It is very easy to laugh at the optimist, and to accuse him of
"poetizing the truth." No doubt, an optimist will see excellence,
beauty, and truth where pessimists see only degradation, vice, and
ugliness. The one hears the nightingale, the other the raven only.
To one, the sunsetting forms a magic picture; to the other, it is
but a presage of bad weather tomorrow. Some people seem to look at
nature through a glass of red wine or in a Claude Lorraine mirror;
to them the landscape has ever the bloom of summer or a spring-tide
grace. To others, it is always cloudy, dreary, dull. The desolate
ravine, the stony path, the blighted heath--that is all they can
find in a book which should have a chapter for everybody. And the
latter are apt to call the former dreamers, visionaries, fools. They
are dubbed in society often flatterers, people whose "geese are all
swans."
But are those, then, the fools who see only the pleasant side? Are
they alone the visionaries who see the best rather than the worst?
It is strange that the critics see only weakness in the "pleasant-
spoken," and only truth and safety in those who croak.
The person who sees a bright light in an eye otherwise considered
dull, who distrusts the last scandal, is supposed to be foolish, too
easily pleased, and wanting in that wise scepticism which should be
the handmaid of common-sense; and if such a person in telling a
story poetizes the truth, if it is a principle or a tendency to
believe the best of everybody, to take everybody at their highest
note, is she any the less canny? Has she necessarily less insight?
As there are always two sides to a shield, why not look at the
golden one?
An excess of the organ of hope has created people like Colonel
Sellers in the play, who deluded himself that there were "millions
in it," who landed in poverty and wrecked his friends; but this
excess is scarcely a common one. Far more often does discouragement
paralyze than does hope exalt. Those who have sunshine for
themselves and to spare are apt to be happy and useful people; they
are in the aggregate the successful people.
But, although good-nature is temperamental, and although some men
and women are, by their force of imagination and charity, forced to
poetize the truth, the question remains an open one, Which is the
nearest to truth, a pessimist or an optimist? Truth is a virtue more
palpable and less shadowy than we think; It is not easy to speak the
unvarnished, uncorrupted truth (so the lawyers tell us). The faculty
of observation differs, and the faculty of language is variable.
Some people have no intellectual apprehension of the truth, although
they morally believe in it. People who abstractly revere the truth
have never been able to tell anything but falsehoods. To such the
power of making a statement either favorable or prejudicial depends
upon the mood of the moment, not upon fact. Therefore a habit of
poetizing the truth would seem to be of either excess the safest.
Society becomes sometimes a hot-bed of evil passions--one person
succeeds at the expense of another. How severe is the suffering
proceeding from social neglect and social stabs! It might, much of
it, be smoothed away by poetizing the truth ever so little. Instead
of bearing an ill-natured message, suppose we carry an amiable one.
Instead of believing that an insult was intended, suppose a
compliment.
"Should he upbraid, I'll own that he prevail, And sing more sweetly
than the nightingale! Say that he frown, I'll own his looks I view
Like morning roses newly dipped in dew."
People who are thus calmly serene and amiable through the frowns and
smiles, the ups and downs, of a social career are often called
worldly.
Well, let us suppose that they are. Some author has wisely said:
"That the world should be full of worldliness seems as right as that
a stream should be full of water or a living body full of blood." To
conquer this world, to get out of it a full, abounding, agreeable
life, is what we are put here for. Else, why such gifts as beauty,
talent, health, wit, and a power of enjoyment be given to us? To be
worldly, or worldlings, is supposed to be incurring the righteous
anger of the good. But is it not improperly using a term of implied
reproach? For, although the world may be too much with us, and a
worldling may be a being not filled to the brim with the deeper
qualities or the highest aims, still he is a man necessary to the
day, the hour, the sphere which must be supplied with people fitted
to its needs. So with a woman in society. She must be a worldling in
the best sense of the word. She must keep up her corner of the great
mantle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. She must fill the social
arena with her influence; for in society she is a most important
factor.
Then, as a "complex overgrowth of wants and fruitions" has covered
our world as with a banyan-tree, we must have something else to keep
alive our umbrageous growth of art, refinement, inventions,
luxuries, and delicate sensibilities. We must have wealth.
"Wealth is the golden essence of the outer world,"
and therefore to be respected.
Of course the pessimist sees purse-pride, pompous and outrageous
arrogance, a cringing of the pregnant hinges of the knee, false
standards, and a thousand faults in this admission. And yet the
optimist finds the "very rich," with but few exceptions, amiable,
generous, and kindly, often regretting that poorer friends will
allow their wealth to bar them off, wishing often that their
opulence need not shut them off from the little dinners, the homely
hospitality, the small gifts, the sincere courtesies of those whose
means are moderate, The cheerful people who are not dismayed by the
superior magnificence of a friend are very apt to find that friend
quite as anxious for sympathy and for kindness as are the poor,
especially if his wealth has caused him, almost necessarily, to live
upon the superficial and the external in life.
We all know that there is a worldly life, poor in aim and narrow in
radius, which is as false as possible. To live _only_ for this
world, with its changing fashions, its imperfect judgments, its
toleration of snobs and of sinners, its forgiveness of ignorance
under a high-sounding name, its exaggeration of the transient and
the artificial, would be a poor life indeed. But, if we can lift
ourselves up into the higher comprehension of what a noble thing
this world really is, we may well aspire to be worldlings.
Julius Caesar was a worldling; so was Shakespeare. Erasmus was a
worldling. We might increase the list indefinitely. These men
brought the loftiest talents to the use of worldly things. They
showed how great conquest, poetry, thought might become used for the
world. They were full of this world.
To see everything through a poetic vision (the only genuine
idealization) is and has been the gift of the benefactors of our
race. Branger was of the world, worldly; but can we give him up? So
were the great artists who flooded the world with light--Titian,
Tintoretto, Correggio, Raphael, Rubens, Watteau. These men poetized
the truth. Life was a brilliant drama, a splendid picture, a garden
ever fresh and fair;
The optimist carries a lamp through dark, social obstructions. "I
would fain bind up many wounds, if I could be assured that neither
by stupidity nor by malice I need make one!" is her motto, the true
optimist.
It is a fine allegory upon the implied power of society that the
poet Marvell used when he said he "would not drink wine with any one
to whom he could not trust his life."
Titian painted his women with all their best points visible. There
was a careful shadow or drapery which hid the defects which none of
us are without; but defects to the eye of the optimist make beauty
more attractive by contrast; in a portrait they may better be hid
perhaps.
To poetize the truth in the science of charity and forgiveness can
never be a great sin. If it is one, the recording angel will
probably drop a tear. This tendency to optimism is, we think, more
like that magic wand which the great idealist waved over a troubled
sea, or like those sudden sunsets after a storm, which not only
control the wave, but gild the leaden mass with crimson and
unexpected gold, whose brightness may reach some storm-driven sail,
giving it the light of hope, bringing the ship to a well-defined and
hospitable shore, and regulating, with a new attraction, the lately
distracted compass. Therefore, we do not hesitate to say that the
philosophy, and the creed, and the manners of the optimist are good
for society. However, his excellence may well be criticised; it may
even sometimes take its place amid those excesses which are
catalogued as amid the "deformities of exaggerated virtues." We may
be too good, some of us, in one single direction.
But the rounded and harmonious Greek calm is hard to find. "For
repose and serenity of mind," says a modern author, "we must go back
to the Greek temple and statue, the Greek epic and drama, the Greek
oration and moral treatise; and modern education will never become
truly effectual till it brings more minds into happy contact with
the ideal of a balanced, harmonious development of all the powers of
mind, body, conscience, and heart."
And who was a greater optimist than your Athenian? He had a
passionate love of nature, a rapt and infinite adoration of beauty,
and he diffused the splendid radiance of his genius in making life
more attractive and the grave less gloomy. Perhaps we of a brighter
faith and a more certain revelation may borrow something from this
"heathen" Greek.