smiles like April sunshine may put to flight that April shower of tears; but that passing cloud none the less shows what our human nature is, and much of the gloom that clouds literature and life proves that we are but children of a larger growth, and that we insist upon making a perpetual curse out of a flitting trouble. Most of the strongest quotations which the pessimists make from the great poets and philosophers of ancient and modern times may be explained in this way, and the despairing words which they speak for themselves or for their heroes are not to be taken as professions of faith so much as utterances of emotion. It is not a fair interpretation of the author of the book of Job to quote the sentence, "Let the day perish wherein I was born;" nor do we do justice to the wisdom of Solomon by taking from the book of Ecclesiastes the words: "Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit." Nor do we represent truly the general delight of the Greeks in life itself by harping upon such sayings of Homer and Sophocles and Plato as these: "There is nothing more wretched than man;" "Not to be born is the most reasonable, but, having seen the light, the next best is to go thither whence one came as soon as possible;" "If death is the privation of all feeling, a sleep without a dream, what a marvelous gain it is!" These Greeks none the less rejoiced in life, and sayings like these are but passing shadows upon their sunshine.

It is quite a memorable fact that the very year 1818, which is the date of Leopardi's acceptance of his gloomy philosophy in the weary solitude of Recanati, brought Schopenhauer to Italy, after having finished his great work on "The World as Will and as Presentation." The two men never saw and never probably heard of each other; yet how they are named throughout the world together, and the delicate Italian is now seen with his quivering harp to have begun the overture of the "Drama of Despair" which the burly German has followed up with his drum and trumpet! Schopenhauer was then thirty years old. He was born in 1788, at Dantzic, and passed his youth at Hamburg in the banking-house of his father, a position so little congenial to him that, upon his father's death, he left it for Göttingen and the study of philosophy, then under the instruction of the skeptical professor Ernst Schulze. After a residence at Berlin, and

attending the lectures of Fichte, he wrote his able thesis upon "The Fourfold Root of the Principle of the Sufficient Reason," and he took at Jena, in 1813, his doctor's degree. From 1814 to 1818 he lived at Dresden, and there wrote the book upon "The World as Will and as Presentation," upon which his fame rests and from which he apparently expected immediate notoriety, when he started for Italy in 1818, leaving his manuscript in the hands of a friend for publication. No such result came, and for long years he lived and taught in Berlin in virtual obscurity, doomed to see Hegel, whom he stigmatized as a charlatan, at the head of the philosophical schools. In 1831 he retired to Frankfort, where he died in 1860, having lived long enough to see the turn of the tide against Hegelianism and the worship of the Idea, and in favor of his own philosophy, which set up the Will as the supreme fact, and assailed the prevailing idealism with a bitterness and wit more acceptable to the mass of readers than the author's logic.

Schopenhauer's personal characteristics and experience undoubtedly had much to do with his philosophy. He professed to have received his misanthropical temper from his father and his intellectual gifts from his mother, who was a distinguished novelist. His attempt to be a man of business in spite of his tastes for study probably did little to sweeten his disposition, and undoubtedly the view of human nature which he got from the competitions of the market and the pages of the ledger, combined with the skeptical lessons of Prof. Schulze and the study of Voltaire, did not lead him to see much sense in the masters of Berlin philosophy who made the world and man depend upon the Idea. To this irascible youth Berlin idealism was all moonshine, and, cynic as he always was, and given to barking from the outset, he wanted teeth to make him bite, and the teeth that he needed came to him with his theory of "The World as Will and as Presentation." His philosophy is founded upon Will as the supreme force; and he belongs to this age of ours which is accepting the reign of Force after its bitter disappointment under the reign of the Idea.

Hartmann, who completes the trio of pessimist leaders, came of quite another pedigree; and in the very interesting and instructive sketch of thirty pages which introduces the volume of studies

which we have placed at the head of this article, he traces his development to the end of the year 1874. He was born in Berlin in 1842, the son of a captain of artillery, and his mother was the daughter of a physician. It is somewhat odd that this predestined pessimist claims to have had two mothers, because after her father's death his mother's sister came to live with her, and all of the military father's strictness was needed to offset the petting of the only child by these two kind souls. After a good schooling in literature and in the classics, as well as in music and drawing, the youth at sixteen entered the army of Prussia, and gave himself to the scientific instruction and the manly discipline required of a soldier. But an accident in, 1861, which lamed his left knee, brought his military career to an end, and toward the close of 1864 he showed the drift of his new experience by beginning his work, "The Philosophy of the Unconscious," which was finished in 1867 and published in 1869, and which is the most conspicuous philosophical treatise of our day, and may probably be called with truth the most popular book of metaphysics that was ever published. There is something in this young man's lameness which took him from his dashing career as a soldier to his quiet chamber, and sometimes for months to his weary bed, that tempts us to explain his gloomy philosophy by his personal disappointment; yet he disclaims any such inference, and rather ascribes to his forced seclusion his freedom to think without being overpowered by book-learning; and he finds in his hard-won patience important help in his effort to lighten the gloom of human destiny by resignation and fellow-feeling. He, moreover, utterly denies that his system tends to make men unhappy; but maintains that it leads them to peace by expecting little good from this world, which is not only the worst that is possible, but the best that is possible; the only world that is possible, and worse for us than if there had been no world at all. We do him no wrong, therefore, in connecting his experience with his philosophy, as we complete this rapid survey of the personal life of the three pessimist leaders, and add the portrait of the lame soldier of Berlin to that of the sickly poet of Recanati and that of the saucy cynic of Frankfort.

These men evidently felt the influence of the general tendencies that were acting upon opinion and life in the nineteenth

century, chief among which we specify the decline of church authority, the unsatisfactoriness of speculative philosophy, and the insufficiency of the spirit of trade and luxury, which supplanted the old ambition and loyalty. Take what view that we please of the cause and the cure of the movement, there can be no reasonable doubt of the fact that the old ecclesiastical authority lost its power over the thinking men of the age; and that sensitive, aspiring souls like Leopardi, who inherited all the religious sentiment of the old Catholic Church and carried its fervor in their very blood, suffered deeply when they found nothing to take the place of the old faith and communion. So profound a thinker as Gioberti goes to the root of the matter when he quotes from St. Augustine the dominant thought under which Leopardi was educated: "Thou hast made us, Lord, for thyself, and restless is our heart until it rests in thee;" and then speaks of Leopardi's exposure to the general skepticism of the south of Europe, and to the sway which Locke and Condillac and De Tracy wielded over the mind of Italy. He had lost the old belief and worship, and he had not found the new culture and humanity. Put even as great a soul as Dante into his place, and would not he too have been tempted to despair? Where would the "Divina Commedia" have been, with no true emperor or pontiff to fill out its visions, no hell for the doom of the traitor, and no paradise where the lost Beatrice could lead the enraptured poet to the Queen of Heaven and to the beatific vision of God? The sickly bard of Recanati knew the charms of woman only to be scorned or jilted by her; and he could look up to no gracious Madonna with her incessant watch to comfort him for the fickleness of the pretty girl whose face had driven him mad. He wanted a faith, and did not find even a philosophy to take its place. The age of Dante and of Pascal had gone, and to him the new day-spring had not come.

The philosophy that rose in England and Germany, and found disciples in France and in time in Italy, and which sought to give rest in ideal convictions instead of church standards, was not sufficient to meet the wants of the people, or of an important class of thinkers to whom Schopenhauer, the founder of the pessimist system, belonged. The philosophers of Berlin, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, gave him little comfort; and when he published his

first treatise on the Sufficient Reason, and began to study his philosophy of the Will, he laughed at the folly of those schoolmen who were forever prating about ideas in a country which Frederick the Great had created by his sword, and which Napoleon was now conquering by his bayonets. Say what we may of Schopenhauer's extravagances, we must allow him the credit of seeing, as no other abstract thinker saw, that this world is governed more by will than by opinion, and that Nature herself has no opinions, but deals only with facts and forces, and to a certain extent she plays into the hands of pessimism. If not the devil in a strait-jacket, as Coleridge called her, she is not the gentle, pitying mother that the sentimentalists represent her to be. She has a will, a terrible will, of her own, and she strikes without a word.

Hence came a reaction, which for a time took a practical form in the spirit of the bourgeoisie, which has been so strong since 1830 under the rule of Louis Philippe and the second emperor, and in Germany since the death of Hegel and Goethe, and in England and America since the rise of the new industries. With all the advantages of this money-making age, there have been limitations and evils, especially the egotism that looks first to its own pocket and its own pleasures, setting up self in over-conscious pride, and ignoring the nation and the race in the luxury of its living. This state of things, with its self-will in enterprise, and its hedonism in the plan of life, goes far to explain the motive and the reason of Hartmann's philosophy, especially his view of the power of the unconscious, and the folly of pleasure-seeking. To a certain extent Northern Germany has gone with him, in his protest against self-sufficiency and enjoyment, and not without a certain ground has it been said by South German spite that Hartmann is Bismarck in philosophy, and Bismarck is Hartmann in statesmanship.

But, in addition to the particular and the general tendencies that have favored the rise of pessimism in our century, there are causes more universal in their character, which concern the root of the matter. If love may be called by eminence the old, old story, sin and death and all evil follow hard upon it, and the great question of all faith and all philosophy is: "What shall we make of the evil in the world and in ourselves, and who will show us the true good?" The reconciliation of good with evil-this has been and is