The pessimistic temper of the age reveals itself in every field where mood finds utterance. Every book that makes a sensation does it by virtue of the phase of despair it presents. Every drama that creates a furore does it by uncovering some new tragic element in life. Anything optimistic falls flat. The literary men of Europe are recklessly underbidding each other in the attempt to show that life is sadder, or meaner, or baser, or emptier than had been supposed. The cynic and the pessimist share public attention. Not that European writers are insincere. The authors and thinkers themselves have been the first to feel the Zeitgeist. They have written as they have because they have found the melancholy view of life the most fruitful thing in recent culture. They have found it the richest in novelty, surprises, images, scenes, reflections, effects, and sensations. The worthlessness of life is an idea that agrees with science, meets the mood of the age, and fires the imagination of the artist. The French, Norwegian, and Russian realism of the last decade is the utterance of later pessimism. For the term "realism" describes something more than an art. It describes an ethical view. It means the conviction of Flaubert: "You may fatten the human beast, give him straw up to his belly, and gild his manger; but he remains a brute, say what you will." The realists are filled with the scientific notions of human nature. They base romances on psychology, physiology, or pathology. They study Darwin, and Spencer, and Ribot. They look constantly for the traces of the savage cave-dweller. The great masters,--Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen, Maupassant, Flaubert, Gautier, Loti, Bourget,--as well as their swarms of disciples, are ever on the watch for marks of decadence, or for vestiges of the brute in man's instincts and passions. To the old romanticism of Victor Hugo they oppose blunt truth-telling and remorseless analysis. They spare no illusions. "Love, marriage, family," cries Tolstoi's hero, "are lies, lies, lies!" This same ethical spirit is shared by realism in art. A painter seeking in the work-house a model for his "job," an actress visiting the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,--these show the modern appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times' spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and despair. Most of our great critics of life,--Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoi, and Ruskin--have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement and despair. The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly asks in a recent poem:--