There is pessimism for you, embellished by the art of its most gifted poet. Theoretically there is a good deal to be said for it. As Mr. Bradley puts it, "Pessimism is the doctrine that in a world where everything is bad it is good to know the worst." Practically, anybody can be a pessimist who wants to. The art is easily acquired. Here are the rules for it.

Live in the passive voice; intent on what you can get, rather than on what you can do: in the subjunctive mood; meditating on what might be, rather than what actually is in the past or future tense; either harping on what has been or worrying about what will be, rather than facing the facts of the present: in the third person; finding fault with other people instead of setting your own affairs in order: in the plural number; following the standards of respectability of other people rather than your own perception of what is fit and proper.

Keep these rules faithfully, always measuring the worth of life in terms of personal pleasure, rather than in terms of growth of character or service of high ends, and you will be a pessimist before you know it. For pessimism is the logical and inevitable outcome of that way of looking at life.

A sound optimism accepts with open eyes all the hard facts on which pessimism builds. Enjoyment is fleeting. Nothing can permanently satisfy us. As Browning said to an artist who complained that he was so dissatisfied with what he had done, "But think, if you were satisfied, how little you would be satisfied with!" Optimism proclaims this very incapacity of ours to be satisfied with anything finite, the glory of our nature, the promise and potency of our progress and development, the assurance of our immortality. If good is satisfied feeling,

which is to be given to us ready-made, then indeed we shall never get it, and pessimism is the ultimate truth. If good is a state of eager and enthusiastic activity of will, then this world of ours is just the best place imaginable to give field for this activity.

Of course the classic presentation of this active root of a robust optimism that turns all evil into the means of the increased activity and victory of good is, in the familiar lines from Rabbi Ben Ezra :

"Poor vaunt of life indeed,

Were man but formed to feed

On joy, to solely seek, and find, and feast;
Such feasting ended, then

As sure an end to men;

Irks care the cropful bird? Frets doubt the mawcrammed beast?

"Rejoice we are allied

To That which doth provide

And not partake, effect and not receive!

A spark disturbs our clod;

Nearer we hold of God

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.

"Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!

Be our joys three parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge

the throe.

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:

What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me:

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale."

The same essential idea, that man's true life is one not of fixed and final attainment, but of activity and growth, finds expression in the "Death in the Desert," where he

"Finds progress man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

Such progress could no more attend his soul
Were all it struggles after found at first,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side.

Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.”

Of course, when one talks in this general way about "welcoming rebuffs," and "joys that are three parts pain," the retort is sure to come: "This is all very fine to talk about; but you don't know anything about what real suffering is; you haven't had such a hard time as I have." Well, talk is cheap; and optimistic talk by people who have known no sorrow is the cheapest talk of all. But Browning, as an artist at any rate, knows evil and faces it. His characters are made to drink it to its very dregs. In his greatest book his greatest character, Pompilia, is surely a woman of sorrows and

acquainted with grief, if ever woman was. Her mother was a poor disreputable creature, who bore her in "poverty, pain, shame, and disease at once.”

"My father, he was no one, any one, The worse, the likelier, - call him,

he who came,

Was wicked for his pleasure, went his way,

And left no trace to track by; there remained
Nothing but me, the unnecessary life."

She was adopted by a vain and foolish woman who passed her for her own that she might thereby gain an inheritance to which if childless she would not be entitled. She was married at thirteen to a brute she did not know and could not love, just to please this foolish woman who had adopted her.

"Here marriage was the coin, a dirty piece
Would purchase me the praise of those I loved.
So hardly knowing what a husband meant,
I supposed this or any man would serve,
No whit the worse for being so uncouth."

The husband, who had married her for her dowry, quarrels with the poor girl's foster parents, when he finds the dowry less than he supposed, and finally they are driven away; and the poor Pompilia is left alone with the hateful, cruel husband. For three years she remains the victim of his brutality and abuse; all that should be sweetness and love turned into bitterness and hate. She is exposed to the rudeness and insult of a leering, licentious brother-in-law. Then when the parents in revenge declare the truth about her, and cut off the dowry from her husband,

"He must needs retaliate, - wrong,
Wrong, and all wrong, better say, all blind.
I was the chattel that had caused a crime."

"All bound to do me good, did harm."

The husband laid snares to bring her into compromising connection with a young priest. After resisting mising all his forged importunities, she finally in despair summons this priest to help her escape; is caught with him, and finally is brutally murdered, at the age of seventeen, by her husband. Two weeks before her death she bears a child; yet even her child she cannot have.

"I thought, when he was born,

Something began for once that would not end,
Forevermore, eternally quite mine.

But yet they bore him off

The third day, lest my husband should lay traps
And catch him, and by means of him catch me."

Here surely you have plenty of real evil. A young woman deceived, cheated, abused, persecuted, tormented, sneered at by the holy church to which in her despair she fled for help; the source of sorrow to her friends and enemies alike; an "unnecessary life," with every instinct of womanhood outraged; deprived of her child; her one purest and holiest personal relation misinterpreted, and construed as the foulest crime; murdered at last. Surely no one can rise up and say this poor Pompilia had not known sorrow such as I. Yet Pompilia triumphs; and dies serene. The bad past is to her " one blank, over and ended; a terrific dream."