[Illustration]
There used to be a poem--I wish I could find it again--about a man in a
wild, lonely place who had a child and a dog. One day he had to go
somewhere So he left the dog home to protect the child until he came
back. The dog was a strong, faithful animal, with large, loving eyes.
Something terrible happened soon after the man had gone off. I find I'm
rather hazy about it, but I think it was wolves. The faithful dog had an
awful time of it. He fought and he fought. He was pitifully cut up and
bitten. In the end, though, he won.
The man came back when it was night. The dog was lying on the bed with
the child he had saved. There was blood on the bed. The man's heart
stood still. "This blood is my child's," he thought hastily, "and this
dog, which I trusted, has killed it." The dog feebly wagged his tail.
The man sprang upon him and slew him.
He saw his mistake immediately afterward, but--it was too late.
When I first read this I was a boy of perhaps ten or twelve. It darn
near made me cry. There was one line especially--the poor dog's dying
howl of reproach. I think it did make me cry.
I at once took the book--a large, blue one--and hunted up my younger
brothers. I made them sit one on each side of the nursery fire. "I'm
going to read you something," I said.
[Illustration: "Keep all the wolves out now."]
They looked up at me trustfully. I remember their soft, chubby faces.
[Illustration: Reading about the poor dog.]
I began the poem, very much moved; and they too, soon grew agitated.
They had a complete confidence, however, that it would come out all
right. When it didn't, when the dog's dying howl came, they burst into
tears. We all sobbed together.
This session was such a success that I read it to them several times
afterward. I didn't get quite so much poignancy out of these encores
myself but my little brothers cried every time, and that, somehow, gave
me pleasure. It gave no pleasure to them. They earnestly begged me not
to keep reading it. I was the eldest, however, and paid little
attention, of course, to their wishes. They'd be playing some game,
perhaps. I would stalk into the room, book in hand, and sit them down
by the fire. "You're going to read us about the dog again?" they would
wail. "Well, not right away," I'd say. "I'll read something funny to
start with." This didn't much cheer them. "Oh, please don't read us
about the dog, please don't," they'd beg, "we're playing run-around."
When I opened the book they'd begin crying 'way in advance, long before
that stanza came describing his last dying howl.
It was kind of mean of me.
There's a famous old author, though, who's been doing just that all his
life. He's eighty years old, and still at it. I mean Thomas Hardy. Dying
howls, of all kinds, are his specialty.
His critics have assumed that from this they can infer his philosophy.
They say he believes that "sorrow is the rule and joy the exception,"
and that "good-will and courage and honesty are brittle weapons" for us
to use in our defense as we pass through such a world.
I'm not sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair
enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint
chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain
and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far
from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards
it at heart as so black.
He has written--how many books? twenty odd?--novels and poems. They make
quite an edifice. They represent long years of work. Could he have been
so industrious if he had found the world a chamber of horrors? He might
have done one or two novels or poems about it, but how could he have
kept on if he had truly felt the whole thing was hopeless? He kept on,
because although sorrows move him he does not feel their weight. He
found he could have a good time painting the world's tragic aspects. He
is somehow or other so constituted that that's been his pleasure. And he
has wanted his own kind of pleasure, just as you and I want our kinds.
That's fair.
I like to think that the good old soul has had a lot of fun all his
life, describing all the gloomiest episodes a person could think of. If
a good, gloomy episode comes into his mind while he's shaving, it
brightens the whole day, and he bustles off to set it down, whistling.
Somebody once asked him if he were as pessimistic as his writings would
indicate, and he replied that it wasn't safe to judge a man's thoughts
by his writings. His writings showed only what kind of things he liked
to describe. "Some authors become vocal before one aspect of life, some
another." (Perhaps not his exact words but close to it.) One aspect of
life may impress you, yet leave you in silence; another may stimulate
you into saying something; but what does that prove? It merely shows
what you like best to talk about, not your philosophy. A cat whose life
is principally peace and good food and warm fires makes hardly any noise
about those things--at most a mere purr. But she does become vocal and
wildly so, over midnight encounters. If another cat so much as disputes
her way on a fence-top, her tragic shrieks of anguish will sound like
the end of the world. Well, Hardy has spent his life in what was chiefly
a peaceful era of history, in a liberal and prosperous country; and he
personally, too, has had blessings--the blessing of being able, for
instance, to write really good books, and the blessing of finding a
public to read and admire them. Is any of this reflected in his themes,
though? Does he purr? Mighty little. No, he prefers looking around for
trouble in this old world's backyards; he prowls about at night till he
comes upon some good hunk of bleakness, and then he sits down, like the
cat, to utter long-drawn-out wails, which give him strange, poignant
sensations of deep satisfaction. They give us quite other sensations but
he doesn't care. In the morning he canters back in, pleased and happy,
for breakfast, and he basks in the sun, blinking sagely, the rest of the
day. And we say, with respect, "A great pessimist; he thinks life is
all sorrow."
The principal objection to pessimists is they sap a man's hope. As some
English writer has said, there are two kinds of hope. First, the hope of
success, which gives men daring, and helps them win against odds. That
isn't the best sort of hope. Many deliberately cultivate it because it
makes for success, but that is an insincere habit; it's really
self-hypnotism. It may help us to win in some particular enterprise,
yes; but it's dangerous, like drug-taking. You must keep on increasing
the dose, and blind-folding your reason. Men who do it are buoyant,
self-confident, but some of their integrity is lost.
The best kind of hope is not about success in this or that undertaking.
It's far deeper; hence when things go against you, it isn't destroyed.
It is hope about the nature and future of man and the universe. It is
this hope the pessimists would disallow. That's why they repel us. Some
lessen our hope in the universe; others, in man.