Their all, yet feel no aching void.
Should aught annoy them, they refuse
To be annoyed.”
On the contrary, the whimsical expression of his repeated annoyance is balm to our fretted souls.
For the friend whom we love is the friend who gets wet when he is rained on, who is candid enough to admit failure, and courageous enough to mock at it. When Jane Austen wrote to her sister that she did not have a very good time at a party, because men were disposed not to ask her to dance until they could not help it, she did more than make Cassandra smile; she won her way into the hearts of readers for whom that letter was not meant. We know the “radiant” people to whom all occasions are enjoyable, who intimate—with some skill, I confess—that they carry mirth and gaiety in their wake. They are capable of describing a Thanksgiving family dinner as mirthful because they were participants. Not content with a general profession of pleasure in living, “which is all,” says Mr. Henry Adams, “that the highest rules of good breeding should ask,” they insist upon the delightfulness of a downcast world, and they offer their personal sentiments as proof.
Dr. Johnson’s sputtering rage at the happy old lady is the most human thing recorded of his large and many-sided humanity. A great thinker who confronted life with courage and understanding was set at naught, and, to speak truth, routed, by an unthinking, but extremely solid, asseveration. And after all the old lady was not calling for recruits; she was simply stating a case. Miss Helen Keller, in a book called “Optimism,” says very plainly that if she, a blind deaf mute, can be happy, every one can achieve happiness, and that it is every one’s duty to achieve it. Now there is not a decent man or woman in the country who will not be glad to know that Miss Keller is, as she says she is, happy; but this circumstance does not affect the conditions of life as measured by all who meet them. The whole strength of the preaching world has gone into optimism, with the result that it has reached a high place in man’s estimation, is always spoken of with respect, and not infrequently mistaken for a virtue.
Are we then so sunk in dejection, so remote from the splendid and unconscious joy which the struggle for life gave to the centuries that are over? Time was when men needed the curb, and not the spur, in that valorous contention. “How high the sea of human delight rose in the Middle Ages,” says Mr. Chesterton, “we know only by the colossal walls they built to keep it within bounds.” Optimism was as superfluous as meliorism when the world was in love with living, when Christianity preached penance and atonement for sin, striving by golden promises and direful threats to wean man from that unblessed passion, to turn the strong tide of his nature back from the earth that nourished it. There was never but one thorough-going optimist among the Fathers of the Church, and that was Origen, who looked forward confidently to the final conversion of Satan. His attitude was full of nobleness because he had suffered grievously at the heathen’s hands; but not even by the alchemy of compassion is evil transmutable to good.
The Stoics, who proposed that men should practise virtue without compensation, were logically unassailable, but not persuasive to the average mind. It does not take much perspicuity to distinguish between an agreeable and a disagreeable happening, and once the difference is perceived, no argument can make them equally acceptable. “Playing at mummers is one thing,” says the sapient tanner in Kenneth Grahame’s “Headswoman,” “and being executed is another. Folks ought to keep them separate.” On the other hand, the assurance of the Epicureans that goodness and temperance were of value because they conduced to content was liable to be set aside by the man who found himself contented without them. “The poor world, to do it justice,” says Gilbert Murray, “has never lent itself to any such bare-faced deception as the optimism of the Stoics”; but neither are we disposed to recognize enlightened self-interest as a spiritual agency. It may perhaps be trusted to make a good husband or a good vestryman, but not a good human being.
A highly rational optimist, determined to be logical at any cost, observed recently in a British review that sympathy was an invasion of liberty. “If I must sorrow because another is sorrowing, I am a slave to my feelings, and it is best that I shall be slave to nothing. Perfect freedom means that I am able to follow my own will, and my will is to be happy rather than to be sad. I love pleasure rather than pain. Therefore if I am moved to sorrow against my will, I am enslaved by my sympathy.”
This is an impregnable position. It is the old, old philosophy of the cold heart and the warm stomach. I do not say that it is unwise. I say only that it is unlikable.