ings showed only what kind of things he liked
to describe. "Some authors become vocal before one aspect of life, some
another." (Perhaps not his exact words but close to it.) One aspect of
life may impress you, yet leave you in silence; another may stimulate
you into saying something; but what does that prove? It merely shows
what you like best to talk about, not your philosophy. A cat whose life
is principally peace and good food and warm fires makes hardly any noise
about those things--at most a mere purr. But she does become vocal and
wildly so, over midnight encounters. If another cat so much as disputes
her way on a fence-top, her tragic shrieks of anguish will sound like
the end of the world. Well, Hardy has spent his life in what was chiefly
a peaceful era of history, in a liberal and prosperous country; and he
personally, too, has had blessings--the blessing of being able, for
instance, to write really good books, and the blessing of finding a
public to read and admire them. Is any of this reflected in his themes,
though? Does he purr? Mighty little. No, he prefers looking around for
trouble in this old world's backyards; he prowls about at night till he
comes upon some good hunk of bleakness, and then he sits down, like the
cat, to utter long-drawn-out wails, which give him strange, poignant
sensations of deep satisfaction. They give us quite other sensations but
he doesn't care. In the morning he canters back in, pleased and happy,
for breakfast, and he basks in the sun, blinking sagely, the rest of the
day. And we say, with respect, "A great pessimist; he thinks life is
all sorrow."

The principal objection to pessimists is they sap a man's hope. As some
English writer has said, there are two kinds of hope. First, the hope of
success, which gives men daring, and helps them win against odds. That
isn't the best sort of hope. Many deliberately cultivate it because it
makes for success, but that is an insincere habit; it's really
self-hypnotism. It may help us to win in some particular enterprise,
yes; but it's dangerous, like drug-taking. You must keep on increasing
the dose, and blind-folding your reason. Men who do it are buoyant,
self-confident, but some of their integrity is lost.

The best kind of hope is not about success in this or that undertaking.
It's far deeper; hence when things go against you, it isn't destroyed.
It is hope about the nature and future of man and the universe. It is
this hope the p