The billows are murmuring their murmurs unceasing,
Wild blows the wind, the dark clouds are fleeting,
The stare are still gleaming, so calmly and cold,
And a fool awaits an answer.
Horace and the Epicureans would have agreed with Heine. The great gods recline in Olympus careless of mankind. Immortality is at best a great Perhaps. All we know for certain is the brief space between the cradle and the grave. Carpe diem. Extract all the pleasure you can from the fleeting moment. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow you die." But mere Epicureanism has been difficult of attainment, save to mental sluggards, since the advent of Christianity.
A vast hope has traversed the earth, and our eyes,
In spite of ourselves, we must raise to the skies:
so sings Owen Meredith in the splendid lines which he has stolen without acknowledgment from Musset. Here is how a modern sceptic—a sceptic who would fain lift his eyes heavenward—has in one of his bitterest moments translated the doctrines of Epicurus:
Eat, drink, and play, and think that this is bliss:
There is no heaven but this.
There is no hell
Save earth, which serves the purpose doubly well,
Seeing it visits still
With equalest apportionment of ill
Both good and bad alike, and brings to one same dust
The unjust and the just
With Christ who is not risen.
Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved:
Of all the creatures under heaven's wide scope,
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, that had most belief.
Clough's attitude, like that of Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, Mallock, is one of personal grief and sorrow at the loss of the beliefs or the illusions which glorify life. George Eliot, and in a lesser degree Tourgenief, seem to brood with large-hearted, all-embracing, tender pity over the great mass of humanity, dancing as it were upon a false bottom projected into chaos, with infinite gulfs yawning below them, with infinite possibilities of pain environing them. Carlyle recoils with wrath and scorn from the spectacle. Swift, Heine, and Voltaire jeer at it. Hugo's intense egotism rejoices simply in finding an arena where he can exhibit his superiority; he is a god addressing beings of a lower order, and glad to find that they are lower. Men whose egotism is milder than Hugo's, whose imagination is blunter or less morbid, if you will, than that of Carlyle, Swift, or Tolstoi, but whose organization is too fine to tempt them into the chase after mere material comfort, look on with more or less of scientific, artistic, or sociological curiosity. Balzac is one of these; so are Mérimée, Daudet, Henry James.
The humorist occupies a somewhat anomalous position. Last month we defined him as one who is struck by the contrast between the inner and the outer man, the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real, or whatever awkward metaphysical terminology you may prefer to use, but is struck by the
