THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

228 THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
each separately to a brook, and there drink instead cf dining, anxious
only to hide their misery from one another." 1 Never had life seemed so
meaningless, or so mean.
Yes, the Revolution was dead; and with it the life seemed to have gone
out of the soul of Europe. That new heaven, called Utopia, whose glamour
had relieved the twilight of the god?, had receded into a dim future where
only young eyes could see it; the older ones had followed that lure long
enough, and turned away from it now as a mockery of men's hopes. Only
the young can live in the future, and only the old can live in the past;
men were moft cf them forced to live in the present, and the present was
a ruin. How many thousands of heroes and believers had fought for the
Revolution! How the hearts cf youth even-where In Europe had turned
towards the young republic, and had lived on the light and hope of it,,
until Beethoven tore into shreds the dedication of his Heroic Symphony
to the man who had ceased to foe the Son of the Revolution and had
become the son-in-'av/ of reaction. Hew many had fought even then for
the great hope, and had believed, with passionate uncertainty, to the
very end? And new IILTC was the very end: Waterloo, and St. Helena,
and Vienna: and on the throne of prostrate France a Bourbon who had
learned nothing and forgotten nothing. This was the glorious denouement
of a generation of fuch hope and effort as human history had never known
before. What a comedy this tragedy was for those whose laughter was
yet bitter *u:h tears!
Many of the poor had, in these days of disillusionment and suffering,
the consolation cf religious hope: but a large proportion of the upper
classes had lost their faith, and looked out upon a ruined world with no
alleviating vision of a vaster life in whose final justice and beaut)' these
ugly ills would be dissolved. And in truth it was hard enough to believe
that such a sorry- planet as men saw in 1818 was held up in the hand of
an intelligent and benevolent God. Mephistopheles had triumphed, and
every Faust was in despair. Voltaire had sown the whirlwind, and
Schopenhauer was to reap the harvest.
Seldom had the problem of evil been flung so vividly and insistently
into the face of philosophy arid religion. Every martial grave from Bou-
logne to Moscow and the Pyramids lifted a mute interrogation to the indifferent
stars. How long, O Lord, and Why? Was this almost universal
calamity the vengeance of a just God on the Age of Reason and unbelief?
Was it a call to the penitent intellect to bend before the ancient virtues
of faith, hope and charity? So Schlegel thought, and Novalis, and
Chateaubriand, and De Musset, and Southey, and Wordsworth, and
Gogol; and they turned back to the old faith like wasted prodigals happy
to be home again. But some others made harsher answer: that the chaos
of Europe but reflected the chaos of the universe; that there was no divine
: Lift and Letters of Thorsas Carlylg* I, p. 5*.