Or just a bleak and deadly melancholy. Some of the greatest poetry that has ever been written has come from gloom. Emotional energy, like other forms of energy, is convertible. This is so at every level. The work done need not have the color of the emotional energy that produced it.
Gloom can produce other things than pathos.
There is no doubt, I think, that the whole field of literature would corroborate his opinion. Yet the wit is not all satire. There is nothing about gloom that makes it inevitably corrosive. It is true that such a piece as Tschaikowsky's Symphonie Pathetique luxuriates in sorrow and is, to that extent, emotional indulgence. But it need not have been so.