Chapter II: A Discriminating Optimist

“_I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me._”

One of the most familiar terms of reproach in these days is “Victorian.” It is used by clever literary persons who have rebelled against the standards of their immediate predecessors. It implies a certain smugness and self-satisfaction which is very irritating to persons who are conscious of the cruel realities of this unfinished world. The Victorians are supposed to have been incorrigible optimists who mistook the Fool’s Paradise in which they lived for the final resting place of humanity. They were worshipers of the respectabilities, and were content with the cant of liberalism as their fathers had been content with the cant of Toryism.

To-day, however, we are taught that it is our duty to face the grimmest realities, and not to flinch when we see something that is ugly and threatening. We must see how the other half lives, and we must free ourselves from amiable delusions.

In turning from the work of our painfully sincere realists to Emerson, the first impression is that we are going back to that discredited state of mind, the early Victorian optimism. For Emerson faces the existing world with a smiling face. He takes for granted that there is a friendliness in its laws, and that the ultimate reality is not to be feared. He has a frank predilection for beauty and does not feel it his duty to feed his imagination on what is ugly and unwholesome. He is always glad to be alive, and glad to find so many other creatures alive at the same time. Sometimes he has a too debonair way of making light of the evils that are encountered by earnest people.

But those who look upon the optimism of Emerson as a part of the conventionalism of his time are, I think, superficial in their judgments. In the first place, he was not a Victorian, but an American, who was not under the spell of the good queen and her court. No one was less disposed to imitate the literary conventions then dominant in England. He was no more a Victorian than was Abraham Lincoln. There was nothing smug in his optimism. He was not an apologist for the existing state of things, nor interested in proving that this is the best of all possible worlds. He did not try to make himself agreeable by calling evil good. He recognized the existence of an enormous number of bad and cruel things. “Nature as we know her is no saint.”

He taught that nature does not coddle us, nor provide ready-made houses or clothes. She leaves us to make these things for ourselves. And the process of experiment is never an easy one. It is a long and tedious way by which we travel toward truth. Nature does not tell us what is good for us; to discover this is part of our experience.

“I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the Universe and is disappointed, and I found that I began at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate blessings.”

So far from denying or seeking to hide the darker and more painful aspects of the world, he admitted them and placed them where they belong, _at the beginning_. They belong to the realm of chaos and night.

But the outstanding fact is that there has been a gradual emergence from chaos. The existence of man as a reasoning creature becomes more wonderful as we think of the odds against it. No good thing can be had without effort.

But the real question is, “Is the effort worth while?” You may say that it is not. You do not know whether or not you shall succeed, and therefore you will not try.

Emerson declares that the effort is most gloriously worth while. It reveals the joy of creation.

“A man is a golden impossibility. Power keeps quite another road than the turnpike of choice and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking and keeping if it were not.... Nature hates calculators, her methods are saltatory and impulsive.... The mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive on casualties.... Every man is an impossibility till he is born, everything is impossible till we see it a success.”

At this point it would be well to lay down Emerson’s essay on Experience and do a little meditating on the words, “the mind goes antagonizing on.”

Here is a philosophy that goes behind the old dispute between the optimist and the pessimist. The ordinary optimist tries to prove that there is no real antagonism between the facts of nature and the ideals of the human soul. Everything is exquisitely fitted to produce happiness. The pessimist denies this and insists on the flagrant opposition between what is and what ought to be. He arranges a deadly parallel between the world of the ideals and the world of hard reality.

Emerson answers that there is an antagonism. The human spirit must not be bullied by that which lies beneath it. It must assert its sovereignty, and in its resistance it makes the discovery of its power. It goes “antagonizing on.” That is the way of the conqueror.

“The essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie in any list of particular evils. After we have enumerated famine, fever, inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness and loss of friends, we have not yet included the proper tragic element, which is Terror, and which does not respect definite evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which haunts the afternoon and night, idleness and solitude.”

A low haggard spirit sits by our side, “casting the fashion of uncertain evils, a sinister presentiment, a power of the imagination to disclose things orderly and cheerful and show them in startling array. Hark, what sounds on the night wind? the cry of murder in that friendly house, see those marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot. The whisper overhead, the detected glance, the glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half knowledge and mistakes, darken the brow and chill the heart of man. And accordingly it is natures not clear, nor of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters from which something is hidden that all others see, that suffer most from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough, and they crave pain, Mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so downed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mishear and misbelieve, they suspect and dread. They handle every nettle, and tread on every snake in the meadow.”

It is here that Emerson made his stand. It is not necessary for us to apologize for facts or to attempt to vindicate Eternal Providence. Events come and we must face them. But the Terror we must not yield to, this we can overcome. There is a health of the spirit which may be cultivated and which makes us immune to evil influences.

The optimism of Emerson was not to be expressed in the phrase, “looking at the bright side of things.” That is the lazy man’s optimism. There is a homelier phrase, “making the best of it.” Let the circumstances be what they may, the brave man accepts them resolved to make the best of them. And the surprise is that when he puts all his strength into the task, the result is something better than he had planned. Even when worst has come to worst, the hero turns upon the hostile powers and finds the Best which he has worshiped afar now realized in his own will.

“Trembler, do not whine and chide,
Art thou not also real?
Why shouldst thou stoop to poor excuse;
Turn on the accuser roundly, say,
‘Here am I, here will I abide
Forever to myself soothfast.
Go thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure stay!’
Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast.”

The most complete expression of Emerson’s discriminating optimism can be found in his essay on Fate. Here he states the argument of the pessimist in the strongest terms. There are forces at work which bring pain and loss. There are laws which we can not control. There are tragedies which are inevitable. But the good man confronts the evil fate. Emerson believed that the result of that conflict was the creation of a higher good than had before been perceived. The struggle with Fate produced power.

“Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals--in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him--thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous--quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planet and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature--here they are, side by side, God and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.

“Nor can he blink the free-will. To hazard the contradiction--freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. For ever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a ‘Declaration of Independence,’ or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other. His sound relation to these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them. ‘Look not on Nature, for her name is fatal,’ said the oracle. The too much contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

“I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny. They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and lazy. ’Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the scale of nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no persuasion, no bribe, shall make him give up his point. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.

“’Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

“For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront Fate with Fate.”