694 THE DRAMA 



produce fruit in the imaginative sphere, the fruitage is singularly 

 bitter, stunted, abortive. Take, for instance, a scheme like that of 

 Schopenhauer. Beginning with an assurance that there is a large 

 preponderance of misery over happiness in this world, he explains 

 that we are all the victims of a great, mysterious, blind, but all- 

 powerful force, which he calls " the will to live." If you and I and 

 all other men and women are alike miserable, the reason is that we 

 are at once the creatures and playthings of a great impersonal, natural 

 volition, driving us to live our dreary lives, to fear death, and cling 

 to existence, whether we will or no. Intelligence which is given to 

 the human race is the dreariest of mockeries, for it is powerless 

 against this insatiable craving. All that intelligence can do is to 

 throw light upon the turmoil, to make us comprehend the fatal condi- 

 tions in which we are ensnared, and thus to make us more unhappy 

 than we were before. Now observe the moral which Schopenhauer 

 draws from his philosophical scheme. He tells us that we should 

 deny the will to live, not so much by suicide, for that would be a 

 wilful act, and our object is to get rid of will but by asceticism, 

 self-restraint, resignation to passivity, such as was practiced and is 

 now practiced in the East. 



Now, if we suppose that any dramatic artist accepted Schopen- 

 hauer as his guide, philosopher and friend, he would have to believe 

 that passivity was better than activity, and would be essaying the 

 almost impossible task of painting by means of action a goal of in- 

 action. The essence of drama is human activity ; the very word signi- 

 fies action; and the idea is absolutely eviscerated of all meaning by 

 the assumption that a denial of the will to live is our real object. 

 Schopenhauer's own notion of tragedy illustrates this. It is only at 

 best a sort of alleviation or temporary consolation part and parcel, 

 therefore, of that lamentable gift of intelligence which shows how 

 hideous is the chaos in which we live. " What gives to all tragedy, in 

 whatever form it may appear, the peculiar tendency towards the sub- 

 lime is the awakening of the knowledge that the world, life, can 

 afford us no true pleasure, and consequently is not worthy of our 

 attachment. In this consists the tragic spirit; it therefore leads 

 to resignation." x 



But the artist must believe in his work as a free and joyous form of 

 activity, not assuredly as a mere anaesthetic, an anodyne, a mode of 

 sending to sleep a ceaseless grumble of indignation and despair. 



Such pessimism as this is, I say, for the most part fruitless, or if it 

 bear fruit, such fruit is atrophied, abortive, bitter, like dead sea- 

 apples in the mouth. It is difficult, perhaps, to suggest a work of 

 art which is conceived in this spirit, and is the direct fruit of Scho- 

 penhauer's pessimism. But perhaps Mr. Hardy's Jude the Obscure 

 i Schopenhauer's " World as Will and Idea." Book III, cap. 37. 



