So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel.
By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it.
It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one
creed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl
yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul,
"O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill.
Ignore the maimed lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts,
the reddened fangs and ravening claws of nature all round thee."
Pessimism is sympathy. Optimism is selfishness. The optimist
folds his smug hands on his ample knees, and murmurs contentedly,
"The Lord has willed it;" "There must always be rich and poor;"
"Nature has, after all, her great law of compensation." The
pessimist knows well self-deception like that is either a fraud or
a blind, and recognizing the seething mass of misery at his doors
gives what he can,--his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, in
redressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or nature.
All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic.
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