432 MORE POT-POURRI 



ignored, might perhaps bring forth future trouble. If he 

 has no such ties, so much the better for everybody. If he 

 has, she who is about to marry him should share the 

 troubles and privations that they entail. So many 

 problems in this life are solved by courage. Facing such 

 a position does not make it, whereas ignoring it may 

 weave difficulties and misery. 



Optimism I have always believed to be the right rule 

 of conduct both for men and nations. Yet there is truth 

 in what I have somewhere read that it must not be an 

 optimism without intelligence. It should not be that 

 kind of optimism which, to keep cheerful, must blot out 

 menace by looking another way, and obliterate coming 

 peril by turning the back. Neither in private nor in 

 public life should it be the spurious optimism which is 

 part dulness of perception, part moral weakness, part 

 intellectual timidity, part something worse I mean, 

 refusal to recognise approaching danger because open 

 recognition would have to be followed by the worry or 

 expense of prevention. 



As I said before, it is so difficult to generalise not 

 only because every individual case has a different aspect, 

 but also because every ten years makes an entirely 

 different platform for our conduct of life. This seems to 

 me to be not sufficiently acknowledged. Once more I 

 return to a bundle of letters, to find one written by a very 

 old friend of our family, which talks of the decline of life, 

 from a man's point of view, in a way that is individual 

 and yet applicable to many : 



' I quite agree with you that it is very disagreeable to 

 grow old, and I have always thought that if I had been 

 Providence I would have made life begin with dotage and 

 decrepitude, and go on freshening and improving to a 

 primal death. But as I am a humble individual, and not 

 Providence, I make up my mind to things as they are. 



