Part 9

Thus recent definitions of the optimist illustrate the superior attitude of the pessimist: “An optimist is a fool unfamiliar with the facts.” “An optimist is one who falls out of a fourth-story window, and as he goes by the third story, he says, ‘So far, so good.’” “An optimist is one who at night makes lemonade out of the lemons that have been handed to him all day.” “A pessimist is one who lives with an optimist.”

Now the familiarly unpleasant back-slapping cheerio person, with a genius for the inopportune, is not necessarily an optimist. He is a nuisance. He was well known and dreaded like a pestilence among the ancient Jews. See the Book of Proverbs, 27:14, “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him,” and 25:29, “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.”

* * * * *

A man who attempts to console another by making light of his troubles or by pretending that things are otherwise than what they obviously are will not get very far. One might as well pretend in January that it is June. You cannot get rid of obstacles by ignoring them any more than you can solve problems by forgetting them. Nor can you console sufferers by reminding them of the woes of others or by inopportunely emphasising other things.

If a man slips on an orange peel that some moron has left on the pavement and breaks his leg, you will not help him by saying, “Yesterday a man fell here and broke his _neck_.” If a manifold father loses one of his sons by a motor accident, you can’t help him by saying, “Cheer up! You’ve got three sons left.”

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” These terrible words were spoken not by a peevish invalid or by a bankrupt, but by the Light of the World. He always and everywhere recognised the forces of evil and never pretended that life was all sunshine. Religion does not pretend that everything is easy and comfortable, for religion is not meant to fill our minds with illusions but rather with fortitude. Our Lord came into the world to show us how to bear the burden of life cheerfully and bravely; life is not easy, but His yoke is.

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.

Great translators are rarer than great creative authors. In order to achieve the best possible translation, one must in the first place have an absolute command of two languages, an accomplishment that is not nearly so common as is often supposed. Indeed, this is too often supposed erroneously by the translator himself.

* * * * *

In the history of the literature of the world, there are four supremely great poets; no one can name a fifth who is in their class. Those four, in chronological order, are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. Every reader, every lover of good books, should know something of the work of these four mighty ones, for there is a perceptible difference between the best and the second best. Goethe’s masterpiece is _Faust_, and it so happens that we have an English translation of _Faust_ that is so much better than all other English translations that no comparison is possible. This is by the American, Bayard Taylor.

It was the major work of his life; he spent many years of sedulous, conscientious toil perfecting it. It has three admirable features--the English style is beautiful; it is as literal as is consistent with elegance, in this work amazingly literal; it preserves in every instance the original metres which change so often in the German. If you wish to know how superior Taylor is to all other translators of _Faust_, just read aloud the four stanzas of the Dedication in any other English version and then try the same experiment with Taylor’s. Those who cannot read German and yet wish to come in contact with “the most spacious mind since Aristotle” have the satisfaction of knowing they are very close to the original--both in thought and in expression--in reading Taylor.

Goethe is not only one of the supreme poets of the world; he has the distinction of being the author of the best German novel, _Wilhelm Meister_. The best translation of this was written and published by Thomas Carlyle more than one hundred years ago. In reading this translation, therefore, one is reading in the same book the works of two men of genius. Carlyle had had almost no opportunity to hear spoken German; he was largely self-taught. But it was characteristic of his honesty, industry, conscience, as well as of his literary gifts, that he should have done his difficult work so well that no one has been able to equal it.

In the course of the novel occurs the exquisite lyric _Know’st thou the land?_ The best English translation of this song was made about fifteen years ago by the late James Elroy Flecker.

No absolutely first-rate translation of Dante into English exists. The best plan is probably to read one in prose and one in verse; the prose by Charles Eliot Norton, the verse by Cary.

A large number of English writers have had a try at Homer. George Chapman, whose version inspired Keats, made a thundering Elizabethan poem. Pope, according to his contemporary, Young, put Achilles into petticoats, but Pope’s translation has anyhow the merit of being steadily interesting. Butcher and Lang wrought together an excellent prose version of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, while the latter poem was artistically translated into rhythmic prose by George Herbert Palmer.

There is an English translation of another work that stands with Taylor’s _Faust_ as being all but impeccable. This is Edward FitzGerald’s version of the stanzas of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald really wrote a great English poem; it is only necessary to compare his version with a literal prose translation, in Nathan Haskell Dole’s admirable Variorum edition, to see how big is the debt we owe FitzGerald. If Omar and Edward have met in the other world, I am sure Old Fitz has received due acknowledgment.

The great Russian novelists, Turgeney, Dostoevski and Chekhov, have been magnificently translated by Constance Garnett. She has also Englished some of the novels of Tolstoi and Gogol. She has a positive genius for translation. In the centenary year--1928--began an entirely new version of the complete works of Tolstoi, by Aylmer Maude. Mr. Maude knew Tolstoi intimately and is himself an admirable writer.

XXXIV

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

When I was a small boy in Hartford, I often used to see Mark Twain standing in the open air in his shirt-sleeves, the eternal cigar in his mouth and a billiard cue in his hand. The billiard room was on the top floor of his house and a tiny balcony projected from one of the windows; nearly all dwellings built in the seventies had strange abscesses of that kind. While his opponent was shooting, Mark would come out on that platform for a breath of air. Billiards was the only game he cared for; he was by no means fond of exercise. He always said, “Never stand up when you can sit down; never sit down when you can lie down.” Many years later, when he was living in New York, he often attended professional billiard matches and the spectators often looked away from the table at Mark’s superb leonine head and noble old face.

Another famous contemporary writer also found his only recreation in billiards--this was Herbert Spencer. Every afternoon he would give himself and the unknowable a rest and go to the Athenæum Club in London for a game, where his own cue is still preserved as a memorial. If none of his cronies was available, he would challenge a stranger. His philosophy afforded no balm in defeat. On one occasion when he was beaten badly he put his cue in the rack and remarked testily that to play billiards well was an accomplishment; to play it too well was the sign of a misspent life.

It is rather strange, since most of our American games are derived from the English, that we should have taken billiards from France. Few games are more uncommon in the United States than English billiards; cricket is not nearly so unusual a spectacle.

Almost every American boy wants to play billiards. When I was fourteen one of my schoolmates found a man who wished to sell a small table--it had rubber tubes for cushions--but the price was prohibitive, twenty dollars. Our total assets were seventy-five cents. We remembered that my friend’s sister had received a twenty dollar gold piece as a birthday present. Of what possible use could it be to her? We persuaded her to donate it to the good cause, and if any one thinks that our powers of persuasion were extraordinary, he thinks accurately, for I subsequently persuaded her to become my wife. We bought the table and set it up in my house late one Saturday night, too late, alas, to play. Father would not allow me to touch it on Sunday, and early Monday morning I had to be off to school. We got out at four o’clock, made straight for that table and played till eleven at night, not stopping to eat.

I know of no game at which professional skill has developed more rapidly than at billiards. It seems incredible, but only fifty years ago there were four balls on the table and the ordinary friendly game was 34 points! Almost any professional today could run a thousand points--indeed he could go on indefinitely.

I regret that the beautiful game of cushion-caroms, so common in the eighties among the professionals, has become obsolete. In that game there could be no nursing, because one had to make the cue ball hit the cushion either before making the carom or after hitting the object ball. The gentlemen of the green cloth who were most proficient at this game were Vignaux, the Frenchman, and the Americans, “Jake” Schaefer, father of the present expert of that name; Slosson, Sexton and Sutton. In Allyn Hall at Hartford I saw a great match between Vignaux and Schaefer. M. Vignaux was a large man and very dignified; in his evening clothes he looked like a prime minister. Mr. Schaefer was so small that Maurice Daly used to call him the little shaver. They were formally introduced to the spectators by the referee, who remarked with immense unction, “Mr. Schaefer has never in his life played with his coat on; he asks the kind permission of the audience to remove it.” This privilege was granted with fervent applause. When the game began to go against him, M. Vignaux also removed his swallowtail.

At that time the highest run that had ever been made at cushion-caroms was 77, which had been accomplished by Sexton. On this night, by dazzling open-table play, Schaefer made a run of 70. He was called the Wizard, because he played with extreme rapidity, exactly the opposite of Slosson, who was known as the Student.

Now the popular professional game is the balkline, 18.2. A recent champion is Edouard Horemans of Belgium, who won the title from young Schaefer in a hair-raising match at San Francisco. Horemans is a left-handed player and in every respect a worthy champion. His rail play is phenomenal. I saw him give an exhibition on his first visit to America in 1920 and it was clear that he was a dangerous competitor.

Who is the greatest player in history? It is hard to say, but I suspect there never was a greater player than Napoleon Ives. He was one of the first to use a cue weighing more than twenty ounces and was all but unbeatable. Schaefer (senior) once beat him with the anchor shot, which was afterward barred. Unfortunately, tuberculosis cut Ives off in his prime. The heated room, the chalk dust and the excitement of close contests were too much for him.

XXXV

DOG BOOKS

The dog, except in very high latitudes, is not so useful as the horse, the mule, the camel, the donkey; he cannot supply food and drink, like the cow and the goat; but for all that, he is, among all the lower animals, man’s best friend. Even here, as in bipeds, we do not prize our friends for what they can do for us, but for their mental and moral qualities.

If it were possible to collect in one heap all the books and articles that men have written in praise of dogs, it would be a sky-scraper. I cannot tell what the earliest literary allusion to dogs is; but I think it strange that the Bible is so silent. Those books representing the social history of the Jews for many centuries, contain the most beautiful poetry and prose ever written, as well as the most tender and comforting assurances; but they indicate little interest in animals as companions or pets. The word dog is repeatedly used as a term of degradation, and for some unknown reason the Jews were forbidden to bring into the sanctuary the price of a dog, which was coupled with the wages of sin. The only allusion I have found to the dog as a companion is in the Apocrypha, in the eleventh chapter of Tobit: “So they went their way, and the dog went after them.” Even here the dog apparently had to force his attentions upon man, which is a way he has when unappreciated.

The fact that in the New Testament the dogs ate of the crumbs from the table and that the street dogs licked the sores of Lazarus the beggar, proves nothing in the way of appreciation; other animals moved freely about the houses in Palestine, and they were not kept for the charm of their company.

But in the old Indian books of the East, many centuries before Christ, the dog’s fidelity and social attractions were prized; as is shown by the well-known story of the righteous pilgrim coming to the gates of heaven with his dog. He was told to walk right in. “And my dog?” “Oh, no dogs allowed.” “All right, then I don’t go in.” This man thought heaven would not be heaven without dogs, as Siegmund cared naught for heaven without Sieglinde.

Pope alluded to the Indian love of dogs:

“But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.”

The Greeks loved dogs. One of the most affecting incidents in Homer’s _Odyssey_ is where Ulysses returns after years of wandering, and, being in rags, no one recognises him. But his dog Argos, who had waited for his master expectantly all these years, instantly sees and knows him, and through the beggar’s disguise salutes the king. He wags his tail and dies of joy.

English literature is filled with dogolatry. Dr. John Brown’s _Rab and His Friends_ (1858), became a little classic. Tennyson worshipped dogs, and always had two or three huge dogs in the room while he composed poetry, which he read aloud to them. His poem _Owd Roa_ (Old Rover), describes how a dog saved a family when the house was on fire. Bret Harte made a marvellous sketch of the strange appearance and characteristics of the dog Boonder. Stevenson wrote a whimsical essay, _The Character of Dogs_, in which he proves conclusively that many dogs are snobs. They certainly are; they will fawn on well-dressed strangers, and try to bite the iceman.

Maeterlinck has declared that the dog is the only conscious being in the world who knows and is sure of his god; in _The Blue Bird_ he exalted the moral character of the dog, though I find it hard to forgive him for his slander of the cat. Richard Harding Davis’s masterpiece--among all his brilliant short stories--is _The Bar Sinister_, an imaginative study of dogs. Rudyard Kipling has celebrated the virtues of dogs both in prose and verse.

Vivisection and dogs have called out many poems, of which two of the most notable are Robert Browning’s _Tray_ and Percy MacKaye’s _The Heart of a Dog_.

Jack London’s masterpiece is _The Call of the Wild_, where the great dog reverted to primitive impulses and habits. This is an imperishable work of literature, and although cast in the form of prose fiction, has much of the elevation and majesty of poetry. Among contemporary writers, Albert Payson Terhune has specialised in dogs, and done admirable work in canine psychoanalysis. The late Senator Vest, when a young man, made a speech in court on dogs which will outlast his political orations.

But of all the works in prose or verse, ancient or modern that celebrates the virtues of the dog, the most admirable is the novel, _Bob, Son of Battle_, by the late Alfred Ollivant. It was published in 1898, and was his first book, written under peculiar circumstances. Mr. Ollivant was a young Englishman who had injured his spine in football; then, having apparently recovered, he received a commission in the artillery at the age of nineteen. A fall from his horse permanently injured him, so that he was an invalid for the rest of his life--he died in 1927. For the first few years he was not able to leave his bed, and at the age of twenty, in horizontal pain and weakness, began to write _Bob_. It took him three years to finish the book. In England it was published under the poor title, _Owd Bob_, and attracted no attention; but in America the publishers wisely changed the name to the alliterative _Bob, Son of Battle_, and the book sold by the hundred thousand. (Those who are interested in the first editions should know that the first English edition differs in style from the first American edition; the London publishers delayed publication, and the author revised the story without injuring it.)

It is a curious fact that this book, written by an Englishman for Englishmen, and dealing exclusively with English scenes and customs, should have attracted no attention in the land of its birth, while selling like the proverbial hot cakes in every city and village in America. In public lectures in Texas, California, and all over the middle West and the East, I had only to mention the name of this novel and a wave of delighted recognition swept over the audience. But even ten years after its appearance it was practically unheard of in England. I asked William De Morgan, Henry Arthur Jones, and William Archer if they had read it; they had never heard of it.

Some years after that, however, a cheap edition was published in Great Britain, and the book slowly made its way, and is now over there as here an acknowledged classic. Its popularity was increased by its being made into a motion picture, and Mr. Ollivant was elected to the Athenæum.

The two most remarkable dogs I ever met in fiction are both in _Bob, Son of Battle_--the hero, Bob, the Grey Dog of Kenmuir, and the villain Red Wull. Their continued rivalry has an epic force and fervour. It is the eternal strife between the Power of Light and the Power of Darkness.

XXXVI

GOING TO HONOLULU

Remember to pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with “bone,” not with “on.” But, above all, remember, when you are there, never to speak of coming from the United States or from America--you are in the United States. Call your home “the mainland.” I was once giving a lecture in California and I thoughtlessly began a sentence this way: “When I get back to America”--I never finished that sentence. It was owing only to the sense of humour possessed by the audience that I was able to finish the lecture.

People who have travelled all over the world say there are only two places that may accurately be called paradise; they are the Hawaiian Islands and Ceylon. If the wind is right, you get the spicy perfume from Ceylon before the island is visible, as it is written in the missionary hymn. I have never seen Ceylon, but Hawaii will do very well as an earthly paradise. The most vivid and alluring description of it came from the pen of Mark Twain and is to be found at the end of that work of genius, _Roughing It_. In a certain sense, Mark was always homesick for these islands. He saw them in his youth and he remembered them in his old age.

In honor of Lord Sandwich, Captain Cook in 1778 named them the Sandwich Islands. The next year he was killed there and a native chief affirmed that he had eaten the Captain’s heart. I hope it gave him indigestion.