ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS
In one of the plays of the decadent period, an intellectual expressed
the atmosphere of his epoch by referring to Dickens as “a vulgar
optimist.” I have in a previous chapter suggested something of the real
strangeness of such a term. After all, the main matter of astonishment
(or rather of admiration) is that optimism should be vulgar. In a
world in which physical distress is almost the common lot, we actually
complain that happiness is too common. In a world in which the majority
is physically miserable we actually complain of the sameness of praise;
we are bored with the abundance of approval. When we consider what
the conditions of the vulgar really are, it is difficult to imagine a
stranger or more splendid tribute to humanity than such a phrase as
vulgar optimism. It is as if one spoke of “vulgar martyrdom” or “common
crucifixion.”
First, however, let it be said frankly that there is a foundation for
the charge against Dickens which is implied in the phrase about vulgar
optimism. It does not concern itself with Dickens’s confidence in the
value of existence and the intrinsic victory of virtue; that is not
optimism but religion. It is not concerned with his habit of making
bright occasions bright, and happy stories happy; that is not optimism,
but literature. Nor is it concerned even with his peculiar genius for
the description of an almost bloated joviality; that is not optimism,
it is simply Dickens. With all these higher variations of optimism I
deal elsewhere. But over and above all these there is a real sense in
which Dickens laid himself open to the accusation of vulgar optimism,
and I desire to put the admission of this first, before the discussion
that follows. Dickens did have a disposition to make his characters
at all costs happy, or, to speak more strictly, he had a disposition
to make them comfortable rather than happy. He had a sort of literary
hospitality; he too often treated his characters as if they were
his guests. From a host is always expected, and always ought to be
expected as long as human civilization is healthy, a strictly physical
benevolence, if you will, a kind of coarse benevolence. Food and fire
and such things should always be the symbols of the man entertaining
men; because they are the things which all men beyond question have in
common. But something more than this is needed from the man who is
imagining and making men, the artist, the man who is not receiving men,
but rather sending them forth.
As I shall remark in a moment in the matter of the Dickens villains, it
is not true that he made every one thus at home. But he did do it to a
certain wide class of incongruous characters; he did it to all who had
been in any way unfortunate. It had indeed its origin (a very beautiful
origin) in his realization of how much a little pleasure was to such
people. He knew well that the greatest happiness that has been known
since Eden is the happiness of the unhappy. So far he is admirable. And
as long as he was describing the ecstasy of the poor, the borderland
between pain and pleasure, he was at his highest. Nothing that has ever
been written about human delights, no Earthly Paradise, no Utopia has
ever come so near the quick nerve of happiness as his descriptions of
the rare extravagances of the poor; such an admirable description, for
instance, as that of Kit Nubbles taking his family to the theatre. For
he seizes on the real source of the whole pleasure; a holy fear. Kit
tells the waiter to bring the beer. “And the waiter, instead of saying,
‘Did you address that language to me?’ only said, ‘Pot of beer, sir;
yes, sir.’” That internal and quivering humility of Kit is the only way
to enjoy life or banquets; and the fear of the waiter is the beginning
of dining. People in this mood “take their pleasures sadly”; which is
the only way of taking them at all.
So far Dickens is supremely right. As long as he was dealing with such
penury and such festivity his touch was almost invariably sure. But
when he came to more difficult cases, to people who for one reason or
another could not be cured with one good dinner, he did develop this
other evil, this genuinely vulgar optimism of which I speak. And the
mark of it is this: that he gave the characters a comfort that had no
especial connection with themselves; he threw comfort at them like
alms. There are cases at the end of his stories in which his kindness
to his characters is a careless and insolent kindness. He loses his
real charity and adopts the charity of the Charity Organization
Society; the charity that is not kind, the charity that is puffed up,
and that does behave itself unseemly. At the end of some of his stories
he deals out his characters a kind of out-door relief.
I will give two instances. The whole meaning of the character of
Mr. Micawber is that a man can be always almost rich by constantly
expecting riches. The lesson is a really important one in our sweeping
modern sociology. We talk of the man whose life is a failure; but
Micawber’s life never is a failure, because it is always a crisis.
We think constantly of the man who if he looked back would see that
his existence was unsuccessful; but Micawber never does look back;
he always looks forward, because the bailiff is coming to-morrow.
You cannot say he is defeated, for his absurd battle never ends; he
cannot despair of life, for he is so much occupied in living. All
this is of immense importance in the understanding of the poor; it is
worth all the slum novelists that ever insulted democracy. But how
did it happen, how could it happen, that the man who created this
Micawber could pension him off at the end of the story and make him a
successful colonial mayor? Micawber never did succeed, never ought to
succeed; his kingdom is not of this world. But this is an excellent
instance of Dickens’s disposition to make his characters grossly and
incongruously comfortable. There is another instance in the same book.
Dora, the first wife of David Copperfield, is a very genuine and
amusing figure; she has certainly far more force of character than
Agnes. She represents the infinite and divine irrationality of the
human heart. What possessed Dickens to make her such a dehumanized prig
as to recommend her husband to marry another woman? One could easily
respect a husband who after time and development made such a marriage,
but surely not a wife who desired it. If Dora had died hating Agnes we
should know that everything was right, and that God would reconcile
the irreconcilable. When Dora dies recommending Agnes we know that
everything is wrong, at least if hypocrisy and artificiality and moral
vulgarity are wrong. There, again, Dickens yields to a mere desire to
give comfort. He wishes to pile up pillows round Dora; and he smothers
her with them, like Othello.
This is the real vulgar optimism of Dickens; it does exist, and I have
deliberately put it first. Let us admit that Dickens’s mind was far too
much filled with pictures of satisfaction and cosiness and repose. Let
us admit that he thought principally of the pleasures of the oppressed
classes; let us admit that it hardly cost him any artistic pang to make
out human beings as much happier than they are. Let us admit all this,
and a curious fact remains.
For it was this too easily contented Dickens, this man with cushions
at his back and (it sometimes seems) cotton wool in his ears, it was
this happy dreamer, this vulgar optimist who alone of modern writers
did really destroy some of the wrongs he hated and bring about some
of the reforms he desired. Dickens did help to pull down the debtors’
prisons; and if he was too much of an optimist he was quite enough
of a destroyer. Dickens did drive Squeers out of his Yorkshire den;
and if Dickens was too contented, it was more than Squeers was.
Dickens did leave his mark on parochialism, on nursing, on funerals,
on public executions, on workhouses, on the Court of Chancery. These
things were altered; they are different. It may be that such reforms
are not adequate remedies; that is another question altogether. The
next sociologists may think these old Radical reforms quite narrow or
accidental. But such as they were, the old radicals got them done;
and the new sociologists cannot get anything done at all. And in the
practical doing of them Dickens played a solid and quite demonstrable
part; that is the plain matter that concerns us here. If Dickens was an
optimist he was an uncommonly active and useful kind of optimist. If
Dickens was a sentimentalist he was a very practical sentimentalist.
And the reason of this is one that goes deep into Dickens’s social
reform, and like every other real and desirable thing, involves a kind
of mystical contradiction. If we are to save the oppressed, we must
have two apparently antagonistic emotions in us at the same time. We
must think the oppressed man intensely miserable, and, at the same
time, intensely attractive and important. We must insist with violence
upon his degradation; we must insist with the same violence upon his
dignity. For if we relax by one inch the one assertion, men will say he
does not need saving. And if we relax by one inch the other assertion,
men will say he is not worth saving. The optimists will say that reform
is needless. The pessimists will say that reform is hopeless. We must
apply both simultaneously to the same oppressed man; we must say that
he is a worm and a god; and we must thus lay ourselves open to the
accusation (or the compliment) of transcendentalism. This is, indeed,
the strongest argument for the religious conception of life. If the
dignity of man is an earthly dignity we shall be tempted to deny his
earthly degradation. If it is a heavenly dignity we can admit the
earthly degradation with all the candour of Zola. If we are idealists
about the other world we can be realists about this world. But that is
not here the point. What is quite evident is that if a logical praise
of the poor man is pushed too far, and if a logical distress about
him is pushed too far, either will involve wreckage to the central
paradox of reform. If the poor man is made too admirable he ceases to
be pitiable; if the poor man is made too pitiable he becomes merely
contemptible. There is a school of smug optimists who will deny that he
is a poor man. There is a school of scientific pessimists who will deny
that he is a man.
Out of this perennial contradiction arises the fact that there are
always two types of the reformer. The first we may call for convenience
the pessimistic, the second the optimistic reformer. One dwells upon
the fact that souls are being lost; the other dwells upon the fact
that they are worth saving. Both, of course, are (so far as that is
concerned) quite right, but they naturally tend to a difference of
method, and sometimes to a difference of perception. The pessimistic
reformer points out the good elements that oppression has destroyed;
the optimistic reformer, with an even fiercer joy, points out the
good elements that it has not destroyed. It is the case for the first
reformer that slavery has made men slavish. It is the case for the
second reformer that slavery has not made men slavish. The first
describes how bad men are under bad conditions. The second describes
how good men are under bad conditions. Of the first class of writers,
for instance, is Gorky. Of the second class of writers is Dickens.
But here we must register a real and somewhat startling fact. In
the face of all apparent probability, it is certainly true that the
optimistic reformer reforms much more completely than the pessimistic
reformer. People produce violent changes by being contented, by being
far too contented. The man who said that revolutions are not made with
rose-water was obviously inexperienced in practical human affairs. Men
like Rousseau and Shelley do make revolutions, and do make them with
rose-water; that is, with a too rosy and sentimental view of human
goodness. Figures that come before and create convulsion and change
(for instance, the central figure of the New Testament) always have the
air of walking in an unnatural sweetness and calm. They give us their
peace ultimately in blood and battle and division; not as the world
giveth give they unto us.
Nor is the real reason of the triumph of the too-contented reformer
particularly difficult to define. He triumphs because he keeps alive
in the human soul an invincible sense of the thing being worth doing,
of the war being worth winning, of the people being worth their
deliverance. I remember that Mr. William Archer, some time ago,
published in his interesting series of interviews, an interview with
Mr. Thomas Hardy. That powerful writer was represented as saying, in
the course of the conversation, that he did not wish at the particular
moment to define his position with regard to the ultimate problem of
whether life itself was worth living. There are, he said, hundreds of
remediable evils in this world. When we have remedied all these (such
was his argument), it will be time enough to ask whether existence
itself under its best possible conditions is valuable or desirable.
Here we have presented, with a considerable element of what can only
be called unconscious humour, the plain reason of the failure of the
pessimist as a reformer. Mr. Hardy is asking us, I will not say to buy
a pig in a poke; he is asking us to buy a poke on the remote chance of
there being a pig in it. When we have for some few frantic centuries
tortured ourselves to save mankind, it will then be “time enough”
to discuss whether they can possibly be saved. When, in the case of
infant mortality, for example, we have exhausted ourselves with the
earth-shaking efforts required to save the life of every individual
baby, it will then be time enough to consider whether every individual
baby would not have been happier dead. We are to remove mountains
and bring the millennium, because then we can have a quiet moment to
discuss whether the millennium is at all desirable. Here we have the
low-water mark of the impotence of the sad reformer. And here we have
the reason of the paradoxical triumph of the happy one. His triumph
is a religious triumph; it rests upon his perpetual assertion of the
value of the human soul and of human daily life. It rests upon his
assertion that human life is enjoyable because it is human. And he
will never admit, like so many compassionate pessimists, that human
life ever ceases to be human. He does not merely pity the lowness
of men; he feels an insult to their elevation. Brute pity should be
given only to the brutes. Cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile
thing; but cruelty to a man is not cruelty, it is treason. Tyranny
over a man is not tyranny, it is rebellion, for man is loyal. Now,
the practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor
and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity; the pity is
pitiful, but not respectful. Men feel that the cruelty to the poor is
a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is injustice to
equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades. This dark, scientific pity,
this brutal pity, has an elemental sincerity of its own; but it is
entirely useless for all ends of social reform. Democracy swept Europe
with the sabre when it was founded upon the Rights of Man. It has done
literally nothing at all since it has been founded only upon the wrongs
of man. Or, more strictly speaking, its recent failures have been due
to its not admitting the existence of any rights or wrongs, or indeed
of any humanity. Evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does
not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the
existence of man. And all the despair about the poor, and the cold and
repugnant pity for them, has been largely due to the vague sense that
they have literally relapsed into the state of the lower animals.
A writer sufficiently typical of recent revolutionism--Gorky--has
called one of his books by the eerie and effective title “Creatures
that Once were Men.” That title explains the whole failure of the
Russian revolution. And the reason why the English writers, such as
Dickens, did with all their limitations achieve so many of the actual
things at which they aimed, was that they could not possibly have put
such a title upon a human book. Dickens really helped the unfortunate
in the matters to which he set himself. And the reason is that across
all his books and sketches about the unfortunate might be written the
common title, “Creatures that Still are Men.”
There does exist, then, this strange optimistic reformer; the man whose
work begins with approval and yet ends with earthquake. Jesus Christ
was destined to found a faith which made the rich poorer and the poor
richer; but even when He was going to enrich them, He began with the
phrase, “Blessed are the poor.” The Gissings and the Gorkys say, as
an universal literary motto, “Cursed are the poor.” Among a million
who have faintly followed Christ in this divine contradiction, Dickens
stands out especially. He said, in all his reforming utterances, “Cure
poverty”; but he said in all his actual descriptions, “Blessed are the
poor.” He described their happiness, and men rushed to remove their
sorrow. He described them as human, and men resented the insults to
their humanity. It is not difficult to see why, as I said at an earlier
stage of this book, Dickens’s denunciations have had so much more
practical an effect than the denunciations of such a man as Gissing.
Both agreed that the souls of the people were in a kind of prison.
But Gissing said that the prison was full of dead souls. Dickens said
that the prison was full of living souls. And the fiery cavalcade of
rescuers felt that they had not come too late.
Of this general fact about Dickens’s descriptions of poverty there
will not, I suppose, be any serious dispute. The dispute will only
be about the truth of those descriptions. It is clear that whereas
Gissing would say, “See how their poverty depresses the Smiths or the
Browns,” Dickens says, “See how little, after all, their poverty can
depress the Cratchits.” No one will deny that he made a special feature
a special study of the subject of the festivity of the poor. We will
come to the discussion of the veracity of these scenes in a moment. It
is here sufficient to register in conclusion of our examination of the
reforming optimist, that Dickens certainly was such an optimist, and
that he made it his business to insist upon what happiness there is in
the lives of the unhappy. His poor man is always a Mark Tapley, a man
the optimism of whose spirit increases if anything with the pessimism
of his experience. It can also be registered as a fact equally solid
and quite equally demonstrable that this optimistic Dickens did effect
great reforms.
The reforms in which Dickens was instrumental were, indeed, from the
point of view of our sweeping, social panaceas, special and limited.
But perhaps, for that reason especially, they afford a compact
and concrete instance of the psychological paradox of which we
speak. Dickens did definitely destroy--or at the very least help to
destroy--certain institutions; he destroyed those institutions simply
by describing them. But the crux and peculiarity of the whole matter
is this, that, in a sense, it can really be said that he described
these things too optimistically. In a real sense, he described
Dotheboys Hall as a better place than it is. In a real sense, he made
out the workhouse as a pleasanter place than it can ever be. For the
chief glory of Dickens is that he made these places interesting; and
the chief infamy of England is that it has made these places dull.
Dulness was the one thing that Dickens’s genius could never succeed in
describing; his vitality was so violent that he could not introduce
into his books the genuine impression even of a moment of monotony.
If there is anywhere in his novels an instant of silence, we only
hear more clearly the hero whispering with the heroine, the villain
sharpening his dagger, or the creaking of the machinery that is to
give out the god from the machine. He could splendidly describe gloomy
places, but he could not describe dreary places. He could describe
miserable marriages, but not monotonous marriages. It must have been
genuinely entertaining to be married to Mr. Quilp. This sense of a
still incessant excitement he spreads over every inch of his story, and
over every dark tract of his landscape. His idea of a desolate place
is a place where anything can happen; he has no idea of that desolate
place where nothing can happen. This is a good thing for his soul,
for the place where nothing can happen is hell. But still, it might
reasonably be maintained by the modern mind that he is hampered in
describing human evil and sorrow by this inability to imagine tedium,
this dulness in the matter of dulness. For, after all, it is certainly
true that the worst part of the lot of the unfortunate is the fact
that they have long spaces in which to review the irrevocability of
their doom. It is certainly true that the worst days of the oppressed
man are the nine days out of ten in which he is not oppressed. This
sense of sickness, and sameness Dickens did certainly fail or refuse
to give. When we read such a description as that excellent one--in
detail--of Dotheboys Hall, we feel that, while everything else is
accurate, the author does, in the words of the excellent Captain Nares
in Stevenson’s “Wrecker,” “draw the dreariness rather mild.” The boys
at Dotheboys were, perhaps, less bullied, but they were certainly
more bored. For, indeed, how could any one be bored with the society
of so sumptuous a creature as Mr. Squeers? Who would not put up with
a few illogical floggings in order to enjoy the conversation of a man
who could say, “She’s a rum ’un, is Natur’.... Natur’ is more easier
conceived than described”? The same principle applies to the workhouse
in “Oliver Twist.” We feel vaguely that neither Oliver nor any one else
could be entirely unhappy in the presence of the purple personality
of Mr. Bumble. The one thing he did not describe in any of the abuses
he denounced was the soul-destroying potency of routine. He made out
the bad school, the bad parochial system, the bad debtors’ prison as
very much jollier and more exciting than they may really have been.
In a sense, then, he flattered them; but he destroyed them with the
flattery. By making Mrs. Gamp delightful he made her impossible. He
gave every one an interest in Mr. Bumble’s existence; and by the
same act gave every one an interest in his destruction. It would be
difficult to find a stronger instance of the utility and energy of the
method which we have, for the sake of argument, called the method of
the optimistic reformer. As long as low Yorkshire schools were entirely
colourless and dreary, they continued quietly tolerated by the public,
and quietly intolerable to the victims. So long as Squeers was dull as
well as cruel he was permitted; the moment he became amusing as well
as cruel he was destroyed. As long as Bumble was merely inhuman he was
allowed. When he became human, humanity wiped him out. For in order
to do these great acts of justice we must always realize not only the
humanity of the oppressed, but even the humanity of the oppressor. The
satirist had, in a sense, to create the images in the mind before, as
an iconoclast, he could destroy them. Dickens had to make Squeers live
before he could make him die.
In connection with the accusation of vulgar optimism, which I have
taken as a text for this chapter, there is another somewhat odd thing
to notice. Nobody in the world was ever less optimistic than Dickens in
his treatment of evil or the evil man. When I say optimistic in this
matter I mean optimism, in the modern sense, of an attempt to whitewash
evil. Nobody ever made less attempt to whitewash evil than Dickens.
Nobody black was ever less white than Dickens’s black. He painted
his villains and lost characters more black than they really are. He
crowds his stories with a kind of villain rare in modern fiction--the
villain really without any “redeeming point.” There is no redeeming
point in Squeers, or in Monck, or in Ralph Nickleby, or in Bill Sikes,
or in Quilp, or in Brass, or in Mr. Chester, or in Mr. Pecksniff, or
in Jonas Chuzzlewit, or in Carker, or in Uriah Heep, or in Blandois,
or in a hundred more. So far as the balance of good and evil in human
characters is concerned, Dickens certainly could not be called a vulgar
optimist. His emphasis on evil was melodramatic. He might be called a
vulgar pessimist.
Some will dismiss this lurid villainy as a detail of his artificial
romance. I am not inclined to do so. He inherited, undoubtedly,
this unqualified villain as he inherited so many other things, from
the whole history of European literature. But he breathed into the
blackguard a peculiar and vigorous life of his own. He did not show
any tendency to modify his blackguardism in accordance with the
increasing considerateness of the age; he did not seem to wish to make
his villain less villainous; he did not wish to imitate the analysis
of George Eliot, or the reverent scepticism of Thackeray. And all this
works back, I think, to a real thing in him, that he wished to have
an obstreperous and incalculable enemy. He wished to keep alive the
idea of combat, which means, of necessity, a combat against something
individual and alive. I do not know whether, in the kindly rationalism
of his epoch, he kept any belief in a personal devil in his theology,
but he certainly created a personal devil in every one of his books.
A good example of my meaning can be found, for instance, in such a
character as Quilp. Dickens may, for all I know, have had originally
some idea of describing Quilp as the bitter and unhappy cripple, a
deformity whose mind is stunted along with his body. But if he had
such an idea, he soon abandoned it. Quilp is not in the least unhappy.
His whole picturesqueness consists in the fact that he has a kind of
hellish happiness, an atrocious hilarity that makes him go bounding
about like an indiarubber ball. Quilp is not in the least bitter; he
has an unaffected gaiety, an expansiveness, an universality. He desires
to hurt people in the same hearty way that a good-natured man desires
to help them. He likes to poison people with the same kind of clamorous
camaraderie with which an honest man likes to stand them drink. Quilp
is not in the least stunted in mind; he is not in reality even stunted
in body--his body, that is, does not in any way fall short of what he
wants it to do. His smallness gives him rather the promptitude of a
bird or the precipitance of a bullet. In a word, Quilp is precisely the
devil of the Middle Ages; he belongs to that amazingly healthy period
when even the lost spirits were hilarious.
This heartiness and vivacity in the villains of Dickens is worthy of
note because it is directly connected with his own cheerfulness. This
is a truth little understood in our time, but it is a very essential
one. If optimism means a general approval, it is certainly true that
the more a man becomes an optimist the more he becomes a melancholy
man. If he manages to praise everything, his praise will develop an
alarming resemblance to a polite boredom. He will say that the marsh
is as good as the garden; he will mean that the garden is as dull as
the marsh. He may force himself to say that emptiness is good, but he
will hardly prevent himself from asking what is the good of such good.
This optimism does exist--this optimism which is more hopeless than
pessimism--this optimism which is the very heart of hell. Against such
an aching vacuum of joyless approval there is only one antidote--a
sudden and pugnacious belief in positive evil. This world can be made
beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield. When we have defined
and isolated the evil thing, the colours come back into everything
else. When evil things have become evil, good things, in a blazing
apocalypse, become good. There are some men who are dreary because they
do not believe in God; but there are many others who are dreary because
they do not believe in the devil. The grass grows green again when we
believe in the devil, the roses grow red again when we believe in the
devil.
No man was more filled with the sense of this bellicose basis of all
cheerfulness than Dickens. He knew very well the essential truth,
that the true optimist can only continue an optimist so long as he
is discontented. For the full value of this life can only be got
by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted
everything, we have missed something--war. This life of ours is a very
enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce. And it appears strange
to me that so few critics of Dickens or of other romantic writers
have noticed this philosophical meaning in the undiluted villain. The
villain is not in the story to be a character; he is there to be a
danger--a ceaseless, ruthless, and uncompromising menace, like that
of wild beasts or the sea. For the full satisfaction of the sense of
combat, which everywhere and always involves a sense of equality, it is
necessary to make the evil thing a man; but it is not always necessary,
it is not even always artistic, to make him a mixed and probable
man. In any tale, the tone of which is at all symbolic, he may quite
legitimately be made an aboriginal and infernal energy. He must be a
man only in the sense that he must have a wit and will to be matched
with the wit and will of the man chiefly fighting. The evil may be
inhuman, but it must not be impersonal, which is almost exactly the
position occupied by Satan in the theological scheme.
But when all is said, as I have remarked before, the chief fountain
in Dickens of what I have called cheerfulness, and some prefer to
call optimism, is something deeper than a verbal philosophy. It is,
after all, an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and
the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence. And this word
“eccentricity” brings us, perhaps, nearer to the matter than any other.
It is, perhaps, the strongest mark of the divinity of man that he talks
of this world as “a strange world,” though he has seen no other. We
feel that all there is is eccentric, though we do not know what is the
centre. This sentiment of the grotesqueness of the universe ran through
Dickens’s brain and body like the mad blood of the elves. He saw all
his streets in fantastic perspectives, he saw all his cockney villas
as top heavy and wild, he saw every man’s nose twice as big as it
was, and every man’s eyes like saucers. And this was the basis of his
gaiety--the only real basis of any philosophical gaiety. This world is
not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it
is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. Its merit is
not that it is orderly and explicable; its merit is that it is wild and
utterly unexplained. Its merit is precisely that none of us could have
conceived such a thing, that we should have rejected the bare idea of
it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.