ssible by wearing blinkers. I was
reading a day or two ago a suggestive and brilliant book by one of our
most prolific critics, Mr. Chesterton, on the subject of Dickens. Mr.
Chesterton is of opinion that our modern tendency to pessimism results
from our inveterate realism. Contrasting modern fictions with the old
heroic stories, he says that we take some indecisive clerk for the
subject of a story, and call the weak-kneed cad "the hero." He seems
to think that we ought to take a larger and more robust view of human
possibilities, and keep our eyes steadily fixed upon more vigorous
and generous characters. But the result of this is the ugly and
unphilosophical kind of optimism after all, that calls upon God to
despise the work of His own hands, that turns upon all that is feeble
and unsightly and vulgar with anger and disdain, like the man in the
parable who took advantage of his being forgiven a great debt to exact
a tiny one. The tragedy is that the knock-kneed clerk is all in all to
himself. In clear-sighted and imaginative moments, he may realise in a
sudden flash of horrible insight that he is so far from being what he
would desire to be, so unheroic, so loosely strung, so deplorable--and
yet that he can do so little to bridge the gap. The only method of
manufacturing heroes is to encourage people to believe in themselves and
their possibilities, to assure them that they are indeed dear to
God; not to reveal relentlessly to them their essential lowness and
shabbiness. It is not the clerk's fault that his mind is sordid and
weak, and that his knees knock together; and no optimism is worth the
name that has not a glorious message for the vilest. Or, again, it is
possible to arrive at a working optimism by taking a very dismal view of
everything. There is a story of an old Calvinist minister whose daughter
lay dying, far away, of a painful disease, who wrote her a letter of
consolation, closing with the words, "Remember, dear daughter, that all
short of Hell is mercy." Of course if one can take so richly decisive a
view of the Creator's purpose for His creatures, and look upon Hell
as the normal destination from which a few, by the overpowering
condescension of God, are saved and separated, one might find matter
of joy in discovering one soul in a thousand who was judged worthy of
salvation. But this again is a clouded view, because it takes no account
of the profound and universal preference for happiness in the human