Mark Twain,
superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in
secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced
itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?"
In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable
obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere,
Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the
Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole
Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and
particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and idealist, and became
ludicrous.) Or in the Hauptmann of "Fuhrmann Henschel," or in Hardy, or
in Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the novelist. Sudermann the
dramatist is a mere mechanician.)... The younger men in all countries,
in so far as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem to
move irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepticism. Consider the
last words of "Riders to the Sea." Or Gorky's "Nachtasyl." Or Frank
Norris' "McTeague.
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