We Anglo-Saxons are mostly optimists at heart; we love to have things
comfortable, and to pretend that they are comfortable when they
obviously are not. The brisk Anglo-Saxon, if he cannot reach the grapes,
does not say that the grapes are sour, but protests that he does not
really care about grapes. A story is told of a great English proconsul
who desired to get a loan from the Treasury of the Government over which
he practically, though not nominally, presided. He went to the Financial
Secretary and said: "Look here, T----, you must get me a loan for a
business I have very much at heart." The secretary whistled, and then
said: "Well, I will try; but it is not the least use." "Oh, you
will manage it somehow," said the proconsul, "and I may tell you
confidentially it is absolutely essential." The following morning the
secretary came to report: "I told you it was no use, sir, and it wasn't;
the Board would not hear of it." "Damnation!" said the proconsul, and
went on writing. A week after he met the secretary, who felt a little
shy. "By the way, T----," said the great man, "I have been thinking over
that matter of the loan, and it was a mercy you were not successful;
it would have been a hopeless precedent, and we are much better without
it."
That is the true Anglo-Saxon spirit of optimism. The most truly British
person I know is a man who will move heaven and earth to secure a post
or to compass an end; but when he fails, as he does not often fail, he
says genially that he is more thankful than he can say; it would have
been ruin to him if he had been successful. The same quality runs
through our philosophy and our religion. Who but an Anglo-Saxon would
have invented the robust theory, to account for the fact that prayers
are often not granted, that prayers are always directly answered whether
you attain your desire or not? The Greeks prayed that the gods would
grant them what was good even if they did not desire it, and withhold
what was evil even if they did desire it. The shrewd Roman said: "The
gods will give us what is most appropriate; man is dearer to them than
to himself." But the faithful Anglo-Saxon maintains that his prayer is
none the less answered even if it be denied, and that it is made up to
him in some roundabout way. It is inconceivable to the Anglo-Saxon that
there may be a strain of sadness and melancholy in the very mind of
God; he cannot understand that there can be any beauty in sorrow. To the
Celt, sorrow itself is dear and beautiful, and the mournful wailing
of winds, the tears of the lowering cloud, afford him sweet and even
luxurious sensations. The memory of grief is one of the good things
that remains to him, as life draws to its close; for love is to him
the sister of grief rather than the mother of joy. But this is to
the Anglo-Saxon mind a morbid thing. The hours in which sorrow has
overclouded him are wasted, desolated hours, to be forgotten and
obliterated as soon as possible. There is nothing sacred about them;
they are sad and stony tracts over which he has made haste to cross, and
the only use of them is to heighten the sense of security and joy. And
thus the sort of sayings that satisfy and sustain the Anglo-Saxon mind
are such irrepressible outbursts of poets as "God's in His heaven;
all's right with the world"--the latter part of which is flagrantly
contradicted by experience; and, as for the former part, if it be true,
it lends no comfort to the man who tries to find his God in the world.
Again, when Browning says that the world "means intensely and means
good," he is but pouring oil upon the darting flame of optimism, because
there are many people to whom the world has no particular meaning, and
few who can re-echo the statement that it means good. That some rich
surprise, in spite of palpable and hourly experience to the contrary,
may possibly await us, is the most that some of us dare to hope.
My own experience, the older I grow, and the more I see of life, is that
I feel it to be a much more bewildering and even terrifying thing than
I used to think it. To use a metaphor, instead of its being a patient
educational process, which I would give all that I possessed to be able
sincerely to believe it to be, it seems to me arranged far more upon
the principle of a game of cricket--which I have always held to be, in
theory, the most unjust and fortuitous of games. You step to the wicket,
you have only a single chance; the boldest and most patient man may make
one mistake at the outset, and his innings is over; the timid tremulous
player may by undeserved good luck contrive to keep his wicket up,
till his heart has got into the right place, and his eye has wriggled
straight, and he is set.
That is the first horrible fact about life--that carelessness is often
not penalised at all, whereas sometimes it is instantly and fiercely
penalised. One boy at school may break every law, human and divine, and
go out into the world unblemished. Another timid and good-natured child
may make a false step, and be sent off into life with a permanent
cloud over him. School life often emphasises the injustice of the world
instead of trying to counteract it. Schoolmasters tend to hustle the
weak rather than to curb the strong.
And then we pass into the larger world, and what do we see? A sad
confusion everywhere. We see an innocent and beautiful girl struck down
by a long and painful disease--a punishment perhaps appropriate to some
robust and hoary sinner, who has gathered forbidden fruit with both his
hands, and the juices of which go down to the skirts of his clothing;
or a brave and virtuous man, with a wife and children dependent on him,
needed if ever man was, kind, beneficent, strong, is struck down out of
life in a moment. On the other hand, we see a mean and cautious sinner,
with no touch of unselfishness and affection, guarded and secured in
material contentment. Let any one run over in his mind the memories of
his own circle, fill up the gaps, and ask himself bravely and frankly
whether he can trace a wise and honest and beneficent design all
through. He may try to console himself by saying that the disasters of
good people, after all, are the exceptions, and that, as a rule, courage
and purity of heart are rewarded, while cowardice and filthiness are
punished. But what room is there for exceptions in a world governed by
God Whom we must believe to be all-powerful, all-just, and all-loving?
It is the wilful sin of man, says the moralist, that has brought these
hard things upon him. But that is no answer, for the dark shadow lies
as sombrely over irresponsible nature, which groans over undeserved
suffering. And then, to make the shadow darker still, we have all the
same love of life, the same inalienable sense of our right to happiness,
the same inheritance of love. If we could but see that in the end pain
and loss would be blest, there is nothing that we would not gladly bear.
Yet that sight, too, is denied us.
And yet we live and laugh and hope, and forget. We take our fill of
tranquil days and pleasant companies, though for some of us the thought
that it is all passing, passing, even while we lean towards it smiling,
touches the very sunlight with pain. "How morbid, how self-tormenting!"
says the prudent friend, if such thoughts escape us. "Why not enjoy the
delight and bear the pain? That is life; we cannot alter it." But not on
such terms, can I, for one, live. To know, to have some assurance--that
is the one and only thing that matters at all. For if I once believed
that God were careless, or indifferent, or impotent, I would fly from
life as an accursed thing; whereas I would give all the peace, and
joy, and contentment, that may yet await me upon earth, and take up
cheerfully the heaviest burden that could be devised of darkness and
pain, if I could be sure of an after-life that will give us all the
unclouded serenity, and strength, and love, for which we crave every
moment. Sometimes, in a time of strength and calm weather, when the
sun is bright and the friend I love is with me, and the scent of
the hyacinths blows from the wood, I have no doubt of the love and
tenderness of God; and, again, when I wake in the dreadful dawn to the
sharp horror of the thought that one I love is suffering and crying out
in pain and drifting on to death, the beauty of the world, the familiar
scene, is full of a hateful and atrocious insolence of grace and
sweetness; and then I feel that we are all perhaps in the grip of some
relentless and inscrutable law that has no care for our happiness
or peace at all, and works blindly and furiously in the darkness,
bespattering some with woe and others with joy. Those are the blackest
and most horrible moments of life; and yet even so we live on.
As I write at my ease I see the velvety grass green on the rich pasture;
the tall spires of the chestnut perch, and poise, and sway in the sun; a
thrush sings hidden in the orchard; it is all caressingly, enchantingly
beautiful, and I am well content to be alive. Looking backwards, I
discern that I have had my share, and more than my share, of good
things. But they are over; they are mine no longer. And even as I think
the thought, the old church clock across the fields tells out another
hour that is fallen softly into the glimmering past. If I could discern
any strength or patience won from hours of pain and sorrow it would be
easier; but the memory of pain makes me dread pain the more, the thought
of past sorrow makes future sorrow still more black. I would rather have
strength than tranquillity, when all is done; but life has rather taught
me my weakness, and struck the garland out of my reluctant hand.
To-day I have been riding quietly among fields deep with buttercups and
fringed by clear, slow streams. The trees are in full spring leaf, only
the oaks and walnuts a little belated, unfurling their rusty-red fronds.
A waft of rich scent comes from a hawthorn hedge where a hidden cuckoo
flutes, or just where the lane turns by the old water-mill, which throbs
and grumbles with the moving gear, a great lilac-bush leans out of a
garden and fills the air with perfume. Yet, as I go, I am filled with
a heavy anxiety, which plays with my sick heart as a cat plays with a
mouse, letting it run a little in the sun, and then pouncing upon it in
terror and dismay. The beautiful sounds and sights round me--the sight
of the quiet, leisurely people I meet--ought, one would think, to soothe
and calm the unquiet heart. But they do not; they rather seem to mock
and flout me with a savage insolence of careless welfare. My thoughts go
back, I do not know why, to an old house where I spent many happy days,
now in the hands of strangers. I remember sitting, one of a silent and
happy party, on a terrace in the dusk of a warm summer night, and how
one of those present called to the owls that were hooting in the hanging
wood above the house, so that they drew near in answer to the call,
flying noiselessly, and suddenly uttering their plaintive notes from
the heart of the great chestnut on the lawn. Below I can see the dewy
glimmering fields, the lights of the little port, the pale sea-line. It
seems now all impossibly beautiful and tranquil; but I know that even
then it was often marred by disappointments, and troubles, and fears.
Little anxieties that have all melted softly into the past, that were
easily enough borne, when it came to the point, yet, looming up as they
did in the future, filled the days with the shadow of fear. That is the
phantom that one ought to lay, if it can be laid. And is there
hidden somewhere any well of healing, any pure source of strength and
refreshment, from which we can drink and be calm and brave? That is a
question which each has to answer tor himself. For myself, I can only
say that strength is sometimes given, sometimes denied. How foolish to
be anxious! Yes, but how inevitable! If the beauty and the joy of the
world gave one assurance in dark hours that all was certainly well, the
pilgrimage would be an easy one. But can one be optimistic by resolving
to be? One can of course control oneself, one can let no murmur of pain
escape one, one can even enunciate deep and courageous maxims, because
one would not trouble the peace of others, waiting patiently till the
golden mood returns. But what if the desolate conviction forces itself
upon the mind that sorrow is the truer thing? What if one tests one's
own experience, and sees that, under the pressure of sorrow, one after
another of the world's lights are extinguished, health, and peace, and
beauty, and delight, till one asks oneself whether sorrow is not perhaps
the truest and most actual thing of all? That is the ghastliest of
moments, when everything drops from us but fear and horror, when we
think that we have indeed found truth at last, and that the answer to
Pilate's bitter question is that pain is the nearest thing to truth
because it is the strongest. If I felt that, says the reluctant heart,
I should abandon myself to despair. No, says sterner reason, you would
bear it because you cannot escape from it. Into whatever depths of
despair you fell, you would still be upheld by the law that bids you be.
Where, then, is the hope to be found? It is here. One is tempted to
think of God through human analogies and symbols. We think of Him as of
a potter moulding the clay to his will; as of a statesman that sways a
state; as of an artist that traces a fair design. But all similitudes
and comparisons break down, for no man can create anything; he can but
modify matter to his ends, and when he fails, it is because of some
natural law that cuts across his design and thwarts him relentlessly.
But the essence of God's omnipotence is that both law and matter are His
and originate from Him; so that, if a single fibre of what we know to be
evil can be found in the world, either God is responsible for that, or
He is dealing with something He did not originate and cannot overcome.
Nothing can extricate us from this dilemma, except the belief that what
we think evil is not really evil at all, but hidden good; and thus we
have firm ground under our feet at last, and can begin to climb out of
the abyss. And then we feel in our own hearts how indomitable is our
sense of our right to happiness, how unconquerable our hope; how swiftly
we forget unhappiness; how firmly we remember joy; and then we see that
the one absolutely permanent and vital power in the world is the power
of love, which wins victories over every evil we can name; and if it
is so plain that love is the one essential and triumphant force in the
world, it must be the very heartbeat of God; till we feel that when soon
or late the day comes for us, when our swimming eyes discern ever more
faintly the awestruck pitying faces round us, and the senses give up
their powers one by one, and the tides of death creep on us, and the
daylight dies--that even so we shall find that love awaiting us in
the region to which the noblest and bravest and purest, as well as the
vilest and most timid and most soiled have gone.
This, then, is the only optimism that is worth the name; not the feeble
optimism that brushes away the darker side of life impatiently and
fretfully, but the optimism that dares to look boldly into the fiercest
miseries of the human spirit, and to come back, as Perseus came, pale
and smoke-stained, from the dim underworld, and say that there is yet
hope brightening on the verge of the gloom.
What one desires, then, is an optimism which arises from taking a wide
view of things as they are, and taking the worst side into account,
not an optimism which is only made possible by wearing blinkers. I was
reading a day or two ago a suggestive and brilliant book by one of our
most prolific critics, Mr. Chesterton, on the subject of Dickens. Mr.
Chesterton is of opinion that our modern tendency to pessimism results
from our inveterate realism. Contrasting modern fictions with the old
heroic stories, he says that we take some indecisive clerk for the
subject of a story, and call the weak-kneed cad "the hero." He seems
to think that we ought to take a larger and more robust view of human
possibilities, and keep our eyes steadily fixed upon more vigorous
and generous characters. But the result of this is the ugly and
unphilosophical kind of optimism after all, that calls upon God to
despise the work of His own hands, that turns upon all that is feeble
and unsightly and vulgar with anger and disdain, like the man in the
parable who took advantage of his being forgiven a great debt to exact
a tiny one. The tragedy is that the knock-kneed clerk is all in all to
himself. In clear-sighted and imaginative moments, he may realise in a
sudden flash of horrible insight that he is so far from being what he
would desire to be, so unheroic, so loosely strung, so deplorable--and
yet that he can do so little to bridge the gap. The only method of
manufacturing heroes is to encourage people to believe in themselves and
their possibilities, to assure them that they are indeed dear to
God; not to reveal relentlessly to them their essential lowness and
shabbiness. It is not the clerk's fault that his mind is sordid and
weak, and that his knees knock together; and no optimism is worth the
name that has not a glorious message for the vilest. Or, again, it is
possible to arrive at a working optimism by taking a very dismal view of
everything. There is a story of an old Calvinist minister whose daughter
lay dying, far away, of a painful disease, who wrote her a letter of
consolation, closing with the words, "Remember, dear daughter, that all
short of Hell is mercy." Of course if one can take so richly decisive a
view of the Creator's purpose for His creatures, and look upon Hell
as the normal destination from which a few, by the overpowering
condescension of God, are saved and separated, one might find matter
of joy in discovering one soul in a thousand who was judged worthy of
salvation. But this again is a clouded view, because it takes no account
of the profound and universal preference for happiness in the human
heart, and erects the horrible ideal of a Creator who deliberately
condemns the vast mass of His creatures to a fate which He has no less
deliberately created them to abhor and dread.
Our main temptation after all lies in the fact that we are so impatient
of any delay or any uneasiness. We are like the child who, when first
confronted with suffering, cannot bear to believe in its existence, and
who, if it is prolonged, cannot believe in the existence of anything
else. What we have rather to do is to face the problem strongly and
courageously, to take into account the worst and feeblest possibilities
of our nature, and yet not to overlook the fact that the worst and
lowest specimen of humanity has a dim inkling of something higher and
happier, to which he would attain if he knew how.
I had a little object-lesson a few days ago in the subject. It was a
Bank Holiday, and I walked pensively about the outskirts of a big town.
The streets were crowded with people of all sorts and sizes. I confess
that a profound melancholy was induced in me by the spectacle of the
young of both sexes. They were enjoying themselves, it is true, with all
their might; and I could not help wondering why, as a rule, they should
enjoy themselves so offensively. The girls walked about, tittering
and ogling, the young men were noisy, selfish, ill-mannered, enjoying
nothing so much as the discomfiture of any passer-by. They pushed each
other into ditches, they tripped up a friend who passed on a bicycle,
and all roared in concert at the rueful way in which he surveyed a muddy
coat and torn trousers. There seemed to be not the slightest idea among
them of contributing to each other's pleasure. The point was to be
amused at the expense of another, and to be securely obstreperous.
But among these there were lovers walking, faint and pale with mutual
admiration; a young couple led along a hideous over-dressed child,
and had no eyes for anything except its clumsy movements and fatuous
questions. Or an elderly couple strolled along, pleased and contented,
with a married son and daughter. The cure of the vile mirth of youth
seemed after all to be love and the anxious care of other lives.
And thus indeed a gentle optimism did emerge, after all, from the
tangle. I felt that it was strange that there should be so much to breed
dissatisfaction. I struck out of the town, and soon was passing a mill
in broad water-meadows, overhung by great elms; the grass was golden
with buttercups, the foliage was rich upon the trees. The water bubbled
pleasantly in the great pool, and an old house thrust a pretty gable out
over lilacs clubbed with purple bloom. The beauty of the place was put
to my lips, like a cup of the waters of comfort. The sadness was the
drift of human life out of sweet places such as this, into the town
that overflowed the meadows with its avenues of mean houses, where the
railway station, with its rows of stained trucks, its cindery floor, its
smoking engines, buzzed and roared with life.
But the pessimism of one who sees the simple life fading out, the
ancient quietude invaded, the country caught in the feelers of the
town, is not a real pessimism at all, or rather it is a pessimism
which results from a deficiency of imagination, and is only a matter of
personal taste, perhaps of personal belatedness. Twelve generations of
my own family lived and died as Yorkshire yeomen-farmers, and my own
preference is probably a matter of instinctive inheritance. The point is
not what a few philosophers happen to like, but what humanity likes, and
what it is happiest in liking. I should have but small confidence in the
Power that rules the world, if I did not believe that the vast social
development of Europe, its civilisation, its network of communications,
its bustle, its tenser living, its love of social excitement was not
all part of a great design. I do not believe that humanity is perversely
astray, hurrying to destruction. I believe rather that it is working
out the possibilities that lie within it; and if human beings had been
framed to live quiet pastoral lives, they would be living them still.
The one question for the would-be optimist is whether humanity is
growing nobler, wiser, more unselfish; and of that I have no doubt
whatever. The sense of equality, of the rights of the weak, compassion,
brotherliness, benevolence, are living ideas, throbbing with life; the
growth of the power of democracy, much as it may tend to inconvenience
one personally, is an entirely hopeful and desirable thing; and if a
man is disposed to pessimism, he ought to ask himself seriously to what
extent his pessimism is conditioned by his own individual prospect of
happiness. It is quite possible to conceive of a man without any hope of
personal immortality, or the continuance of individual identity, whose
future might be clouded, say, by his being the victim of a painful and
incurable disease, and who yet might be a thoroughgoing optimist with
regard to the future of humanity. Nothing in the world could be so
indicative of the rise in the moral and emotional temperature of the
world as the fact that men are increasingly disposed to sacrifice their
own ambitions and their own comfort for the sake of others, and are
willing to suffer, if the happiness of the race may be increased; and
much of the pessimism that prevails is the pessimism of egotists and
individualists, who feel no interest in the rising tide, because it does
not promise to themselves any increase in personal satisfaction. No
man can possibly hold the continuance of personal identity to be an
indisputable fact, because there is no sort of direct evidence on the
subject; and indeed all the evidence that exists is rather against the
belief than for it. The belief is in reality based upon nothing but
instinct and desire, and the impossibility of conceiving of life as
existing apart from one's own perception. But even if a man cannot hold
that it is in any sense a certainty, he may cherish a hope that it is
true, and he may be generously and sincerely grateful for having been
allowed to taste, through the medium of personal consciousness, the
marvellous experience of the beauty and interest of life, its emotions,
its relationships, its infinite yearnings, even though the curtain may
descend upon his own consciousness of it, and he himself may become as
though he had never been, his vitality blended afresh in the vitality
of the world, just as the body of his life, so near to him, so seemingly
his own, will undoubtedly be fused and blent afresh in the sum of
matter. A man, even though racked with pain and tortured with anxiety,
may deliberately and resolutely throw himself into sympathy with
the mighty will of God, and cherish this noble and awe-inspiring
thought--the thought of the onward march of humanity; righting wrongs,
amending errors, fighting patiently against pain and evil, until
perhaps, far-off and incredibly remote, our successors and descendants,
linked indeed with us in body and soul alike, may enjoy that peace
and tranquillity, that harmony of soul, which we ourselves can only
momentarily and transitorily obtain.