The next time you hanker for a gripping, stinging, roaring romance, try the story of Eddystone Lighthouse. There wasn’t a realist on the job—they couldn’t stand the gaff. For any tough lay like this of Winstanley’s dream you want a gang of idealists—the impractical kind. It is not a dismal story; it is a long record of trouble, delay, setbacks, exposure, hardship, death and danger, failure, humiliation, jeers, disaster and ruin. Crippled idealists were common in Plymouth Harbor. The sea and the wind mocked their labor; they were crushed, frozen and drowned; but they built Eddystone Light! And men in other harbors took heart again to build great lights against night and storm; the world over, realists fare safelier on the sea for Winstanley’s dream.
There is the great distinction between realism and reality: It is the business of a realist to preach how man is mastered by circumstances; it is the business of a man to prove that he will be damned first.
You may note this curious fact of dismal books—that you remember no passage to quote to your friends. Not one. And you perceive, with lively astonishment, that despairing books are written by the fortunate. The homespun are not so easily discouraged. When crows pull up their corn they do not quarrel with Creation. They comment on the crows, and plant more corn.
This trouble in King Charles’ head may be explained, in part, on a closer looking. As for those who announce the bankruptcy of an insolvent and wildcat universe, with no extradition, and who proclaim God the Great Absconder—they are mostly of the emerged tenth. Their lips do curl with scorn; and what they scorn most is work—and doers. For what they deign to praise—observe, sir, for yourself, what they uphold, directly or by implication. See if it be not a thing compact of graces possible only to idleness. See if it be not their great and fatal mistake that they regard culture as an end in itself, and not as a means for service. Aristocracy? Patricians? In a world which has known the tinker of Bedford, the druggist’s clerk of Edmonton, the Stratford poacher, backwoods Lincoln, a thousand others, and ten thousand—a carpenter’s son among them?
Returning to the Provisional Government: Regard its members closely, these gods ad interim. The ground of their depression is that everybody is not Just like Them. They have a grievance also in the matter of death; which might have been arranged better. It saddens them to know that so much excellence as theirs should perish from the earth. The skeptic is slacker, too; excusing himself from the hardships of right living by pleading the futility of effort.
Unfair? Of course I am unfair; all this is assumption without knowledge, a malicious imputation of the worst possible motives, judgment from a part. It is their own method.
A wise word was said of late: “There are poor colonels, but no poor regiments.” It would be truer to change a word; to say that there are poor soldiers, but no poor regiments. The gloomster picks the poorest soldier he can find, and holds him up to our eyes as a sample. “This is life!” says the pessimist, proud at last. “Now you see the stuff your regiments are made of!”
If one of these pallbearers should write a treatise on pomology he would dwell lovingly on apple-tree borers, blight and pest and scale. He would say no word of spray or pruning; he would scoff at the glory of apple blossoms as the rosy illusion of romance; and he would resolutely suppress all mention of—apples. But he would feature hard cider, for all that; and he would revel in cankerworms.