Yea-Sayers and Nay-Sayers

Thinking of Stevenson -- he was really important for the young G. K. Chesterton, who at one point came very close to despair, but credited RLS and Whitman for helping him out of the trough. See the dedicatory verse to The Man Who Was Thursday (which has horror elements, for sure). The RLS-GKC relationship made me think of this:

The thief he kindly spoke:
"There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now.
The hour is getting late."
 
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Yes. You can acknowledge the darkness and depict its doings, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are pessimistic about humanity and its future.
 
Extollager said:
Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were yea-sayers.
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Indeed, I think I can see this, yes. Blackwood saw nature as a terrifying, awesome thing that might dwarf humanity into insignificance but there may be a grand scheme of things which is not necessarily hostile to humanity but we are largely beneath its notice.

And I suspect that there many authors who do not neatly fit into either category. I'm not so sure I would put Dunsany squarely in the "nay sayers" camp for instance.
 
Anyone read Dunsany's "Highwayman"? Not only is it a breathtakingly beautifully written story, but it is enormously uplifting too.

A robber is hanged for his crimes and his despicable comrades risk their own capture to cut down his body and give him a proper burial so that his soul can be set free. It shows us there is good in all men even if largely buried under a lifetime of sin.
 
I think Tad Williams's Memory, Sorry & Thorn versus Joe Abercombie's First Law is a great example of each end of this spectrum.
 
Patrick O'Brian -- a yea-sayer. How unlike your typical writer of our time.
 
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