STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 004
A Crude Theory of Optimism
1. Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History (3)
A Crude Theory of Optimism
The Optimist is a rarer creature than the Pessimist, because enthusiasm is rarer than the grumbling acquiescence in one’s surroundings into which the majority of men slip so easily. Caustic remarks about the worthlessness of one’s contemporaries and the rottenness of one’s milieu are easy things to make. To take arms against the conventions of a settled society requires much more energy than to satirize it. It is also a much more uncomfortable and dangerous occupation in many cases. Moreover, periods when optimism seems justifiable, even to a man of a cheerful disposition, are much less frequent in the world’s history than periods when mankind’s outlook seems gloomy, or at the best doubtful. It is seldom that even the poet can cry out that at this moment to be alive at all is bliss, and to be alive and young is very heaven, as Wordsworth said. It is rare to stand upon some peak in a spiritual Darien and see a new, beautiful, and unknown ocean of possibilities spreading before one. Rarest of all, perhaps, is it to desire to call to the passing hour to stay, because it is so fair.
Yet Optimists there have been, and yet will be, though their optimism is sometimes a little forced, and more often a little illogical. Was Virgil, chanting his song of the glories of the foundation of the Roman race, and the restoration of the Golden Age in the hall of Augustus, a genuine Optimist, or was he but an amiable court-poet singing for his supper? I prefer to believe the former, for I love Virgil; but Augustus was not really a very pleasant person, and I fancy that Virgil knew it. When Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote sweetly of a former age of primitive virtue and innocence, and taught that a future age of a similar sort was possible even for the jaded and artificial folks of the XVIIIth century, was he a prophet or a charlatan? Considering his private character, one is inclined to take his whole attitude for a mere pose. But, if so, it was a pose which deceived a whole generation, and changed the historical perspective of millions of his contemporaries.
But there are other Optimists of whose genuine inspiration one can have no doubt. And first and foremost among them have been those good men who have had before their eyes a religion of universal salvation, rather than a religion which relies on hell-fire as the most efficient item in its propaganda. When one is thoroughly convinced that one is doing one’s best for a righteous cause, which will, and must, triumph in the end, one has a right to be an Optimist, even though incidentally one may have to be a martyr too. One’s personal sufferings count for little, if thereby the cause is advanced, and a just God will not fail to take them into account when one’s good and evil deeds go into the divine scales. Wherefore there have been epochs of primitive faith, and later epochs of revival, when a genuine optimism prevailed, and the good cause went forth conquering and to conquer. The early apostles making their first assault on the heathen world, the friars of the XIIIth century, the Evangelical missionaries overseas in the earlier XIXth century, were all Optimists, inasmuch as they looked forward to conquering the whole world, and not merely to saving some few chosen souls from the damnation to which the rest of mankind might be doomed. And therein they differed from people like Tertullian or the narrow disciples of Calvin, whose conception of Heaven was that of a very small place destined for a very limited number of the Elect, while the sinners in thousands of millions groaned below. I should call these last Pessimists, however sure they might be of the salvation of their own little souls.
But it has not been the times of religious fervour alone that have seen an optimistic outlook on the world. There is such a thing as social and political optimism; and one would be loth to deny the name of Optimist to the XVIIIth-century enthusiasts drafting the “Rights of Man” and dreaming of a second Golden Age to be reached by the simple method of exterminating kings and priests, and relapsing into a supposed “state of nature”. It was of such an outlook that Wordsworth sang:
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country of Romance.
Where Reason seemed the most to assert her rights
When most intent on making of herself
A prime enchantress—to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth
The beauty wore of promise—that which sets
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
Alas for those poor Optimists of 1792, who had before them no golden age but Robespierre and Bonaparte, the Luddites and the “Six Acts”.
A generation later I should not be disposed to deny the name of Optimist to another and a very different set of political enthusiasts—or perhaps one ought not to use the word “enthusiasts”, for enthusiasm was hardly the badge of their tribe—but at any rate highly convinced political dogmatists. I mean those very superior persons, the Whigs of the earlier XIXth century, who thought that a bicameral constitution, with a constitutional monarchy or a president if necessary, was a panacea for all human ills.
There was a wave of genuine optimism passing over Europe when men thought that Greece, Naples, and Portugal needed only the application of the Whig formula to make them happy. Nay, with the substitution of a constitutional president for a king it might even work for Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Honduras. From that easy solution of the difficulties of mankind we are now far away.
How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Has not Lord Bryce, in his admirable Modern Democracies, confessed, as the last heir of the old Liberal tradition, that constitutions are after all far less important things than national character in the working of a state? The old Liberal Optimist of the XIXth century used to lull himself into a state of beatitude by talking of “Progress”. “We are better than our fathers because we have the railway, the steamer, the electric telegraph, vaccination, improved sanitation, and vote by ballot.” Progress is, he said, inevitable. Evolution is the scientific explanation of the world, and all evolution will be on the right side.
This crude theory of optimism overlooks the fact that the close study of history shows that it is not merely evolutionary; it is also not unfrequently cataclysmic—I mean that things sometimes happen which could not have been foreseen by the wisest, and are purely unexpected and not unfrequently destructive. So far from its being true that all history is a record of progress, there are countless examples of its being a record of decay and disaster, as in modern Russia. The Liberal idea of Progress was a rash generalization from the single epoch of the XIXth century, which took into no consideration the setbacks in the history of civilization, and cataclysms, such as those which ended the Assyrian or Egyptian Empires, the old Roman world, or the unity of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages or the Russian Czardom ten years ago.
To my thinking, history is not so often the history of the progressive development of a race or an empire, as the story of the working of individual great men on their contemporaries. Personalities like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed or Bonaparte, or Lenin actually turn the course of history from its normal channel. And there is no use in talking of evolution as ruling all things—still less of its being always a progress from the worse to the better.
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What a wise man