THE PESSIMIST

'REJOICE, O young man, in thy youth,' 1 said the Hebrew preacher. 'Sursum corda '-' Lift up your hearts'-is the lofty exhortation of the Church in the most solemn of her offices. Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice,' was the inspiring message of the great Apostle of the Gentiles.

The goal aimed at by the philosophers of the Academy was Tò μérov, the middle course, the moderate view, the right sense of proportion, the avoidance of extremes. This may be the perfection of reason, but in practical politics the advice is not so easy to follow. Some natural instinct compels us to apply preconceived principles to the crises that succeed one another with bewildering rapidity in the political world. The gifted originator of English comic opera assures us that every little boy or girl that is born into this world alive is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative. Thus are we bred and nurtured in an atmosphere of extremes. Our own party is always right, and the opposing party always wrong. Orthodoxy is our doxy, and heterodoxy the other fellow's doxy. Opinions on Church and State, foreign and domestic policy, Socialism, Capitalism, science, philosophy, art, literature, the drama, and countless other matters, are hurled about indiscriminately by a great mass of people who have often given little or no intelligent thought to the momentous questions at issue. Prejudice overrides reason; environment is more effectual than argument, and individual psychology more powerful than rational judgment.

If optimism and pessimism are relentlessly opposed to one another, if the Greek system of philosophy can find no common ground on which these two antagonists may meet, if it is impossible to devise any formula which will unite them under one standard, it is worth while to consider which of them better deserves our support, and is the more valuable asset to the community. I do not think that we shall be backing the wrong horse if we select the splendid cheerfulness of Mark Tapley rather than the

1 From the context it appears that youth' signifies the whole lifetime of a man until the years draw nigh when he shall say, I have no pleasure in

them.'

incurable despondency of Jaques, who boasts that he can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.

We have it on the authority of Lord Macaulay that there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. But the British public in its present phase of pessimism presents a spectacle which, if not exactly ridiculous, is neither dignified nor elevating. There is an air of unreality about it; it would seem to be a kind of pose, a passing tableau, a thoughtless and unconsidered fashion. This impression is strengthened by the fact that the sentiments enunciated spring, rather unexpectedly, not so much from those who find themselves the most hard hit by the aftermath of the war, and reduced to straitened and disagreeable circumstances, as from people who have suffered considerably less, and who still retain some of the amenities of life. After a pleasant little dinner party men will tell each other with gusto that it is Germany who has won the war, that the whole country is saturated with Bolshevism, that Cabinet Ministers are the mere tools of GermanJew financiers, and that Europe is on its way to relapse into barbarism. They say with Samuel Rogers:

You shall not chase my gloom away!

There's such a charm in melancholy
I would not if I could be gay.

Here I must for a moment digress in order to avoid a possible misconception. Do I mean to suggest that there are no calamities in life, no tragedies which tear the heart-strings asunder, no slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which pierce the very soul, when anguish and despair bow down the sufferer? Do I wish to make light of such a grief? Mǹ yévolтo: God forbid. Shall we reprove David for his pathetic sorrow at the death of Absalom ?

And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom I would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!

Or, again, when, in the depths of his tribulation, he sang :

Save me, O God: for the waters are come in even unto my soul.

I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is: I am come into deep waters so that the floods run over me.

Tennyson in his In Memoriam voices this agony of spirit :

Tears

Which weep a loss for ever new,

A void where heart on heart reposed;

And, where warm hands have pressed and closed,

Silence, till I be silent too.

Which weep the comrade of my choice,

An awful thought, a life removed,
The human-hearted man I loved,

A spirit, not a breathing voice.

Such genuine grief has our utmost commiseration, our tenderest sympathy. It differs toto cœlo from the mock heroics, almost wholly materialistic, the pseudo-lamentations for the supposititious ruin of everything, our awful degeneracy, our approaching national bankruptcy (with a surplus of 100 millions), a Government pursuing a callous course of idleness, procrastination, and wanton extravagance, which is sapping the very life-blood of the nation,' and all the rest of it.

What is the point of all this? Where does the pleasure of making such statements come in? How can a man think, or persuade himself that he thinks, such a farrago of nonsense? Does he enjoy the sensation of telling us, like the fat boy in Pickwick, that he is going to make our flesh creep? Perhaps he thinks that he is somebody or something, a pillar it may be, when he holds forth in this vein. It may flatter his vanity, add to his self-conceit, increase his importance, if he finds listeners who are impressed by all these thunderbolts which he has at his fingers' ends, as Maria in Twelfth Night has her supply of jests: With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit, As who should say, 'I am Sir Oracle,

And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark !'

Or without all these alarums and excursions would he find, like the French prince in King John, that

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,

Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man?

To men of this calibre reasoned evidence goes for nothing. It is not required. As Iago says when he places Desdemona's handkerchief in Cassio's lodging:

Trifles light as air

Are to the jealous confirmations strong

As proofs of holy writ.

Not to the jealous only, but to this crowd of babblers,

At (whose) every word a reputation dies, be it the reputation of their country or of individual statesmen who have the privilege of being on the other side in politics. Could they but realise

O wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see ourselves as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.

The art of broadcasting pessimist records, if we may judge by its prevalence, is one that is easily acquired. To say that everything is wrong is simplicity itself. All that is needed is a nice

selection of catch-phrases, plenty of brass and self-assertion, an air of mystery conveying the impression that the speaker has an intimate knowledge of what is at the back of the minds of the most prominent men of the day, with a few slight impressive gestures to emphasise the finality of each ipse dixit.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.

But amongst devotees of this cult there is too frequently no knowledge at all. They have no idea of clear thinking. Things appear to them to be new which are, in fact, as old as the hills. In order to elucidate my meaning, I am compelled somewhat reluctantly to analyse just a very few of the lugubrious and shallow opinions which one hears expressed with such damnable iteration. I have no intention of running through the whole gamut of these absurdities. It is the general principle, the attitude, the falsity, the humbug, against which I am up in arms.

One sign of the ruin which, according to these latter day prophets, threatens to engulf the nation, is that capital is leaving the country, taking to itself wings and flying away because there is no security here. It is a case of rats deserting a sinking ship. But if they had only studied the question with the faintest amount of care they would have known that from time immemorial British capital has gone abroad, and that this is a sign of prosperity, not of decay. This rich country, after satisfying its own national requirements, has always exported its superabundant wealth to the uttermost parts of the earth, and invested it here, there, and everywhere, to the great advantage of the world and to its own very special benefit. We have developed the resources of other lands and reaped a rich harvest in the process. The City columns of the daily papers record constant flotations of new companies and commercial ventures at home, the shares being taken up greedily. Money flows in. Yet large sums are being invested in foreign concerns; therefore, we are told, ruin stares us in the face.

Communism and Socialism are spoken of as if they were new symptoms of disease in the body politic, dangers with which our forbears never had to contend, while at the most it is only a case of committing

The oldest sins the newest kind of ways.

In Richard II.'s time-and that is fairly long ago-the very serious rebellion of Wat Tyler was entirely communistic and socialistic. The peasantry were determined to free themselves from a condition of what seemed to them to be one of serfdom and bondage. They were told by their leaders, including some of the clergy, that things would never be right until there should be

neither gentlemen nor villeins, and all should be absolutely equal. The rich and the poor, the mighty and the weak, were all children of Adam and Eve; and when Adam was delving and Eve spinning where was the gentleman to be found? The present state of things, they said, was no longer to be borne; and they enforced their arguments by marching on Blackheath, a hundred thousand strong, burning palaces in London, and murdering the Archbishop of Canterbury. Jack Cade, the violent rebel of Henry VI.'s reign, in the course of his socialistic harangues, insisted that the whole realm was to be in common. In subsequent reigns it was found necessary to pass one Act of Parliament after another to prevent agricultural and other labourers from combining for the advancement of their conditions. Nearer our own times there was Owen's formidable Communistic Trades Union movement in 1836; and agitation on behalf of these principles, though at times more active and militant than at others, has never ceased. Two novels of about a century ago, Bulwer Lytton's My Novel and Captain Marryat's Midshipman Easy, give us picturesque object-lessons of the sinister methods at work in those days. But our croakers of to-day speak as if Communism and Socialism had never been heard of before! The danger exists, but it has existed all along; and, since the sturdy common-sense of the nation has successfully dealt with it in the past, there is no need to feel despair for the future. The mere fact that the whole subject has been debated quite recently without prejudice or bias in the House of Commons on Mr. Philip Snowden's motion takes the wind out of the sails of extreme agitators. If they see that it is possible to pursue their aims by constitutional methods the raison d'être for violent revolution ceases to exist.

Just one more illustration, and I have done. The morality of the day and the type of modern girl are used to point many a moral and adorn a multitude of tales. Is there anything new in this? On the contrary, from the Tudor, Stuart, and Georgian periods up to now there has always been the same outcry. True, there are cycles of comparative rigidity and laxity in the conventional moral code. British matrons who now bewail the falling off of their daughters from their own exalted standard fail to recollect that in the 'sixties of the last century a tremendous attack on the 'Girl of the Period' was initiated in the pages of the Saturday Review. Quite as bitter reproaches were levelled against the girls who are the grandmothers of the present generation as against their granddaughters now. They lived, their critics insisted, for nothing but pleasure; they were selfish, fast, and talked slang; in short, they were all that they should not be. All this rather discounts modern invectives. But it is quite forgotten by the cynics who seek a bubble reputation in traducing the present age.