[In the following assessment of Levy's career. Chambers places Levy in the context of late nineteenth-century literary pessimism.]

In the mind of a student of humanity, if he be also a reader of books, intellectual problems are apt to crystallise around individual personalities. A single poet, a single novelist, comes to stand to him for a whole complex of thought, a web of vague ideas and tendencies which are elsewhere, as we say, in the air, but which first become palpable when compelled by an artist's hand into the rigidity of the written word. This is especially the case with poets, for poetry, by its very nature, strikes to the heart of things and sets them before us in their naked essence, stripping away the vesture of irrelevant detail that, in the novel no less than in life, often veils and obscures them. It is by its poignancy, its directness of presentment, that poetry claims to be, as a medium of ideas, what Aristotle called it, most akin to philosophy.

The analysis, for example, of modern pessimism can scarcely be dissociated from the study of that gifted writer whose work it permeates and informs, Amy Levy. Two little volumes of her poems, in a dainty green-and-white binding, lie on my table, and have fascinated me for hours together. Vividly personal as they are, the pent-up sufferings of hundreds of souls throb through them, launching one on wide seas of melancholy speculation. Of Amy Levy's short and sad life I have no knowledge. She was, it would seem, by birth a Jewess, but one for whom the faith of her fathers had become an impossible thing. Gifted with brilliant intellectual powers, she spent a short time as a student at Cambridge, and then entered upon the perilous ways of literary life. It was not long before success appeared to be within her reach, but she was not destined to reap the fruition of it. A haunting shadow had fallen upon her path; she came to find the burden of life intolerable; and while still a girl was contented to yield up her share therein. Throughout all her work, prose and poetry alike, hand in hand with a sincere devotion to art, there runs a note of invincible sadness.

Such is the dominant impression that one gets from reading these volumes. Looked at purely as literature, they have a remarkable charm. They possess all the subtle workmanship, the delicacy of finish, the innumerable scholarly touches, which are so characteristic of the minor verse of our day. If they are somewhat full of echoes, there also they do not stand alone. But far beyond their merely artistic value, is their interest as the record of a soul. They are, indeed, a human document at least as rich with suggestion as the much discussed diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. And a document, one would think, far more legible; for Marie, even in her most secret moments, was always and inevitably a poseuse, whereas Amy Levy is throughout absolutely genuine and sincere. How could it be otherwise? Utterly disenchanted with the world, why should she try to keep up a brave show before it? Her verse mirrors her thought, and its leit-motif, recurring with constant sad iteration, is the consciousness of pain.

I suppose that the philosophical attitudes which we call optimism and pessimism are generally less the result of mental conviction than of individual temperament. They are moods, not systems. Life in itself is iridescent with pleasure and pain: to one the richer hues, the lurking purples and leaping crimsons alone are visible; another is spiritually colour-blind, and can see only the browns and drabs, the dusky shadows and more sombre depths of existence. Personality is a selective force, choosing from the vast mass of what is, by some subtle magnetism, just those elements which are most akin to its own nature. For all who attract pleasure, life is a triumph; for the rest, a pilgrimage. This, no doubt, has been a universal law, no less true when the world seemed vanity to the author of Ecclesiastes, than it is now. Yet it will hardly be denied that, for whatever cause, pessimism is in an especial degree characteristic of our own time and our own stage of development.

Our splendid literature is invested with melancholy. Tennyson and Browning, indeed, are optimists, but their optimism is grave, not buoyant; they walk by faith, not by sight. Browning twists an assurance for the future out of the failures of the present, while Tennyson, in no less doubtful a strain, bids us "stretch lame hands of faith" to a dimly felt Providence, and "faintly trust the larger hope." So, too, with the rest. George Meredith saves himself from pessimism by a strong will and an austere philosophy. Matthew Arnold and A. H. Clough are openly and profoundly despondent; for them the light of the past is quenched, the future is beset with clouds; they are for ever "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." Even in the Neo-Romantic poets, who least express the spirit of their age, the same tone may be discerned. Rossetti, though a lover, walked in Willow-wood all the days of his life. Morris, in youth, sought a refuge from the century's stress in the groves of an earthly Paradise, a dream-world of Greek and northern and mediæval legend. But his attempt was not all a success: the blitheness of Hellas was beyond recapture; the violin-note of modern feeling rang incongruously through Arcadia, and in the end—

he could not keep,
For that a shadow lour'd on the fields,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.

He translated his ideals from the past to the future, and the "idle singer of an empty day" became the busy herald of a visionary hope. And if this sadness haunts the great poets of the age, still more is it noticeable in the lesser singers. Look at the pages of Mr. Miles's Poets and Poetry of the Century. There is a literature surcharged with tears, whose sure touch is on the pathetic, whose lyre sounds in groves that are shaded by cypresses and poplars, among roses that weep their petals.

When one turns from letters, the reflex of life, to life itself, the outlook is equally drear. We moderns find the world a very serious matter. Fifty years of individualism, of free thought, and unrestricted competition, have bitten their mark deep into our civilisation. The suffering which inevitably accompanies the struggle for existence is not less, but greater, for organisms upon a high level of self-consciousness. Flesh is ever but a transparent veil to spirit, and of this suffering we bear the plain sign upon our brows. It needs no wide knowledge of art to realise that the faces which Gainsborough painted differ notably in character and expression from those which fill the walls of a modern picture-gallery. The new type is as beautiful perhaps, more deeply intellectual, but certainly far more sad. It is scarcely fantastic to suggest that Leonardo's ironically named La Gioconda, an alien to our great-grandmothers, is curiously at home among the women of our own generation. By the same spirit our philosophy is coloured. Mr. Alexander, in his thoughtful book on Moral Order and Moral Progress, has singled out, as a central point in current ethical conceptions, the growing sense of the significance of pain. Pleasure was the loadstar of the earlier Hedonist; his modern successor, less exigent, would barter hopes of positive felicity to be quite sure of escaping suffering. This tendency to dwell on pain manifests itself among many who are by no means Hedonists. In it are rooted both strong and weak elements in our social organisation, the self-sacrifice of genuine philanthropy, as well as the excesses of sentimental humanitarianism.

It is difficult to analyse the causes which have made pain and pessimism so aggressive nowadays. Perhaps they are not really new dwellers among us, but only now for the first time becoming articulate, after long silent years in the heart of humanity. Partly they may be the outcome of fundamental changes in the religious consciousness. I do not mean the spread of unorthodoxy, but the disappearance of what George Eliot called "other-worldliness," that facile optimism which held this world as a vale of tears, to be compensated for by an eternity of pleasures in the next. More and more the conception that "I myself am heaven and hell," with all that it implies, is coming to be a fixed and abiding mode of belief. In part, also, a reason may be found in the intensity of our intellectual life, in the constant feverish speculation, the besetting desire to know. We are "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Only the superficial, the unreflecting, can dare to echo in all soberness the famous words of Mr. Pole; "No one has said the world's a jolly world so often as I have. It's jolly!" Given a temperament exceptionally sensitive to pain, and set in a modern environment, the result will be yet farther conditioned by individual characteristics. In the sympathetic, for whom the sufferings of others are no less real, no less vivid than their own, it will generally be devotion, in some one of its many forms, to the cause of humanity. In the self-centred, who have no safety-valve, it can hardly be other than a life of brooding misery. And such a life, faithfully presented, one would think, but at any rate with poignancy, is revealed to us in these poems of Amy Levy's. On opening them one's eye falls upon some such passage as this, lines in which the stored-up bitterness of the heart seems forcing itself into expression:

EPITAPH

ON A COMMONPLACE PERSON WHO DIED IN BED.

This is the end of him, here he lies:
  The dust in his throat, the worm in his eyes,
The mould in his mouth, the turf on his breast;
This is the end of him, this is best.
He will never lie on his couch awake,
Wide-eyed, tearless, till dim daybreak;
Never again will he smile and smile,
When his heart is breaking all the while;
He will never stretch out his hands in vain
, Groping and groping—never again;
Never ask for bread, get a stone instead,
Never pretend that the stone is brea;d
Never sway and sway 'twixt the false and true,
  Weighing and noting the long hours through;
Never ache and ache with the choked-up sighs:
This is the end of him—here he lies.

One turns instinctively to the portrait facing the title-page to see what manner of woman she was who could write thus, but the secret is hardly revealed. There is a face of no special beauty, the brow and eyes burdened with a weight of thought, the lips set as if in some reticence of sorrow. Baffled rather than satisfied, one goes back to the poems, anxious if possible to win the mystery from themselves. They are not many. A few lyrics and fragmentary snatches of verse, and a Browningesque monologue, A Minor Poet, clearly in some measure autobiographical. Brief as these records are, it is yet possible to decipher in them some image of the personality by which they were dictated. Amy Levy was in her way a passionate idealist. She entered upon life full of hope and strength and self-confidence, conscious of unbounded capacities for happiness and intensely eager to realise them. In the person of the Minor Poet she cries:

I want all, all;
I've appetite for all: I want the best,
Love, beauty, sunlight, nameless joy of life.

Moreover, she was modern to the core, keen in relish of the pleasures of aesthetic and philosophical speculation; sensitive, as only moderns can be, to the thousand charms and phases of Nature, in her infinite variety; blessed with rich potentialities for friendship and love; thirsting, like Tennyson's Ulysses, to "drink life to the lees." But it is part of the irony of things that those who have most power to enjoy are often those whom joy visits most rarely. Little by little, disillusion crept upon her; overlooked by love, cheated in friendship by death and misprision, she discovered in girlhood that the universe was hollow, and life, for her at least, "a circle of pain," more terrible than death itself, although, or perhaps because, death bore no promise of a hereafter. As her capacity for joy had been deep, so her actual sufferings were intense; they find some expression in these volumes, with their pitiful mottoes from Omar Khayyam, filled with poems of which each is a wail, only more penetrating for the artistic charm which makes of it a carven shrine for grief. The keynote of them all is struck in a half-serious, half-ironic imitation of Swinburne, by the lines:

I am I—just a Pulse of Pain—I am I, that is all I know.
For Life, and the sickness of Life, and Death, and desire to die:
They have passed away like the smoke, here is nothing but Pain and I.

And this dominant sense of a besetting personal pain is never far away, coming at last to bear the aspect of a fate, disastrous to all hope and all effort, a watcher at the threshold, of whose presence she is ever conscious, with bitterness, or with resignation, or with a half surprise, all alike unavailing. Desolation and solitude add a pang:

The people take the thing of course,
They marvel not to see
  This strange unnatural divorce
Betwixt delight and me.

Only most rarely, in the swing of a waltz, in some spiritual day of April or Midsummer, in the presence of an elect soul, does a moment of gladness come to her; never is it more than a moment, and in most of her moods, even the intimations of beauty, moral and physical, are powerless. They speak to a deaf ear, and the heart regardeth them not:

Is it so much of the gods that I pray?
  Sure craved man never so slight a boon!
To be glad and glad in my heart one day—
  One perfect day of the perfect June.

I would hold my life as a thing of worth;
Pour praise to the gods for a precious thing.
Lo! June in her fairness is on the earth,
  And never a joy does the niggard bring.

More cruel than all else is the contrast between what is and what might have been, between the aspiring idealism of the past and the sorry levels of the present. This is the burden of a striking little poem called The Old House:

In through the porch and up the silent stair;
  Little is changed, I know so well the ways;
Here the dead came to meet me, it was there
  The dream was dreamed in unforgotten days.

But who is this that hurries on before,
A flitting shade the brooding shades among?
She turned—I saw her face—O God, it wore
The face I used to wear when I was young.

I thought my spirit and my heart were turned
To deadness; dead the pangs that agonise.
The old grief springs to choke me—I am shamed
Before that little ghost with eager eyes.

O turn away, let her not see, not know!
How should she bear it, how should understand?
O hasten down the stairway, haste and go,
And leave her dreaming in the silent land.

Among thoughts such as these it is only natural that the image of death, in its varied aspects, should be a familiar visitant, presenting itself now as a strong deliverer, now as a terrible veiled shape, inscrutable, and therefore to be feared. As a matter of theory, Amy Levy in her strenuous rejection of the religious standpoint can only look upon death as the goal of existence and ultimate barrier between human souls. And so, when one whom she had loved passes away, the blank sense of loss is unrelieved by any hope. Every link is shattered:

There is no more to be done,
Nothing beneath the sun.
All the long ages through
Nothing—by me for you.
All's done with utterly,
All's done with. Death to me
Was ever death indeed:
To me no kindly creed

Consolatory was given
You were of earth, not heaven.

This for her friends. But for herself death seems all the more a gracious thing in its finality. Annihilation might yield a rest unknown to sentience; the whirl of life might vanish for ever in a "poppied sleep." The thought of death makes strange disturbance in her heart, becoming at last an imperious summons not to be disregarded. It obtrudes itself, in unexpected places, at inappropriate moments, striking across every vein of reflection with ironic self-assertiveness, waiting at the close of every avenue of conversation.

It is so long gone by, and yet
How clearly now I see it all!
The glimmer of your cigarette,
The little chamber, narrow and tall,

Perseus, your picture in its frame
(How near they seem and yet how far!)
The blaze of kindled logs: the flame
Of tulips in a mighty jar.

Florence and Spring-time: surely each
Glad thing unto the spirit saith,
Why did you lead me in your speech
To these dark mysteries of death?

And so the days pass by, and life becomes more intolerable, and the thought of the end more alluring, until the second volume of poems—of which, the publishers tell us, the proofs were corrected by the author about a week before her death—closes upon the ominous words:

On me the cloud descends.

The first effect of such a record as this upon the mind is purely an emotional one. "Sunt lacrimæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." The pity, the infinite pity of it, resists all attempts to draw a moral. But before long the inevitable problem asserts itself. What help is there? By what philosophy, what direction of will is a soul smitten with this welt-schmerz, this modern disease of pessimism, to shake off the paralysis, and get back into touch with the normal and saner aspect of things? Many answers have been given and merit consideration; but it must frankly be admitted that they are none of them very cogent. Theories that challenge refutation when set forth in an essay or from the pulpit have a terrible way of shrivelling up and ceasing to convince when brought face to face with the concrete facts of an individual human life. Ideals are so often ineffectual from the mere lack of dynamic force. To the present difficulty both the moral philosopher and the plain man, influenced more or less consciously by centuries of Christian tradition, would probably offer the same very obvious reply. Pessimism, they would say, is rooted in self-absorption. Constant inward gazing upon the bare self can only beget a sense of emptiness and vanity. Fruition, and happiness therewith, can alone be attained by contact with the other than self, by entering into some form of sympathetic union with the universal life wherein each person is only a unit. And this is perfectly true, as an ethical maxim. But it does not meet the case of those who have not the gift of sympathy. "He that loseth his soul, the same shall find it." But there are those whose temperament does not permit them for one instant to lose their souls. Take Miss Levy. What are the ways by which the individual mingles with the universal? Love, Friendship, Religion, the passion of Art, the passion of Humanity. For her, it would seem, all these avenues were irretrievably closed. Friendship and love she had grasped at, but they had proved bitter and elusive—apples of Sodom in the mouth. Religion she held an unmeaning thing. "Both for me and you, you know," she cries, "there's no Above and no Below." Hers indeed was the saddest of all spiritual states upon the earth, that of an awakened Israelite, cheated of the hope of Israel. So, too, with Art: once she might have striven to find a vocation in some mode of creative effort; but little by little her early ambitions had been nipped by a chilling sense of impotence, until all faculty of absorbing herself in them was gone. There remains the service of Humanity, in which, no doubt, under its various forms, many have found the consolation for which they had sounded the depths of their own personality in vain. Yet one reads a confession in A Minor Poet, which shows how little this could ever have appealed to her:

Then, again,
"The common good," and still "the common good,"
And what a small thing was our joy or grief
When weighed with that of thousands. Gentle Tom
But you might wag your philosophic tongue
From morn till eve, and still the thing's the same,
I am myself, as each man is himself—
Feels his own pain, joys his own joy and loves
With his own love, no other's. Friend, the world
Is but one man: one man is but the world.
And I am I, and you are Tom, that bleeds
When needles prick your flesh (mark, yours not mine).
I must confess it; I can feel the pulse
A -beating at my heart, yet never knew
The throb of cosmic pulses. I lament
The death of youth's ideal in my heart;
And, to be honest, never yet rejoiced
In the world's progress—scarce indeed discerned.

Ah no! it is idle to preach philanthropy to those who have not the genius for sympathy. At bottom it is a matter of temperament. "We are as the Fates make us." In spite of all gospels, the self-centred will be self-centred still to the end of time, and must spin their threads of interest from within, or not at all. And on this rock of the essential difference between centripetal and centrifugal natures, the Christian answer to the pessimistic problem necessarily founders.

The neo-paganism of the nineteenth century has also attempted its answers to this same problem. In the end these reduce themselves more or less directly to the idea of harmony with Nature. All alike preach self-surrender, acceptance of the inevitable, and a strenuous cultivation of the consciousness that only by his attempt to transcend Nature, and to live his life on another plane than hers, does man vex and fret himself away. One side of this philosophy addresses itself to the emotional correspondences between Nature and man. Nature is the universal Mother, the infinite comforter, consoling her lovers with subtle spells of forest and cloud and meadow, yielding to whoso will take it the cup of Lethe, the soporific that lulls doubt and destroys sorrow. It is in Wordsworth that this teaching first became articulate, and in virtue of it he has been enabled to dominate a whole century of poetry. It is the burden of his most inspired moods, of Lucy, of the lines on Tintern Abbey, of the Ode on Immortality. Matthew Arnold, with his accurate critical instinct in such matters, has touched this central point in Wordsworth's attitude to life and has in some measure learnt the lesson of it.

He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round;
He spoke and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Smiles broke from us and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain,
Our youth returned, for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furl'd,
The freshness of the early world.

Transfigured and stamped with the impress of a wayward genius, the same ruling ideal appears in the Nature-poetry of George Meredith. For him the man who has attained is Melampus, the eyes open and ears unsealed for every secret of bird and beast and flower, in whom insight has been born of love.

Through love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.

Only in the "Woods of Westermain" may the riddle of life be read. Those who can walk there undismayed find all the joys of life and lose its hungers. Beauty and the meaning of beauty, passion and the seeds of passion, are made manifest to them; they become interpreters and know themselves "kin of the rose" and of all delicious things. But not for every one is such transfiguration possible: it is reserved for those of a right heart and a right temper, those who are by nature "servile to all the skyey influences," who can give an absolute confidence, an absolute self-surrender. At a single hint of mistrust, the spell of the woods is broken, terrible shapes possess them.

Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair!

And this is why, for all its magic, the Nature-philosophy is no panacea against pessimism. Like the ethical gospel, it is only true for certain temperaments that have already a faculty of detachment from self, and can greet the physician in his own spirit. And such are not the stuff of which pessimists are made. Those on whom the burden of the world presses most heavily are yet most strongly drawn to it; they are linked to it for ever with adamantine fetters. So it was with Amy Levy. The peace of Nature was to her merely an Arcadia, a languid bower of bliss, impotent to satisfy her restless perturbed spirit. "Fain would I bide," she moans, among the lavender and lilies of a summer garden—

Fain would I bide, but ever in the distance
A ceaseless voice is sounding clear and low:
The city calls me with her old persistence,
  The city calls me—I arise and go.

Of gentler souls this fragrant peace is guerdon;
For me, the roar and hurry of the town,
Wherein more lightly seems to press the burden
Of individual life that weighs me down.

But there is another aspect of the neo-pagan creed, Stoic rather than Epicurean, in which the harmony to be set up between Nature and man finds a basis not in the emotions, but in the intellect. Of this, too, Meredith in certain moods is the best representative. He conceives of life as a constant struggle between natural law rigid and invincible and the idealism which strives to overleap law. So long as the unequal battle lasts, the issue for the idealist must be disastrous, tragic alternately and comic. Only when man wins himself "more brain," and by coming to understand the laws of Nature comes also willingly to submit to them, can he look for any semblance of happiness. But rarely will he bring himself to this. Love, for example, will yearn for immortality, forgetful that change is the one fixed principle in things, although the annual process of the seasons might so easily have taught the lesson:

"I play for Seasons, not Eternities!"
Says Nature, laughing on her way. "So must
All those whose stake is nothing more than dust."
And lo, she wins, and of her harmonies
She is full sure! Upon her dying rose
She drops a look of fondness, and goes by,
Scarce any retrospection in her eye;
For she the laws of growth most deeply knows,
Whose hands bear here a seed-bag, there an urn.
Pledged she herself to aught, 'twould mark her end!
This lesson of our only visible friend
Can we not teach our foolish hearts to learn?

And then, like all philosophers sooner or later, Meredith points us to the flaw in his own doctrine. The idealist cannot accept law; he would not be an idealist if he could. Emotion, after all, is the strongest thing in man. Theories cannot quell it, nor syllogisms subdue. From the ruins of them it arises craving and unassuaged.

Yes! yes!—but oh, our human rose is fair.
Surpassingly! Lose calmly Love's great bliss,
When the renewed for ever of a kiss
Sounds through the listless hurricane of hair.

Christianity, then, and paganism alike attempt to provide the pessimist with an antidote against his secret sickness, nor can either claim to have effected a cure. One last alternative remains, that "which Cato gave and Addison approved." Is the remedy for life to be found in the will not to live, the high goal of man's hopes and possibilities to be reached in his annihilation? Such, no doubt, is the official teaching of pessimism. And some such dream haunts line after line of Miss Levy's verse. But to defer the difficulty is not to solve it. Long ago a great dramatist taught us that in the supreme creation which has tasked the wits of three centuries. To Hamlet, most modern of Elizabethans, the pessimist problem presented itself. He, too, looked lovingly upon the white poppy of death. "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." And yet the thought of what might be beyond stayed his hand. Let us not be too hasty to ring down the curtain, for how if the gods do not applaud? Better to wait and strive and, if it may be, pray; for what is, is, and not even Zeus, as Agathon tells us, can make it as though it were not. It were idle to suppose that the razor's edge or a drop of dark liquid in a phial could erase the past, or cut the thread of continuity with the future. And the pity of it is that in her strong moments Amy Levy knew this well. How should the argument against suicide be better put than in the farewell words of Tom Leigh over the deathbed of the Minor Poet:

Nay, I had deemed him more philosopher;
For did he think by this one paltry deed
To cut the throat of circumstance, and snep
The chain which binds all being.