Facing Life Fearlessly

Clarence Darrow

The Pessimistic Versus The Optimistic View Of Life

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS

GIRARD, KANSAS

(Report of a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago,
under the auspices of the Poetry Club, and the Liberal Club;
revised by Mr. Darrow.)

I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. A.E.
Housman in the Summer of 1927. I spent two hours with him, and
before that I had been to the home of Thomas Hardy. Mr. Hardy told
me how much he thought of Housman, before I visited Housman; and
Housman was a frequent visitor at the Hardy home. Their ideas of
life were very much alike; they were what the orthodox people and
the Rotary Clubs would call pessimistic. They didn't live on pipe
dreams; they took the universe as they found it, and man as they
found him. They tried to see what beauty there was in each of them,
but didn't close their eyes to the misery and maladjustments of
either the universe or man, because they ware realists, honest,
thorough, and fearless.

Hardy himself had received the censure of all the good people
of England and the world, who, in spite of that, bought his books.
They all condemned him when he wrote his 'Tess;' so he determined
not to write any more prose. He thought that people probably were
not intelligent enough to appreciate him; certainly not his
viewpoint, and he didn't wish to waste his time on them.

Housman's viewpoint is much the same, as all of you know. He
has written very little. You can read all he has written in two
hours, and less than that; but everything is exquisitely finished.
met him he was in his study in Cambridge. He is a professor of
Latin. I can't Imagine anythINg more useless than that -- unless it
be Greek! He has been called the greatest Latin scholar in the
world, and he seemed to take some pride in his Latin; not so much
in his poetry. He said he didn't write poetry except when he felt
he had to, it was always hard work for him, although some of the
things he wrote very quickly; but as a rule he spent a great deal
of time on most of them.

I asked him if it was true that the latest little volume was
what it is entitled -- 'Last Poems.' He said he thought it was
true; that it had been published as his last poems in 1922 -- five
years before -- and he had only written four lines since: so he
thought that would probably be the last. Upon my asking him to
recite the four lines, he said he had forgotten them.

Both Hardy and Housman, and of course Omar, believed that man
is rather small in comparison with the universe, or even with the
earth; they didn't believe in human responsibility, in free will,
in a purposeful universe, in a Being who watched over and cared for
the people of the world. It is evident that if He does, He makes a
poor job of It!

Neither Hardy nor Housman had any such delusions. They took
the world as they found it and never tried to guess at its origin.
They took man as they found him and didn't try to build castles for
him after be was dead. They were essentially realists, both of
them; and of course long before them Omar had gone over the same
field.

It is hardly fair to call the Rubaiyat the work of Omar
Khayyam. I have read a good many different editions and several
different versions. I never read it in Persian, in which it was
first written, but I have read not only poetical versions but prose
ones. Justin McCarthy brought out a translation a number of years
ago which was supposed to be a literal translation of Omar's book.
There is no resemblance between that book and the classic under his
name that was really written by FitzGerald. There is nothing very
remarkable about the Omar Khayyam as found in Justin McCarthy's
translation. It is probably ten times as expansive as the one we
have, and no one would recognize it from the FitzGerald edition.

The beauty of the Rubaiyat is Edward FitzGerald's. He
evidently was more or less modest or else he wanted to do great
homage to Omar, because no one would ever have suspected that Omar
had any more to do with the book than they would have suspected
Plato. But, under the magic touch of FitzGerald, it is not only one
of the wisest and most profound pieces of literature in the world,
but one of the most beautiful productions that the world has ever
known.

I remember reading somewhere that when this poem was thrown on
the market in London, a long time ago, nobody bought it. They
finally put it out in front of the shop in the form in which it was
printed and sold it for a penny. One could make more money by
buying those books at a penny and selling them now than he could
make with a large block of Standard Oil! It took a long while for
Omar and FitzGerald to gain recognition, which makes it rather
comfortable for the rest of us who write books to give away, and
feel happy when somebody asks us for one, although we suspect they
will never read them. But we all think we will be discovered
sometime. Some of us hope so and some are fearful that they will
be. Neither Omar nor FitzGerald believed in human responsibility.
That is the rock on which most religions are founded, and all laws
-- that everybody is responsible for his conduct; that if he is
good he is good because he deliberately chooses to be good, and if
he is bad it is pure cussedness on his part -- nobody had anything
to do with it excepting himself. If he hasn't free will, why, he
isn't anything! The English poet Henley, in one of his poems,
probably expressed this about as well as anybody. It looks to me as
if he had a case of the rabies or something like that. But people
are fond of repeating it. In his brief poem about Fate he says:

A fine captain of his soul; and a fine master of his fate! He
wasn't master enough of his fate to get himself born, which is
rather important, nor to do much of anything else, except brag
about it. Instead of being the captain of his soul, as I have
sometimes expressed it, man isn't even a deck-hand on a rudderless
ship! He is just floating around and trying to hang on, and hanging
on as long as he can. But if it does him any good to repeat Henley,
or other nonsense, it is all right to give him a chance to do it,
because he hasn't much to look forward to, any way. Free will never
was a scientific doctrine; it never can be. It is probably a
religious conception, which of course shows that it isn't a
scientific one.

Neither one of these eminent men, Hardy or Housman, believed
anything in free will. There is eight hundred years between Omar
and Housman, and yet their, philosophy is wondrously alike. I have
no doubt but that Omar's philosophy was very like what we find in
the rendering of FitzGerald. It is not a strange and unusual
philosophy, except in churches and Rotary Clubs and places like
that. It is not strange in places where people think or try to, and
where they do not undertake to fool themselves. It is rather a
common philosophy; it is a common philosophy where people have any
realization of their own importance, or, rather, unimportance. A
realization of it almost invariably forces upon a human being his
own insignificance and the insignificance of all the other human
atoms that come and go.

Men's ideas root pretty far back. Their religious creeds are
very old. By means of interest and hope and largely fear, they
manage to hang on to the old, even when they know it is not true.
The idea of man's importance came in the early history of the human
race. He looked out on the earth, and of course he thought it was
flat! It looks flat, and he thought it was. He saw the sun, and he
formed the conception that somebody moved it out every morning and
pulled it back in at night. He saw the moon, and he had the opinion
that somebody pulled that out at sundown and took it in in the
morning. He saw the stars, and all there was about the stars was,
"He made the stars also." They were just "also." They were close
by, and they were purely for man to look at, about like diamonds in
the shirt bosoms of people who like them.

This was not an unreasonable idea, considering what they had
to go on. The people who still believe it have no more to go on.
Blind men can't be taught to see or deaf people to hear. The
primitive people thought that the stars were right near by and just
the size they seemed to be. Of course now we know that some of them
are so far away that light traveling at nearly 286,000 miles a
second is several million light years getting to the earth, and
some of them are so large that our sun, even, would be a fly-speck
to them. The larger the telescopes the more of them we see, and the
imagination can't compass the end of them. It is just humanly
possible that somewhere amongst the infinite number of infinitely
larger and more important specks of mud in the universe there might
be some organisms of matter that are just as intelligent as our
people on the earth. So to have the idea that all of this was made
for man gives man a great deal of what Weber and Field used to
call "Proud flesh."

Man can't get conceited from what he knows today, and he can't
get it from what intellectual people ever knew. You remember, in
those days the firmament was put in to divide the water below from
the water above. They didn't know exactly what it was made of, but
they knew what it was. Heaven was up above the firmament. They knew
what it was, because Jacob had seen the angels going up and down on
a ladder. Of course, a ladder was the only transportation for such
purposes known to Jacob. If he had been dreaming now, they would
have been going up in a flying machine and coming down in the same
way.

Our conceptions of things root back; and that, of course, is
the reason for our crude religions, our crude laws, our crude
ideas, and our exalted opinion of the human race.

Omar had it nearer right. He didn't much overestimate the
human race. He knew it for what it was, and that wasn't much. He
knew about what its power was; he didn't expect much from the human
race. He didn't condemn men, because he knew he couldn't do any
better. As he puts it.

Compare that conception with Mr. Henley's, with his glorious
boast that he is the captain of his soul and the master of his
fate. Anyone who didn't catch that idea from the ordinary thought
of the community, but carved it out for himself, would be a subject
for psychopathic analysis and examination. When you have an idea
that everybody else has, of course you are not crazy, but if you
have silly ideas that nobody else has, of course you are crazy.
That is the only way to settle it.

Most people believe every day many things for which others are
sent to the insane asylum. The insane asylums are full of religious
exaltants who have just varied a little bit from the standard of
foolishness. It isn't the foolishness that places them in the bug-
house, it is the slight variations from the other fellows'
foolishness -- that is all. If a man says he is living with the
spirits today, he is insane. If he says that Jacob did, he is all
right. That is the only difference.

Omar says we are simply "impotent pieces in the game He plays"
-- of course, he uses a capital letter when he spells, He which is
all right enough for the purpose -- "in the game He plays upon this
chequer-board of nights and days." And that is what man is. If one
could vision somebody playing a game with human pawns, one would
think that everyone who is moved around here and there was moved
simply at the will of a player and he had nothing whatever to do
with the game, any more than any other pawn. And he has nothing
more to do with it than any other pawn.

Omar expresses this opinion over and over again. He doesn't
blame man; he knows the weakness of man. He knew the cruelty of
judging him.

Whatever the impulse calls one to do, whatever the baubles or
the baits that set in motion many acts, however quickly or
emotionally, the consequences of the acts, as far as he is
concerned, never end. All your piety and all your wit cannot wipe
out a word of it! Omar pities man; he doesn't exalt God, but he
pities man. He sees what man can do; and, more important still, he
sees what he cannot do. He condemns the idea that God could or
should judge man. The injustice of it, the foolishness of it all,
appeals to him and he puts it in this way:

Nothing ever braver and stronger and truer than that!
Preachers have wasted their time and their strength and such
intelligence and learning as they can command, talking about God
forgiving man, as if it was possible for man to hurt God, as if
there was anything to be forgiven from man's standpoint. They pray
that man be forgiven and urge that man should be forgiven. Nobody
knows for what, but still it has been their constant theme. Poets
have done it; Omar knew better. Brave and strong and clear and far-
seeing, although living and dying eight hundred years ago. This is
what he says about forgiveness:

"Man's forgiveness give -- and take!" If man could afford to
forgive God, He ought to be willing to forgive man. Omar knew it.
"Ev'n with paradise devised the snake." Taking the orthodox theory,
for all the sin with which the earth is blackened, "Man's
forgiveness give -- and take!" That is courage; it is science. It
is sense, and it isn't the weak, cowardly whining of somebody who
is afraid he might be hurt unless he whines and supplicates, which
he always does, simply hoping that some great power will have
compassion on him. Always cowardice and fear, and nothing else!

Omar was wise enough to know that if there was any agency
responsible for it, that agency was responsible. He made us as we
are, and as He wished to make us, and to say that a weak, puny,
ignorant human being, here today and gone tomorrow, could possibly
injure God or be responsible for his own weakness and his
ignorance, of course is a travesty upon all logic; and of course it
does great credit to all superstition, for it couldn't come any
other way.

Housman is equally sure about this. He knows about the
responsibility of man. Strange how wonderfully alike runs their
philosophy! Housman condemned nobody. No pessimist does -- only
good optimists. People who believe in a universe of law never
condemn or hate individuals. Only those who enthrone man believe in
free will, and make him responsible for the terrible crudities of
Nature and the force back of it, if there is such a force. Only
they are cruel to the limit.

One can get Housman's idea of the responsibility of the human
being from his beautiful little poem, "The Culprit," the plaintive
wailing of a boy to be executed the next morning, when he, in his
blindness and terror, asked himself the question, "Why is it and
what does it all mean?" and thought about the forces that made him,
and what a blind path he traveled, as we all do. He says:

Nobody lives in this world to himself or any part of himself.
Nobody fashions his body, and still less is responsible for the
size or the fineness of his brain and the sensitiveness of his
nervous system. No one has anything to do with the infinite
manifestations of the human body that produce the emotions, that
force men here and there. And yet religion in its cruelty and its
brutality brands them all alike. And the religious teachers are so
conscious of their own guilt that they only seek to escape
punishment by loading their punishment onto someone else. They say
that the responsibility of the individual who in his weakness goes
his way is so great and his crimes are so large that there isn't a
possibility for him to be saved by his own works.

The law is only the slightest bit more intelligent. No matter
who does it, or what it is, the individual is responsible. If he is
manifestly and obviously crazy they may make some distinction; but
no lawyer is wise enough to look into the human mind and know what
it means. The interpretations of the human judges were delivered
before we had any science on the subject whatever, and they
continue to enforce the old ideas of insanity, in spite of the fact
that there isn't an intelligent human being in the world who has
studied the question who ever thinks of it in legal terms. Judges
instruct the jury that if a man knows the difference between right
and wrong he cannot be considered insane. And yet an insane man
knows the difference better than an intelligent man, because he has
not the intelligence and the learning to know that this is one of
the hardest things to determine, and perhaps the most impossible.
You can ask the inmates of any insane asylum whether it is right to
steal, lie, or kill, and they will all say "No," just as little
children will say it, because they have been taught it. It
furnishes no test, but still lawyers and Judges persist in it, to
give themselves an excuse to wreak vengeance upon unfortunate
people.

Housman knew better. He knew that in every human being is the
imprint of all that has gone before, especially the imprint of his
direct ancestors. And not only that, but that it is the imprint of
all the environment in which he has lived, and that human
responsibility is utterly unscientific, and besides that, horribly
cruel.

Another thing that impressed itself upon all these poets alike
was the futility of life. I don't know whether a college succeeds
in making pupils think that they are very important in the scheme
of the universe. I used to be taught that we were all very
important. Most all the boys and girls who were taught it when I
was taught it are dead, and the world is going on just the same. I
have a sort of feeling that after I am dead it will go on just the
same, and there are quite a considerable number of people who think
it will go on better. But it won't; I haven't been important enough
even to harm it. It will go on just exactly the same.

We are always told of the importance of the human being and
the importance of everything he does; the importance of his not
enjoying life, because if he is happy here of course he can't be
happy hereafter, and if he is miserable here he must be happy
hereafter. Omar made short work of that, of those promises which
are not underwritten, at least not by any responsible people. He
did not believe in foregoing what little there is of life in the
hope of having a better time hereafter.

He says, "Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go." Good
advice that: "Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go." If you take
the "Credit," likely as not you will miss your fun both here and
hereafter. Omar knew better.

It is strange how the religious creeds have hammered that idea
into the human mind. They have always felt there was a kinship
between pleasure and sin. A smile on the face is complete evidence
of wickedness. A solemn, uninteresting countenance is a stamp of
virtue and goodness, of self-denial, that will surely be rewarded.
Of course, the religious people are strangely hedonistic without
knowing it! There are some of us who think that the goodness or
badness of an act in this world can be determined only by pain and
pleasure units. The thing that brings pleasure is good, and the
thing that brings pain is bad. There is no other way to determine
the difference between good and bad. Some of us think so: I think
so.

Of coarse, the other class roll their eyes and declaim against
this heathen philosophy, the idea that pain and pleasure have
anything to do with the worth-whileness of existence. It isn't
important for you to be happy here. But why not? You are too
miserable here so you will be happy hereafter; and the hereafter is
long and the here is short. They promise a much bigger prize than
the pagan for the reward of conduct. They simply want you to trust
them. They take the pain and pleasure theory with a vengeance, but
they do business purely on credit. They are dealers in futures! I
could never understand, if it was admissible to have joy in heaven,
why you couldn't have it here, too. And if joy is admissible at
all, the quicker you get at it the better, and the surer you are of
the result. Omar thought that: "Ah, take the Cash, and let the
Credit go!" Take the Cash and let the other fellow have the Credit!
That was his philosophy, and I insist it is much better, and more
intelligent philosophy than the other.

But Omar had no delusions about how important this human being
is. He had no delusions about the mind, about man's greatness. He
knew something about philosophy or metaphysics, whatever it is. He
knew the uncertainty of human calculations, no matter who arrived
at them. He knew the round-about way that people try to find out
something, and he knew the results. He knew the futility of all of
it.

That is what Omar thought. Man evermore came out by the same
door where in he went. Therefore, "take the Cash and let the Credit
go!"' He put it even stronger than this. He knew exactly what these
values were worth, if anything. He knew what a little bit there is
to the whole bag of tricks. What's the difference whether you were
born 75 years ago, or fifty or twenty-five? what's the difference
whether you are going to live ten years, or twenty or thirty, or
weather you are already dead? In that case you escape something!
This magnifying the importance of the human being is one of the
chief sins of man and results in all kinds of cruelty.

If we took the human race for what it is worth, we could not
be so cruel. Omar Khayyam knew what it was, this life, that we talk
so much about:

"Tis but a Tent where takes his one day's rest" -- is there
anything else, if one could just make a survey of the human being,
passing across the stage of life? I suppose man has been upon the
earth for over a million years. A million years, and perhaps his
generations may be thirty to thirty-five years long. Think of the
generations in a thousand years, in 5,000 years, in a hundred
thousand, in a million years! There are a billion and a half of
these important organisms on the earth at any one time. All of
them, all important -- kings, priests and professors, and doctors
and lawyers and presidents, and 100 per cent Americans, and
everything on earth you could think of -- Ku Kluxers, W.C.T.U.'s,
Knights of Columbus and Masons, everything. All of them important
in this scheme of things! All of them seeking to attract attention
to themselves, and not even satisfied when they get it!

What is it all about? it is strange what little things will
interest the human mind -- baseball games, fluctuations of the
stock market, revivals, foot races, hangings, Anything will
interest them. And the wonderful importance of the human being!

Housman knew the importance just as well as Omar. He has
something to say about it, too. He knew it was just practically
nothing. Strangely like him! The little affairs of life, the little
foolishnesses of life, the things that consume our lives without
any result whatever; he knew them and knew what they were worth. He
knew they were worth practically nothing. But we do them; the urge
of living keeps us doing them, even when we know how useless and
foolish they are. Housman understood them:

That is what life is, rising in the morning and washing and
dressing and going to recitations and studying and forgetting it,
and then going to bed at night, to get up the next morning and wash
and dress and go to recitation, and so on, world without end.

One might get a focus on it from the flies. They are very busy
buzzing round. You don't exactly know what they are saying, because
we can't understand fly language. Professors can't teach you fly
language! We can't tell what they are saying, but they are probably
talking about the importance of being good, about what's going to
happen to their souls and, when. And when they are stiff in the
morning in the Autumn and can hardly move round, the housewife gets
up and builds the fire, and the heat limbers them up. She sets out
the bread and butter on the table. The flies come down and get into
it, and they think the housewife is working for them. Why not?

Is there any difference? Only in the length of the agony. What
other? Apparently they have a good time while the sun is shining,
and apparently they die when they get cold. It is a proposition of
life and death, forms of matter clothed with what seems to be
consciousness, and then going back again into inert matter, and
that is all. There isn't any manifestation that we humans make that
we do not see in flies and in other forms of matter.

Housman understands it; they have all understood it. Read any
of the great authors of the world -- any of them; their hopes and
their fears and their queries and their doubt, are, about the same.
There is only one man I know of that can answer everything, and
that is Dr Cadman.

Housman saw it. He knew a little of the difference between age
and youth -- and there is some. The trouble is, the old men always
write the books; they write them not in the way they felt when they
were young, but in the way they feel now. And they preach to the
young, and condemn them for doing what they themselves did when
they had the emotion to do it. Great teachers, when they grow old!
Perhaps it is partly envy and the desire that no one shall have
anything they can't have. Likely it is, but they don't know it.
Housman says something about this:

The world is somewhat different. The lost young man was once
looking at the fair. He couldn't go in, and he liked it more for
that; but now he is tired of the fair and tired of the baubles that
once amused him and the riddles he once tried to guess, and he
can't understand that the young man still likes to go to the fair.

We hear a great deal said by the ignorant about the wickedness
of the youth of today. Well, I don't know: some of us were wicked
when we were young. I don't know what is the matter with the youth
of today having their fling. I don't know that they are any
wickeder today. First, I don't know what the word wicked moans. Oh,
I do know what it means: It means unconventional conduct. But I
don't know whether unconventional conduct is wicked in the sense
they mean it is wicked, or whether conventional conduct is good in
the sense they mean it is good. Nobody else knows!

But I remember when I was a boy -- it was a long time ago --
I used to hear my mother complain. My mother would have been pretty
nearly 125 years old if she had kept on living, but luckily for her
she didn't! I used to hear her complain of how much worse the girls
were that she knew than the girls were when she was a girl. Of
course, she didn't furnish any bill of particulars; she didn't
specify, except not hanging up their clothes, and gadding, and
things like that. But at any rate, they were worse. And my father
used to tell about it, and I have an idea that Adam and Eve used to
talk the same fool way.

The truth is, the world doesn't change, or the generations of
men or the human emotions. But the individual changes as he grows
old. You hear about the Revolt of Youth. Some people are pleased at
it and some displeased. Some see fine reasons for hope in what they
call the youth movement. They can put it over on the old people,
but not on the youth! There is a Revolt of Youth.

Well, youth has always been in revolt. The greatest trouble
with youth is that it gets old. Age changes it. It doesn't bring
wisdom, though most old people think because they are old they have
wisdom. But you can't get wisdom by simply growing old. You can
even forget it that way! Age means that the blood runs slow, that
the emotions are not as strong, that you play safer, that you stay
closer to the hearth. You don't try to find new continents or even
explore old ones. You don't travel into unbeaten wilderness and lay
out new roads. You stick to the old roads when you go out at all.

The world can't go on with old people. It takes young ones
that are daring, with courage and faith.

The difference between youth and old age is the same in every
generation. The viewpoint is in growing old, that is all. But the
old never seem wise enough to know it, and forever the old have
been preaching to the young. Luckily, however, the young pay very
little attention to it. They sometimes pretend to, but they never
do pay much attention to it. Otherwise, life could not exist.

Both of these poets saw the futility of life: the little
things of which it is made, scarcely worth the while. It is all
right to talk about futility. We all know it, if we know much of
anything. We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life
is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.
Let anybody study the ordinary, everyday details of life; see how
closely he is bound and fettered; see how little it all amounts to.

There are a billion and a half people in the world, all of
them trying to shout loud enough to be heard all at once, so as to
attract the attention of the public, so they may be happy. A
billion and a half of them, and if they all attracted attention
none of them would have attention! Of course, attention is only
valuable if the particular individual attracts it and nobody, else
can get it. That is what makes presidents and kings -- they get it
and nobody else.

Then when you consider that it is all made up of little
things, what is life all about, anyway? We do keep on living. It is
easy enough to demonstrate to people who think that life is not
worth while. We could do it easier if we could only settle what
worth while means. But if we settle it and convince ourselves that
it is not worth while, we still keep on living. life does not come
from willing; rather it does not come from thought and reason. I
don't live because I think it is worth while; I live because I am
a going concern, and every going concern tries to keep on going, I
don't care whether it is a tree, or a plant, or what we call a
lower animal, or man, or the Socialist party. Anything that is
going tries to go on by its own momentum, and it does just keep on
going -- it is what Schopenhauer called the 'will to live.' So we
must assume that we will live anyhow as long as we can. When the
machine runs down we don't have to worry about it any longer.

Hotisman asked himself this question, and Omar asked himself
this question. Life is of little value. What are we going to do
while we live? In other words, what is the purpose, if we can use
the word purpose in this way, which is an incorrect way? What
purpose are we going to put into it? Why should we live; and if we
must live, then what? Omar tells us what. He knew there was just
one thing important; he knew what most thinkers know today. He put
it differently -- he and FitzGerald together. It is a balance
between painful and pleasurable emotions. Every organized being
looks for pleasurable emotions and tries to avoid painful ones. The
seed planted in the ground seeks the light. The instinct of
everything is to move away from pain and toward pleasure. Human
beings are just like all the rest. The earth and all its
manifestations are simply that. Omar figured it out, and after
philosophizing and finding that he ever came out the same door
where in he went, he said:

That is one way of forgetting life -- one way of seeking
pleasurable emotions: "I took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse."
A way that has been fairly popular down through the ages! Even in
spite of the worst that all the fanatics could possibly do, it has
been a fairly universal remedy for the ills of man. It would be
perfect If it were not for the day after!

He says in his wild exuberance:

There isn't much of it; but while it is fluttering, help it.
It has but a little way to flutter, and it is on the wing!

To those who are not quite so strenuous, there is an appeal
more to beauty, a somewhat more permanent although not much more,
but a more beautiful conception of pleasure, which is all he could
get:

Well, if you get the right jug and the right book and the rest
of the paraphernalia, it isn't so bad!

It is strange that two so different human beings have sought
about the same thing. This physical emotional life that we hear so
much about is the only life we know anything about. They sought
their exaltation there, and Omar Khayyam pictured it very well.
Housman again does as well. What does he say about the way to spend
life and about life?

What else is there? So while the light is still on and while
I can still go, and when the cherry is in bloom -- I will go to see
the cherries hung with snow.

That is the whole philosophy of life for those who think; that
is all there is to it, and it is what everybody is trying to do,
without fully realizing it. Many are taking the Credit and letting
the Cash go. Housman is right about that.

That is why I have so little patience with the old preaching
to the young. If youth, with its quick-flowing blood, its strong
imagination, its virile feeling; if youth, with its dreams and its
hopes and ambitions, can go about the woodland to see the cherry
hung with snow, why not? Who are the croakers, who have run their
race and lived their time, who are they to keep back expression and
hope and youth and joy from a world that is almost barren at the
best?

It has been youth that has kept the world alive; it will be,
because from the others emotion has fled; and with the fleeing of
emotion, through the ossification of the brain, all there is left
for them to do is to preach. I hope they have a good time doing
that, and I am so glad the young pay no attention to it!

Of course, Housman and Omar and the rest of us are called
pessimist's. It is a horrible name. What is a pessimist, anyway? It
is a man or a woman who looks at life as life is. If you could, you
might take your choice, perhaps, as to being a pessimist or a pipe
dreamer. But you can't have it, because you look at the world
according to the way you are made. Those are the two extremes. The
pessimist takes life for what life is: not all sorrow, not all
pain, not all beauty, not all good. Life is not black; life is not
orange, red, or green, or all the colors of the rainbow. Life is no
one shade or hue.

It is well enough to understand it. If pessimism could come as
the result of thought, I would think a pessimist was a wise man.
What is an optimist, anyway? He reminds "Me of a little boy running
through the woods and looking up at the sky and not paying any
attention to the brambles or thorns he is scrambling through. There
is a stone in front of him and he trips over the stone. Browning
said, "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world." Others
say, "God is love, love is God," and so on. A man who thinks that
is bound to be an optimist. He believes that things are good.

The pessimist doesn't necessarily think that everything is
bad, but he looks for the worst. He knows it will come sooner or
later. When an optimist falls, he falls a long way; when a
pessimist falls it is a very short fall. When an optimist is
disappointed he is very, very sad, because he believed it was the
best of all possible worlds, and God's in his heaven and all's well
with the world. When a pessimist is disappointed he is happy, for
he wasn't looking for anything.

This is the safest and by all odds it is the wisest outlook.
Housman has put it in a little poem. It is about the last thing I
shall give you. Housman is the only man I know of who has written
a poem about pessimism. Nearly all the people who are talking about
pessimism talk in prose; it is very prosy. Poems are generally
written about optimism:

Those are the sort of poems. Of course there have been poems
written about pessimism. Poetry is really, to my way of thinking,
good only if it is beauty and if it is music.

I don't mean tonight to discuss the question of free verse and
poetry, or the comparative merits of the two styles, or of prose,
but I do think that poetry is an exaltation and that you can't hold
it for long. Poetry ought to have beauty and it ought to have
music. It should have both. You can be the poet of sadness; sadness
lends itself to poetry as much as gladness, although few poets know
how to use it. Listen to this from Housman:

That is sad, isn't it? But it is beautiful.

I remember once, years and years ago, reading Olive
Schreiner's Story of an African farm, in which she describes the
simple Boers of South Africa, with their sorrows and their
pleasures. She used this expression: which it took me some time to
understand, in describing pain and pleasure: "There is a depth of
emotion so broad and deep that pain and pleasure are the same."
They are the same, and I think they find their meeting in beauty.
The beauty, even if it is painful, is still beauty. You find the
meeting of pain and pleasure, and you can hardly distinguish
between the two emotions.

Housman knew it; he knew how to do it. Here is his idea of the
young lad who dies: not passes on -- passes off. He dies:

Does it bring you painful or pleasurable emotions? It is
beautiful; it is profound; it is deep. To me the painful and
pleasurable are blended in the beauty, and I think the two may be
one.

Housman, as I have said, is the only one I know who wrote a
poem of pessimism; and this, like all of his, is very short, and I
will read it. Somebody else may have written one; but Housman
carries the philosophy of pessimism into poetry, perhaps the
philosophy that I have given you. This poem is supposed to be
introduced by somebody who complains of Housman's dark, almost
tragical verses. For in every line that he ever wrote there is no
let down. He is like Hardy; he never hauled down the flag. Life to
him was what he saw; what the world saw meant nothing. This was the
view in all of Housman's work. In all of his work there is not one
false note; and when I say a false note I mean one that is not in
tune with the rest. This is his idea of pessimism in poetry:

"Luck's a chance but trouble's sure." The moral of it is to
"train for ill and not for good."

If I had my choice, I would not like to be an optimist, even
assuming that people did not know that I was an idiot. I wouldn't
want to be an optimist because when I fell I would fall such a
terribly long way. The wise man trains for ill and not for good. He
is sure he will need that training, and the other will take care of
itself as it comes along.

Of course, life is not all pleasant: it is filled with
tragedy. Housman has told us of it, and Omar Khayyam tells us of
it. No man and no woman can live and forget death. However much
they try. it is there, and it probably should be faced like
anything else. Measured time is very short. Life, amongst other
things, is full of futility.

Omar Khayyam understood, and Housman understood. There are
other poets that have felt the same way. Omar Khayyam looked on the
shortness of life and understood it. He pictured himself as here
for a brief moment. He loved his friends; he loved companionship;
he loved wine. I don't know how much of it he drank. He talked
about it a lot. It might have symbolized more than it really meant
to him. It has been a solace, all down through the ages. Not only
that, but it has been the symbol of other things that mean as much
-- the wine of life, the joy of living.