A true optimist is one who recognises the sorrows, worries, drawbacks, misfortunes of life, its injustice and inequalities. But while seeing these things, the optimist believes that no matter how strong error may be, truth in the long run will triumph, even though it may not be our truth.
The optimist believes that in the long run virtue has superior staying power as compared with vice; that goodness will eventually defeat evil; that life means something; that character counts; that men and women are of more consequence than sparrows; in short, that this is God’s world and that the moral law is as unshakable as the law of gravitation.
What, then, is a pessimist? A pessimist is one who believes that the evolutionary process is the tragedy of the universe or, as Mark Twain put it, that life is the worst practical joke ever played on man by destiny. That from one primordial cell should have developed all complex forms of life through the vegetable kingdom, through the lower forms of animal existence up to man, is generally regarded as an advance. The true pessimist regards it as an irremediable disaster, as the worst of all possible mistakes. According to him, it would have been better had the evolutionary march stopped with the lower forms of animal life and never reached self-consciousness.
The fish, for example, is better off than men and women. The fish functions perfectly. He does exactly what he was meant to do, he has not the torture of self-conscious thought, no fear of death, and dies at the appointed time. But man has thoughts and dreams and longings that seem to belong to eternal life and eternal development, whereas in reality he dies like the fish; only with all his dreams and longings unsatisfied and with the constant fear and horror of annihilation in a universe where, no matter how sublime or far-reaching his thoughts, he is, in reality, of no more importance than a fish and must in the end share the same fate.
Taking this stiff definition, are there then any genuine pessimists? Certainly there are. Thomas Hardy was exactly such a pessimist. He affirmed in his last volume of poems that man would have been happier if he could have remained at the stage of lower animal development, with no power of thought. Alfred Housman, the great lyrical poet, says we could all be happy, if only we did not think. It is when we think that we are overwhelmed with gloom.
The custom of congratulating others on their birthdays is really an acquiescence in optimism. We instinctively (and I believe rightly) regard life as an asset. But Swift believed that the worst thing that had ever happened to him was being born. He therefore, like the honest man he was, kept his birthdays as days of fasting and mourning. He wore black and refused to eat.
For my part I find daily life not always joyous, but always interesting. I have some sad days and nights, but none that are dull. As I advance deeper into the vale of years, I live with constantly increasing gusto and excitement. I am sure it all means something; in the last analysis, I am an optimist because I believe in God. Those who have no faith are quite naturally pessimists and I do not blame them.
XXXIII
TRANSLATIONS
Of course it is best to read every book in the language in which it was originally written; but no man has ever been able to do that. Elihu Burritt, “the learned blacksmith,” could, so I have heard, write an intelligible sentence in fifty languages, but there were many more than fifty of which he was ignorant. The vast majority of even intelligent Americans know no language but their own, and that they do not know any too well. It becomes necessary, therefore, unless one is to cut oneself off from foreign thought and literature, to have recourse to translations; a reader of a newspaper does that every day, though he is not always aware of the fact.
Inasmuch as the greatest works of literature have been translated many times into English, it is rather important to know which is the best translation; no one driving a car would take a bad road if a better one were available.