With the professor

Preface

The author tenders thanks to Harper's Magazine for permission to reprint Chapter I, to the Atlantic Monthly for Chapters II and XII, to Scribner's Magazine for Chapter IV, and to the Educational Review for Chapters III, V, VI, VIII, and IX.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. A Prelude on Pessimism i

II. The Strange Case of Dr. Scholarship and

Introduction

What M. Anatole France says of the literary critic : " The critic, if he would be frank, ought to say : ' Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself apropos of Shakespeare, or Pascal, or Goethe,' " contains a formula which might also be applied to the Professor's sponsor. He, too, if he would be frank, ought to say : " Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself apropos of the Professor."

And yet, he desires nothing less than that his words should be regarded as autobiographical. It will transpire that the Professor herein delineated is bald, and has half a dozen children; whereas he himself has but two children, and displays not the least symptom of baldness. Could anything make clearer the fact that the Professor and himself are not identical?

X Introduction

He begs, therefore, that the chapters which follow will not be looked upon as autobiography, but as fiction — with just the amount of truth necessary in an age of realism to make it convincing.

With this, he draws the curtain on his friend the Professor

Chapter I A Prelude On Pessimism

It was Saturday morning. The Professor's library was flooded with genial sunlight, and the Professor himself seemed somewhat under the same warm influence. He was lying back in his chair, his eyes resting on a little pile of books and a few sheets of manuscript lying on the table before him, and his features were relaxed in a smile of satisfaction.

Now of course you who know that the Professor was a teacher of ancient literature are already thinking that the books and manuscript and the satisfied expression betokened that he was just in at the finish of a successful chase of polysyndetic paronomasia, or anaphoric ataxia, or acatalectic dietetics, or something of the sort.

But you are mistaken. The books were not on literary topics. Quite the contrary, one of them bore the title Beitrdge zur Geschichte des Pessimismus, and others were suggestive of the same subject. The manuscript contained notes and excerpts, and the Professor's smiles were due to the character of his findings.

The Professor was studying Pessimism. He had chosen a sunshiny Saturday morning as a purely hygienic measure : morning because it was a cheerful time of day; Saturday morning because he fancied that his thoughts were saner on a day free from the mental habits of classroom instruction; and a sunshiny Saturday morning because he wanted all the cheer it was possible to get.

To put it in the usual figure, the Professor was enough of a microbophobe to be in some dread of bacillus pessimisticus, and, with all his devotion to science, was unwilling to expose himself without precautions.

And he was studying not only Pessimism; he was studying the Professor also. To tell the truth, he had been called pessimist so many times of late that he had sometimes almost fallen prey to fear that he really zvas a pessimist.

For example, he had not long before been called by the undesirable name as many as four times in a single day. In the first place, he had left his umbrella in the rack at the Carnegie Library; and when, on his arrival home and sudden recollection of the fact before his own umbrella rack, his wife had said : " Never mind, your name is on it, and you will find it when you go back," he had replied: " Don't fool yourself; that's the last you'll ever see of that umbrella." At which his eldest daughter had looked up from her paradigms, and exclaimed : *' Now, papa, don't be such a pessimist! We had that word yesterday. It comes from mains, peior, pessimus, and teacher says it isn't nice."

In the afternoon, meeting a friend while on the way to the College, he had ventured to prediet, after deliberate scrutiny of the skies and wind, that it would rain for the next three days. He meant it, though of course his real motive was the desire to make conversation, which is a difficult art for college professors, because, unlike most of the other arts, it has not yet been reduced to the scientific method; but his friend had immediately pitched upon him with : " Man, what a pessimist you are! Don't you know we have a game to-morrow ? "

Farther on, he had overtaken another colleague. Prompted by the same abhorrence of the conversational vacuum, and vaguely recollecting the coming game, he had volunteered: *' They say we have a fine team this year. Do you suppose we are going to get a game at last?"

An avalanche of protestation overwhelmed him in a moment. " See here, now ! None of your pessimistic croaking! That's no way to talk! Of course we're going to get the game! We've got to get it!"

The Professor's thoughts were quicker than usual for a moment. He saw a way to redeem himself from the awful disgrace. " Don't be so swift," he said. *' I've got four dollars that I'm going to put up on our team to-morrow, and that ought to show whether I am a pessimist or not." " I'll take you for about three dollars of that myself," his optimistic friend had replied — rather eagerly, the Professor afterwards thought.

A fourth time before the day was done he had been called the Evil Thing again. The table conversation turning, in un-Horatian fashion, on the homes and villas of others, the Professor had somewhat gravely said : " It's possible for my friends the banker and corporation attorney, I know; but I don't see how a professor, like myself, with my family and on my salary, has any reason to expect to live in and own a ten thousand dollar home — at least in this life."

This time it was his wife who spoke: " Dearie, what a pessimist you are! You are positively growing worse every day"; and added, in the same breath : " I saw a perfect love of a hoHday hat at Chapeautier's to-day, and only nineteenforty-nine! Don't you really think I could afford it?"

Now the Professor's umbrella was the fortyseventh he had lost in the sixteen years of his service; he was so weatherwise from long experience that he knew well enough which was the wind that brought the rain ; his college had been defeated in every football game it had played with Atholimpia for nine years; and he had never been able to save from a year's salary more than a hundred and twenty-five dollars. He saw no really good reason why he should be called by a term of reproach because of his recognizing the value of lessons learned by experience.

For the term was one of reproach, as everyone knows. Of course the Professor was aware that few who employed it really intended to be unpleasant, or even critical, or indeed had more than a hazy idea of what it signified. Quite the contrary, he knew it was used by most people as a bit of wit, if not of humor, and was often only their barren way of commenting on what they failed to understand. Just as your ordinary reader of novels spoke of them as " odd," or " characteristic," or " funny," or ** interesting," or " just too dear " — so the ordinary person who enjoyed words and wasn't concerned as to their exact meaning was apt on the slightest excuse to assail you with a charge of being *' sarcastic," or " pessimistic." No one escaped these feeble shafts of wit, and the Professor knew that his cheerful neighbors were called pessimists almost as frequently as himself.

But his attention had been attracted; he liked nice definition; he was guiltily conscious, too, of one or two oblique fibers in his own temperament; and every repetition, however innocent, of the time-honored witticism seemed more and more like an impeachment. He was really beginning to be annoyed.

For, whatever it was that people meant when they called him pessimist, the Professor would

not own to the charge. It is true.

He was not gamesome : he did lack some part Of that quick spirit which was in Antony;

but he was nevertheless no lean and hungry Cassius who seldom smiled. Most of the time he had a merry heart, and it kept on the windy side of care. He saw the humor of the world. He did not believe it had been created as a place of torment for sinful man, in spite of still vivid impressions from the preaching of his childhood days. He enjoyed his home and his profession, possessed a fair measure of philosophic calm, and lived and worked with the zest of the active and aspiring mind.

No, the Professor was not a pessimist; he felt sure of it. And he felt sure that if people called him that, either in jest or earnest, it was because they did not know what pessimism was. So it had occurred to him that if he could give a few of his immediate acquaintances a handy definition of the term, they might not be quite so facile in the application of it to himself and to others like him. Good; such a handy definition he would construct.

But a comprehensive definition had not been so easy. The shortest he could formulate had filled half a page, and the first time he had tried to silence a friend with it he became involved in a four hours' discussion in the effort to make his meaning clear.

This would never do. He liked talk, but at this rate he might as well have been a professor of comparative philosophy, or politics, or pedagogy. He must have a better definition.

In the library next day, his eye had by the merest chance lighted on a neat little book in green binding with Le Pessimisme in gold on its back. Without the least disturbance to his esthetic sensibilities because of the inappropriateness of the binding to the subject, he joyfully seized on the volume and bore it o& home, together with a small armful of companion works of less modest bulk and more pretentious lo With the Professor

titles. As little did he stop to reflect that a college professor with such childlike faith in books had no need of trying to establish a claim to optimism. Here was a find, indeed ! He was as good as rehabilitated in the eyes of his friends.

This explains how it came about that the Professor sat in his study before a pile of books on Pessimism, and it also accounts for his smile of satisfaction. It is true, he had not found a quotable definition; but he had reveled in vast fields of learning, and accumulated much interesting and valuable information. He had found chapters on the origin of the term pessimism; on its use among the various philosophers of the nineteenth century; on the life of the learned German with the long name who had given it currency by the formulation of the pessimistic philosophy; on its possible and not improbable connection with various phases of social, economic, pedagogic, literary, alimentary, and pathological change.

His principal interest, however, as befitted a

A Prelude on Pessimism ii

professor of literature, lay in the statistical data which these works presented. There were various tables of figures compiled by a doctor of philosophy who held the chair of English literature in a neighboring institution: the word pessimism was found 725 times in Macaulay, whereas in Carlyle there were only 723 occurrences, which clearly overturned hitherto prevailing views of scholarship as to the respective temperaments of these great men. In Tennyson and Austin the word occurred an equal number of times, which made it probable that the one was influenced by the other, if not in collusion with him ; or, at any rate, that both were influenced by a common but unknown original of the second decade of the century.

Again, in the dissertation of a sociologist who had been called to the Professor's own institution because of the brilliant results of this very investigation, he found that of 627 patients in 19 hospitals in 23 cities in 14 states and 2 territories, 75.13 per cent, had declared themselves optimists. In lunatic asylums the percentage rose to 97.293, while in jails and poorhouses and prisons it sank respectively to 17. i, 3.0658, and 12.6. Of 500 cases of the clergy, 98 per cent, of the 400 who had salaries of less than $600 and families of more than 5 children had declared themselves optimists; while of 100 who received salaries of over $1,500 and had families of less than 3 members, children included, one had unreservedly confessed pessimism — but had afterward volunteered the further statement that if the remaining 99 had the courage, they would all make like confession, even though optimism was the fashion; because not even religion could endure the strain of being asked to live on a social level with $25,000 parishioners when you had only a $1,600 salary. The author of the dissertation, however, argued with mathematical accuracy that there was a clear connection between big salaries and optimism.

Another work — this was a book by a national authority on pedagogy — ^presented certain results of epistolary and oral inquiry among pupils in high schools, grades, and kindergarten. His most important deductions were: (i) 100 per cent, of children in the kindergarten and 99.5 per cent, of those in the grades did not know what optimism and pessimism meant; (2) among high school students 32 per cent, of those in the Latin course and 2 per cent, of those in other courses had heard of the terms; (3) an examination of the temperamental characteristics of large numbers of children indicated that pessimism and optimism might exist even when the individual had never heard of the terms. Such cases, however, were not frequent. Of 900 children under 10 years of age, only five were pessimists, the fact in two of the cases being traceable to fathers who were drunk 84 per cent. of their waking time, and in the remaining three cases, which at first were baffling, to mothers who were on the managing committees of the Child Study Class and the Cribside Charities. Of conscious pessimists, the high school contained the greatest number, the causes most frequently assigned being the obligation to study what they didn't Hke and couldn't see the use of, and the disposition of the faculty to interfere with their social and athletic liberties.

But, valuable as all this was, it did not in the least forward the Professor's project: he was compelled to resign himself to the conviction that it was impossible to find the desired definition in books. His only resort was to his own powers, after all.

So he would make a last attempt; only, remembering his former failures, this time he would invoke the aid of popular definition. Perhaps by skilful combination of expressions in vogue among ordinary people he might produce a formula which would serve to quote to the ordinary person. It was unscholarly and degrading, but he was desperate, and forgot for the moment his natural professorial horror of the popular.

So he began to assemble the witty and pithy utterances he had heard and read on optimism and pessimism. The pessimist looked only on the dark side of life, the optimist only on the bright. The optimist always saw the doughnut, the pessimist always saw the hole. The optimist went through life thinking that all milk was cream, the pessimist that all cream was milk.

As to this last, the Professor had behind him a boarding-house experience totaling at least a half score of years, and recognized the inevitability of pessimism for boarders on the basis of this definition; though he conceded the desirability of optimism, provided it was leagued with real power of mind over matter, especially lacteal matter.

He continued. The pessimist looked through the wrong end of the telescope. The pessimist saw the rule, the optimist the exception. The optimist used a magnifying glass in contemplation of his joys, the pessimist in contemplation of his troubles. The optimist didn't choose between two evils, because he would not concede their existence; the pessimist also didn't choose, but because he expected to get both of them anyway. The optimist considered and treated every man as honest until he had proven him.- self a villain; the pessimist considered him a rascal until he had proved himself honest. The optimists were the robins of life, the pessimists were the ravens ; mankind was divided into those whose usual note was " cheer-up," and those who croaked.

To be sure, the Professor thought this a trifle unfair to the many- wintered prophet of the rain : who possessed at least the virtue of silence except when he foresaw trouble in the sky. And besides, warning of bad weather to come was no mean form of service to mankind, who ought to be grateful for it.

Recognizing the originality of this observation, the Professor was emboldened to enter the field of epigram himself: the pessimist acted on the assumption that everything was as bad as he was afraid it might be; the optimist, on the assumption that everything was as good as it would be pleasant to have it be.

Or again — the Professor never could get away from books — the optimist was a Micawber, always expecting something good to turn up; the pessimist a Mrs. Gummidge, a lone lorn creetur', with whom everythink went contrairy. Or the pessimist was a Leopardi, looking upon life as all bitterness and vexation, death the only gift of fate to the human race, and seeing in all existence only infinite emptiness —

while the optimist was a — but the Professor could think of no one in literature who was as hopeful as the Italian poet was hopeless. Somehow, optimism seemed a less striking, and, on the whole, a less attractive quality in literature than pessimism. The poets who had most won the hearts of men seemed to be those who felt the sadness of human life, and gave utterance to their sympathy, rather than those whose theme was the joy of existence.

Or — books again — the pessimist was a Lucretius, ill auguring for the babe cast on the shores of Hght :

The infant, hapless mariner cast up

By angry waves upon the coasts of life,

Lies naked on the ground, sans power of speech.

Sans every aid of life, soon as the throes

Of natural anguish from his mother's womb

Have thrust him forth upon the shores of light;

And fills the air with mournful wail, as fits

One doomed to meet so many woes in life —

while the optimist saw deHght in destiny, and in the babe's cry heard, not waiHng, but jubilation.

The Professor's friend in experimental psychology told him that the investigative apparatus thus far available was insufficient to determine the real psychic state of newborn infants, but assured him that the fact of the noise itself had been established beyond all doubt by synchronous experiment in three countries.

This was no news to the Professor, who was possessed, despite his calling, of a really Catonic knowledge of his children. And here, by the way, he bethought himself of another illustration — not bookish, this time. X)ne of his youngest two children, when you held'^^p before him a terra cotta lamp, or a fragment of giallo antic from the veneering of the Rostra, or a bit of opus reticitlatum from the Villa of Hadrian, or the latest Latin Grammar, or any other of the playthings in ordinary use in the homes of classical professors, began without the least hesitation to pucker up and cry, taking for granted that the toy was to be denied him. The other, when the same act was repeated, straightway stretched out his hands and chuckled, already assured of possession, and filled with the joy of anticipation. Here surely, were natural optimism and pessimism.

At this point the Professor paused, and meditated. If his children went through life with that attitude, both were sure to have a great deal of trouble of their own making; for they were both inclined to draw wrong conclusions. They exaggerated. And what was true of them was likewise true of the optimists and pessimists in all the illustrations he had been reviewing. Here was at least one essential : it wasn't so much that the pessimist was gloomy and the optimist cheerful, as that their cheer and gloom were always exaggerated. He was getting on with his definition; one foundation of pessimism was exaggeration.

Furthermore, as this exaggeration was not of the conscious kind, pessimism was really due to lack of balance. The Professor understood now why he had felt so much resentment at being called a pessimist. It was really an impeachment of his understanding, and of his power of self-control. Here he had for years cultivated the Horatian and Sophoclean ideal of sane self-restraint and philosophic calm, had taken pride in regulating his conduct according to the aurea mediocritas, the ne quid nimis, and the fxrfdev ccyav of the ancients — golden sayings affixed, so to speak, to the walls of his intellectual Delphic sanctuary — only to be called ill-balanced, unjudicial, and deficient in will. It touched his amour propre, you see; and everyone knows that professors are very much conceited, engaged continually as they are in imposing their own ideas upon defenseless students who dare not talk back, for fear of certain consequences known to the academic world.

The Professor's little burst of resentment was so vivid that he was tempted to retort upon his critics that, after all, the pessimist was no worse than the cheerful idiot who insisted on calling a spade a tennis racquet; but he recalled the fate of the long line of satirists, including even the good-humored ones like Horace and Thackeray, who had been charged with cynicism because they pointed out with frankness the faults of silly people. It was bad enough to be called a pessimist; but to be called a cynic, i.e., a pessimist who snarls and barks at every fault he sees, would be still worse. After all, there was d, great deal of difference between being called a pessimist and a dog of a pessimist. He might be a weeping philosopher, but no Diogenes.

And yet, it was clear that ordinary optimism was just as extreme as pessimism. Whatever their manifestations, the foundation was always the same for both : lack of equilibrium. Neither optimist nor pessimist was well poised.

To set down lack of equilibrium as the foundation of pessimism and optimism, however, was to beg the question. What lay at the root of this lack?

The Professor cast about. He thought of several things, but the first and chiefest that occurred to him was lack of judgment. Neither optimist nor pessimist saw phenomena in their true relations.

But what in turn was the cause of deficiency in judgment? When the pessimist made up his mind that life was all skim-milk, or the optimist that mining-stock was a safe investment, and that promoters were actuated solely by solicitude for the welfare of professors and other investors, what was the trouble with them?

Clearly, lack of knowledge. Not necessarily book knowledge, of course. Rather, knowledge of life gained through various avenues: from books to some extent, but much more from experience. The intellectuality of the broadest experience was the prime foundation of that sanity and equipoise which everyone must possess who was to be neither the pessimist nor the optimist of popular imagination. The truth should make men free.

Now the Professor had been young, and now was older. He had had some experience, and had actually learned by it, professorial paradox as that may seem. In his extreme youth he had been an optimist :

When all the world was young, lad,

And all the trees were green; And every goose a swan, lad,

And every lass a queen;

and all the doughnuts were hole-proof, and all the milk was cream, and his eyes were dazzled by the brightness of a world filled with honest men and innocent enjoyment.

But he had gone away from home to the academy, and while pursuing what in those days in that town was considered the main concern of secondary school education — attending trials in the circuit court near by — he had been horrified to find that men lied shamefully under oath, that to serve their own petty ends they took advantage of helplessness and poverty, that women threw away their honor, and that in a single session of court he might hear sounded the entire gamut of human folly, perfidy, and crime.

And then he had gone away to college. On the morning after the first night of his first glee club trip, a member of the party, a young man void of understanding, had come in with his shirt front written over with the name of the strange woman. Others had come in at midnight, drunk and cursing; and at the end of the trip the student manager had rendered no account.

He had also gone abroad, and had seen the cruel life of sea-faring men, the circling of birds of prey over the track of the tourist, the bestiality of Hfe in large cities, the all-pervasive spirit of greed, manifest even in the enslavement of women and the exploitation of childhood.

And then he had come home to his own country, where it was as if his eyes had been opened : for he saw there, too, much that he had first witnessed abroad, and had supposed foreign to his own land. It was about this time, too, that for some reason or other a great many persons were insisting that the optimists lay aside their magnifying glasses and look at the real thing for a moment; so that the Professor on landing found himself confronted with many surprises.

Each one of these experiences had been a discouragement for the time being, but salutary in the end. The Professor's judgments became saner, even if not true and righteous altogether. He learned to calculate somewhat more accurately the economic, or gastronomic, effect of the hole in the doughnut, and to recognize the inferiority of blue milk as a producer of red blood. He saw that a landscape had shadows as well as lights.

In other words, he began to see life steadily, and see it whole, and perfection in that respect became his ideal. In the usual sense, he wished to be called neither optimist nor pessimist. More than that, if the penalty for not blinking the truth were to be called pessimistic by the crowd, he would with patience endure the martyrdom.

It might be that others enjoyed themselves if they called a spade by some other name, but for his single self, he preferred to call it a spade, and to know what he was dealing with : it was really inconvenient to find yourself in the tennis court with a spade, and a racquet was useless in a garden. It might be ever so pleasant to assume that the Persian rugs and gold beads and Etruscan antiquities you spent your earnings on were genuine, but if they were not, if your Etruscan terra cottas had merely had a season or two in the dirt of a modern Roman cellar, you lost your money the first time an expert croaked the pessimistic truth at you. The exercise of a reasonable amount of caution in deaHng with men not only made your salary go farther, but helped along in no mean degree the cause of good morals.

The Professor had seen something of the results of long continued popular optimism in civic life. For generations it had been the proper and patriotic thing to assume that every American citizen was incorruptible, and that everything in the market was fit to eat ; but now the contrary assumption was the fashion. Every man was taken for an actual or potential villain, and the land swarmed with deadly microbes and pure food inspectors. The optimists, having been induced to throw away their glasses, had been obliged to look through those of their friends the pessimists ; for they had gone so long without relying upon their natural eyesight that they had to have glasses of some kind.

It was clear, then, that the most efficient corrective of the follies of both optimism and pessimism was knowledge. The pessimist knew too little of the real world in his way, the optimist too little in his way. The truth was needed to set them free.

But there were other foundations besides knowledge for the equilibrium that insured against pessimism. For there were persons in apparent good health, with abundant knowledge of books and men and things, who were ill-balanced. When a professor with good digestion, who had studied and traveled, had married an heiress, and who sat in royal state high on the throne of departmental despotism and had to work only an hour or two now and then — when such a personage was pessimistic, what was one to think?

The Professor didn't hesitate long. It was temperament that lay at the foundation of such cases. Just what temperament was, he wasn't quite clear, but he thought it meant how you felt as a usual thing. And this depended upon how nature had fashioned you. The pessimist by temperament was ill constructed by nature, as by an unskilful workman. And of course nature had also framed temperamental optimists.