man who chooses for himself chooses for all,39 we find that basically the existen« Works, I, 138. 35 Works, I, 127. 38 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Doubleday edition, p. 151. " Works, I, 152. *> Works, I, 153. M Grene, p. 73.

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tialist assumes that the significant fact is that we and things in general exist, but that these things have no meaning for us except as we through acting upon them can create meaning. Martin Heidegger's individual learns to subordinate to their due place the concerns of everyday - and with them the people as much as the things he is concerned with in this aspect of existence.40 If rebellion is the stance of the existentialist and freedom his working atmosphere and at once his goal, then action is the method whereby he accomplishes and sustains his new structure of being. Man is only in that he does, and his doing becomes moral in that it consists of perpetual decision-making. Thomson could not make a decision and fell into the existential dilemma that to choose not to decide is in itself a choice. The frightening aspect of the existentialist's decision is that it must be made freely without the benefit of previous standards, and, in fact, consciously against previous standards. The question, then, is upon what the decision must be made; and the existentialist's answer, in what comes dangerously close to being a circular argument, is that it must be made only upon the basis of oneself! 41 And Thomson's "action" has deteriorated to nothing more than a perpetual, futile circle between "dead Faith, dead Love, and dead Hope". Up to this point Thomson's existential view of life was clearly manifested by his loss of absolutes which revealed itself in his statements, echoing the Nietzschean cry, that God is dead. The loss of absolutes carried with it Thomson's encounter with Nothingness which, in existential terms, is the absence of the state of being. Absence of being implies, to Thomson, that birth is death, that the womb is the same as the tomb, as he juxtaposes the terms in this exploratory stanza: All our wretched race Shall finish with its cycle, and give place To other beings, with their own time-doom: 40 Cf. Martin Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth", trans, by R. F. C. Hull and A. Crick, in his Existence and Being (Chicago, 1949), pp. 317 ff. 41 Sartre, Existentialism, trans, by Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1947), p. 55 ff.

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Infinite aeons ere our kind began; Infinite aeons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb. 42

Sartre's existentialism, as has been stated, holds that existence precedes essence; that is to say, consciousness arises, albeit in an unintelligible way, within the womb of unconcious being. Each individual is not of the world; he is a world of his own making, for he is that which he does. Rather than "all our wretched race" finishing its cycle, each individual, who is himself a universe,43 will complete his cycle by involvement with others, for "in projecting himself, in losing himself outside of himself, he makes for man's existing".44 Thomson's reaction to the existential view of life produced in him dread, which we defined as the fear of meaninglessness, and despair, the fear of Nothingness appearing as the death of hope. Although Thomson experiences this dual dread, he is not led into even a momentary experience of real life in which he would have had being even though he should have died; his dread on the other hand carries the search of death instead of salvation in it. In trying to find meaning for his life, he lived in the physical world but lost his life existentially. "Before you come alive, life is nothing; it's up to you to give it meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating a human community".45 Thomson's attempts to resolve his dilemma proved futile, and it is at this point that he ceases to act as an existentialist. Had he followed the existentialist's logical step, the thrust toward existence, he might have found a salvation by substituting for his loss of the Christian absolute the existential "upsurge of freedom". Not only must man not take himself for granted as a nature fully given, but he must also not take his relations to the world for granted. There is a necessity to act implied in his freedom; his freedom is not for nothing. At the very beginning of The City 42

Works, I, 155. ® Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 50, says, "there is no universe other than a human universe, the universe of human subjectivity". 44 Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 50. 45 Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 49. 4

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of Dreadful Night, Thomson tries to solve his dilemma by reason; and in describing the City as of Night but not Sleep, he finds: This dreadful strain Of thought and consciousness which never ceases Or which some moments' stupor but increases, This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane.46 These wretches were done, desolate, and he wandered or sat desolately pondering with them "Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head".47 Thomson could not become the person he wanted to merely by thinking about himself, but only by doing something with himself. This requires involving himself in the affairs of others, in adapting himself to social pressures, in transforming his environment. Rebellion is the necessary prerequisite for the existentialist in reaching the central stance of his being: absolute freedom. The existentialist desires absolute freedom or the working atmosphere, as it were, for the construction of his new concept of being. This freedom is double-edged. On the one hand, it releases the existentialist from the alien strictures of a world not of his own making; on the other, it plunges him into the uncertainty and insecurity of a world without standards. Because reason failed him at the outset, Thomson turned from freedom of the individual, in which he could not believe, to Necessity, an aspect in Thomson actually anti-existential. In Sartre's play The Flies Zeus tells Orestes of the order of the universe, of the planets moving on their appointed ways, never clashing, of the "music of the spheres, that vast mineral hymn of praise, sounding and resounding to the limits of the firmament. It is my work that living things increase and multiply, each according to his k i n d . . . It is my work that the tides with their innumerable tongues creep up to lap the sand and draw back at the appointed hour". 48 Orestes admits that Zeus, who for Sartre stands for the idea of God rather than God, is the "king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the « Works, I, 127. " Works, I, 126. 48 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies, trans, by Stuart Gilbert in A Treasury of the Theatre, ed. by John Gassner (New York, 1950), p. 492.

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49

king of man". Although Zeus created man, he gave him freedom; and Orestes has found that he himself is his freedom. He finds, also, that his freedom isolates him and makes him an exile, but before he leaves on his lonely, dreary road he will tell his people what he has found. Zeus tells him that he will simply make them "see their lives as they are, foul and futile, a barren boon". 50 Orestes feels that since it is their lot, he should not deny them the despair which he has in himself. And when Zeus asks what they will make of it, he replies: "What they choose. They're free; and human life begins on the far side of despair".51 The necessitarianism, almost deterministic in its application, which Thomson expressed in the following stanzas accepts the forgetfulness found in the belief in Zeus not the freedom of Orestes: All substance lives and struggles evermore Through countless shapes continually at war, By countless interactions interknit; If one is born a certain day on earth, All times and forces tended to that birth Not all the world could change or hinder it. I find no hint throughout the Universe Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse; I find alone Necessity Supreme; With infinite Mystery, abysmal dark, Unlighted ever by the faintest spark For us the flitting shadows of a dream.52 But this apparent assertion that every event in the universe is guided and determined by logical or causal necessity is in direct antagonism to Thomson's earlier rejection of society's perspective. In the very next stanza, in fact, the priest, who has just been speaking, says that "if you would not this poor life fulfill/ Lo, you are free to end it when you will".58 Thus Thomson has taken the first step toward the existentialist's dreadful freedom. The term dreadful freedom "implies not only hope of what I 49 M 31 52 33

Sartre, Sartre, Sartre, Works, Works,

The Flies, p. 493. The Flies, p. 494. The Flies, p. 494. I, 156. I, 157.

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shall do, but literal and inescapable responsibility for what I have done. It implies not only that I may become what I may do, but what, within the close yet flexible bounds of my personal situation, I have contrived to accomplish, I and I alone must bear the credit, the shame, the triumph, and the regret".54 Thomson, in The City of Dreadful Night, becomes so wrapped up in the image he painted for himself that he makes no decisions he merely parrots the ideas and ideals of others.55 He comes very close to the existential idea of non-being, for he is a consciousness which has ceased to be conscious of anything but an unsubstantial dream - were it not for that dream, he would even cease to exist. He can in no way rise above his world and transform it, for the City itself dissolves in the daylight air. Thomson fails of becoming a typical existential being because the existentialist attempts to make every man aware of what he is - Orestes in the play quoted above must tell the people of Argos of their condition - and "to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men".58 Thomson is not aware of himself and consequently cannot accept the responsibilities imposed by the existentialist conception of absolute freedom. "The Existentialist teaching about man is hard. It does not feel any compassion for him. It expects from 54

Grene, p. 50. We might mention Kant's Ideen der reinen Vernunft (Ideas of Pure Reason) in which he claimed the soul, the world, and God were not "objects" but asserted their reality as postulates of practical reason; but this failed Thomson. Hobbes' doctrine, that all the facts in the physical universe are dependent upon and conditioned by their causes, came closer to giving Thomson the answers he sought. In his essay "Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", written in 1868 and published in Essays and Phantasies, Thomson says, in a footnote, that Necessitarians love to argue in the most perfect of figures, the circle. He describes their doctrine this way: "Man is the creature of circumstances. Their practical corollary is: Let us improve circumstances, and man will be proportionately improved. So circumstances make man (for theory), and man makes circumstances (for practice)... Thus the perfect circle is complete, to spin merrily along the railroad of progress unto the not very distant terminus of Heaven-upon-Earth". (pp. 77-78.) 55

' · Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 16.

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him that he hear the riddles of the world without getting an answer, that in desperate cases he make decisions on his own responsibility and carry all the consequences. It asks that man go through life without consolation. But in claiming all this, the Existentialist thinks highly of man".57 The point is that despite the fact that we all reach the same end, we had best make use of our time so that our going will represent a loss. One of Thomson's tragedies was that he could in nowise face up to such responsibility. Sartre has described our human lot as a stark quest after that which can never be realized in itself or in its finite substitutes. His approach to the characteristic existential situations of dread, freedom, moral choice, and death is a sustained homily on the wisdom of disillusioned atheism. A man must first endure the experience of having his certitudes about God contradicted and shattered, before he can make a personally valid decision about transcendence. On the one hand, every man looks for absolutes; on the other, he develops himself. On the one hand a man pursues stability and evades relativism; this is the nostalgia for existence which every existentialist tries to express. On the other hand, the same man struggles to make something of himself and shuns the temptation to wallow in pipe dreams. Thomson attempted to fall back on himself, to look for the personal goal of the fullness of himself, but he did not find it; and only this first movement of personal existence renders possible the second movement of the personal essence. Thomson having lost the absolute failed to find either in the world or in himself a sufficient substitute. Marjorie Grene's discussion of the existential elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet is interesting and to the point, but her note of warning concerning such studies, however, I feel to be well taken - that it is as hazardous to call Hamlet, or any other literary work, existential as it is to call it Freudian or metaphysical in Schlegel's sense.58 Professor Bigelow also warns us that "one of the attractions, and one of the dangers of existential themes is that they become like Sir Thomas Browne's quincunx: 57 58

Amstutz, p. 250. Grene, pp. 57-59.

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once one begins to look for them, he sees them everywhere".5» But I would like to conclude this chapter with a quotation from Marjorie Grene which, although fairly long, is peculiarly appropriate to the supposition that existential concepts (if not existentialism itself) are valid in The City of Dreadful Night. She explains that . . . freedom is total, yet rooted in a determinate, historical situation; dread in the face of such freedom; and the concealment of dread in the comforting frauds of everyday existence—such is the nexus of ideas that make up the core of the existentialist's conception of human life. There is, perhaps, nothing really new in any single one of these ideas. Kierkegaard . . . thought of himself as a continuer, though with a significant difference, of the tradition of Socratic irony. Sartre finds, overlaid, to be sure, with the falsities of 'dogmatism' and 'Christianity', the seed of his conception of free will in the unhampered liberty of the Cartesian God, who is bound neither by truth nor by good but makes them both. Here is the recognition, says Sartre, that liberty is at one with creativity, that only pure freedom can make a world.«0 Thomson would not accept, except in part, the rationalized view of the external universe in which everything is ordered, predetermined; nor could he find in the world of self any basis for fulfillment: The sense that every struggle brings defeat Because Fate holds no prize to crown success; That all the oracles are dumb or cheat Because they have no secret to express; That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain Because there is no light beyond the curtain; That all is vanity and nothingness.61 Thomson failed to recognize that "liberty is at one with creativity" and failed to find the "pure freedom" with which to make a world. He ended with nothingness.

58

Bigelow, p. 178. Grene, p. 56. " Works, I, 172.

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VI. CONCLUSION

Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils, and if it deprives man of any good thing it also takes away his desire for it. Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures, while leaving his appetites for them; and brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, men fear death and desire old age. Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts, trans, by James Thomson (B.V.).

James Thomson's importance as a literary figure of the Victorian period stems from the fact that his writings reflect in miniature the many aspects of that period's strong undercurrent of pessimism. His writings also reflect the constant sense of conflict which gave the period its transitional character.1 Above all, Thomson was unable to come to a satisfactory resolution; and while we have innumerable examples of compromise in his time, we have few representatives of the prominent thread of pessimism who are as eloquent as Thomson. We can trace throughout his creative life the development of each facet of his pessimism. We can see that no one factor by itself is a sufficient explanation, a sufficient cause for the lack of compromise expressed in his greatest work, the ultimate of atheistic pessimism, The City of Dreadful Night. Each of the factors contributing to his pessimism contains an easily detected conflict: the highly charged religious atmosphere of his early years gave way to a thorough 1

See Houghton, p. 1.

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disbelief in the precepts of Christianity; he desperately desired an end to life's sufferings, but to commit suicide attributed a value to life; his attempts to find emotional stability in life were destroyed by the loss of his sweetheart and the consequences of his dipsomania; and, finally, when he sought a resolution to his dilemma in reason and Necessity, they failed, and he was unable to realize existential freedom. These conflicts have been carefully investigated and Thomson's answers, whether he was right or wrong, have been found. The conflict found in the contributory factors of Thomson's pessimism lent itself to a dipolar treatment of the material of this study. Thomson had no sudden revelation of the fallibility of the Bible, or of Christianity, for his was a long, anguished process of doubt and soul searching self-reproach, which can be traced through his works in successive stages from fear of disbelief, through disbelief in the divinity of Christ, in God, and finally in the soul and immortality. His personal conflict reflected the dispute between the adherents of pessimism and the adherents of religious authority. The foes of pessimism, J. Radford Thomson, Mark Wenley, John Hopps, struck hard for the authority of divine guidance and felt that Christianity alone could save for mankind a sense of the relativity of values. The proponents of divine authority themselves felt a need for a belief in Christianity and that need was echoed by a vast number of Englishmen. By an effort of thought it became man's duty to perceive that in his own nature eminently, as in that of all creatures relatively, Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.' Thomson expressed his divergence from the central tenets of Christianity in his "Stanzas Suggested by . . . The Grande Chartreuse". Although he still believed in a soul and a deity when he wrote "The Doom of a City", his lessening belief produced a deepening despair which culminated in utter disbelief and utter despair. "Vane's Story" and "To Our Ladies of Death", and his prose-poem, A Lady of Sorrow lead us to this * Shelley's Works, m , 28.

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declaration of disbelief and despair in his greatest poem, The City of Dreadful Night; his last poems simply reaffirm his atheistic pessimism. The same sort of two-fold classification holds true for Thomson's philosophy of pessimism as well, for according to Schopenhauer we are under the dominion of Will, Will which causes us to exist - the only escape is death. However, as long as we are conscious, we are involved with, always oriented to, an object, whether it be something real, perceived by the senses, or a fantasy of our imaginings. Balanced against this will to exist was Thomson's frequently expressed longing for death, for the eternal rest of something akin to a Buddhist nirvana, or for the complete cessation of pain and anguish in annihilation. He had at almost any time in his life the power to end it when he wished, but to commit suicide is to place too high a value on life. The most startling expression of the dichotomy is the juxtaposition of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds in The City of Dreadful Night·, for Thomson depicts both worlds in the poem as his striving to escape the world of the limbo of the lost, which to him is reality, into the real city, which by a reversal, represents annihilation. This same currous reversal is repeated over and over as each of the supplicants enters the cathedral and leaves his everyday activities by telling the hooded figure that they wake from day dreams to this real life - in the city of fantasy. Thomson, however, had an intense interest in life; he did not shut himself off from the world, at least until his last year. The similarity between Schopenhauer's philosophy and Thomson's pessimism is striking, but the philosopher was speaking from the mind. Thomson turned to the Italian poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi as a kindred soul who felt from the heart, as did Thomson, the pessimism expressed in his writings. That Thomson was familiar with Schopenhauer's philosphy is more than a possibility, but it is a fact that he translated with great sympathy the "Operette Morali" and "Pensieri" of Leopardi. The reality-unreality dichotomy of Thomson's religious despair is repeated in his emotional pessimism, for romantic melancholy comes under the same head. Thomson was a poet of his time,

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and his time was romantically influenced by Rousseau, Goethe, Heine, and the English romantics. From Byron's subjective melancholy Thomson learned the loneliness and isolation of the subjective melancholiac, and he suffered from the solitude imposed by his attacks of dipsomania. In Heine he saw a reflection of his own personal misery caused by the death of Matilda Weller, an emotional effect almost mystic in its intensity transcending the cold expression of philosophical pessimism. Shelley, whom Thomson admired above all other English poets, taught him the distinction between the feigner of melancholy and the sincere sufferer of worldsorrow. Despite his lack of belief in man's ultimate self-perfectibility, Thomson was fully aware that man was the unfortunate victim of social and political inequalities of his period and believed in a reformation of the past. Understanding, as did many in his time, the portents of evolution, he could not transfer his belief to the powers of nature; he could form no new ideal, no peg upon which to hang his life. When a man places absolute value in an ideal - be it his conception of God or of love - and if this prove unobtainable, or obtainable and prove meaningless, the result is utter, futile despair. The City of Dreadful Night is a poem of profound emotional force whose apparent monotony reveals, in a careful reading, subtle variations of form, meter, and dramatic intensity, all within the framework of a single mood. In looking at The City of Dreadful Night from a modern viewpoint, we can see that this poem is at once the beginning and the culmination of the history of Thomson's pessimism. Thomson's existential view of life entailed the loss of absolutes (the death of God) and his encounter with Nothingness. His reaction to that view of life resulted in dread, the fear of meaninglessness, and despair, the fear of Nothingness exemplified by the death of Hope. His futile attempt at a resolution of his dilemma included reason, which did not suffice to reconcile the value of life with the misery in the world, and the freedom of the individual in which Thomson could not believe. Thomson chose, rather, an anti-existential aspect, Necessity, and failed to realize existential freedom; or in the words of F. C. S. Schiller, Thomson's great poem "cannot be

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pooh-poohed as a drunken raving: it must be treated on its merits, as a superb poetic statement of the case against optimism, as a poignant expression of the utter desolation of a soul that abandons itself to a belief in a godless, mindless, ruthless, and mechanical universe".3 It is precisely this that prevented Thomson from realizing existence in the existentialist sense of separating subject and object; because he attempted to transcend human subjectivity, he failed of the essential meaning of existence. Let us turn finally to the premise that Thomson's writings were a contributory factor to the pessimism of his times as well as a result. If it be objected that one who has been scarcely listened to at all could not exercise much influence, the reply is that we are concerned not with the influence but with the accuracy of the presage. To borrow a figure from Thomson's essay on Shelley, it is written that mankind did not heed Noah, or heeded only to mock, during the six-score years in which he foretold the flood and built the ark ready for it. If the flood really came as he foretold, it attested to the truth of his inspiration; but no one now would think that his prophecies were instrumental in accomplishing their own fulfillment, although this opinion must have been general among those who were being submerged.4 Or we may answer, applying a much used metaphor, that the mountain peaks which in any district first reflect the rays of the dawn exercise little or no influence on the dawn's development, even in relation to the country around them. The brightening of the peaks prophesies very early the coming noon time, but the dawn would grow and become noon, and the noon would sink and become night just the same as if they were not there. What I am saying is that the spirit of the ages, the Zeitgeist, is developed universally and independently by its own mysterious laws throughout mankind. The eminent men from whom it first radiates the expression of what may be called a new aspect really cast but a faint reflection upon those beneath them. They help us to read clearly the advance of time, but this advance they do not cause any more than the pointer on a sundial causes the 3 4

Schiller, p. 148. James Thomson, "Shelley (Essay)", Shelley, a Poem, p. 103 ff.

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progression of the hours which it indicates. The twentieth century "Wasteland school" of poetry reflects Thomson's nineteenth century pessimism. The city he describes in his early "The Doom of a City" is, perhaps, a "prelude to Eliot's 'Unreal City' which symbolized for him the pain of human existence resulting from an awareness of the futile ordering of the universe". 5 Thomson's journey through life has also been described as a journey through the Waste Land of his times. If his poetry did not contribute to the bitterness of much of the poetry of his own times and of the post World War I era, it certainly gave an ample foretaste of the desolate, disillusioned literature of those periods.

5

Forsyth, p. 153.

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