Complete. From “Caxtoniana.”
WE are always disposed to envy the man of a hopeful temper; but a hopeful temper, where it so predominates as to be the conspicuous attribute, is seldom accompanied with prudence, and therefore seldom attended with worldly success. It is the hopeful temper that predominates in gamblers, in speculators, in political dreamers, in enthusiasts of all kinds. Endeavoring many years ago to dissuade a friend of mine from the roulette table, I stated all the chances which calculators sum up in favor of the table against the gamester. He answered gayly, “Why look to the dark side of the question? I never do!” And so, of course, he was ruined. I observe, in reading history and biography, that the men who have been singularly unfortunate have for the most part been singularly hopeful. This was remarkably the case with Charles I. It startles one to see in Clarendon how often he is led into his most fatal actions by a sanguine belief that fate will humor the die for him. Every day a projector lays before you some ingenious device for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers with the most sanguine expectation that the age has just arrived at the certainty that his cucumber alone can enlighten it. The late Mr. Robert Owen remained to the last as sure of converting the world to his schemes for upsetting it as if he had never known a disappointment. When, a short time before his death, that amiable logician, after rejecting all the evidences of nature and all the arguments of sages in support of the soul’s immortality, accepted that creed on the authority of a mahogany table, the spirit of one of George IV.’s portly brothers, evidently wishing to secure so illustrious a convert, took care to rap out “Yes” when Mr. Owen asked if he should bring his plans before parliament, and to sustain his new faith in a heaven by promising him that within a year his old hope of reforming the earth should be realized. Had his Royal Highness told him that he could never square the circle of life by a social parallelogram, I greatly fear that Mr. Owen would have remained a materialist, and declared table rapping to be a glaring imposture.
In my recollections of school and college, I remember that, as between two youths of equal ability and ambition, the odds of success in rivalry were always in favor of the one least sanguinely confident of succeeding, and obviously for this reason: He who distrusts the security of chance takes more pains to effect the safety which results from labor. To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: “Leave no stone unturned.”
As all men, however, have in their natures a certain degree of hope, so he is the wisest who husbands it with the most care. When you are engaged in any undertaking in which success depends partly on skill, partly on luck, always presuppose that the luck may go against you, for the presupposition redoubles all your efforts to obtain the advantages that belong to skill. Hope nothing from luck, and the probability is that you will be so prepared, forewarned, and forearmed, that all shallow observers will call you lucky.
At whist, a game into which, of all games needing great skill, perhaps luck enters most, indifferent players, or even good players who have drunk too much wine, will back some run of luck upon system, and are sure to lose at the year’s end. The most winning player I ever knew was a good but not a first-rate player, and, playing small stakes, though always the same stakes, he made a very handsome yearly income. He took up whist as a profession instead of the bar, saying ingenuously, “At the bar, if I devoted myself to it, I think I could make the same yearly sum with pains, which at whist I make with pleasure. I prefer pleasure to pain when the reward is equal, and I choose whist.” Well, this gentleman made it a rule never to bet, even though his partner were a B. or a C. (the two finest players in England, now living since the empire of India has lost us General A.), and his adversaries any Y. Z. at the foot of the alphabet. “For,” said he, “in betting on games and rubbers, chance gets an advantage over the odds in favor of skill. My object is to win at the year’s end, and the player who wins at the year’s end is not the man who has won the most games and rubbers, but the man who in winning has made the greatest number of points, and who in losing has lost the fewest. Now if I, playing for, say, 10s. a point, with B. or C. for my partner, take a £5 bet on the rubber, X. and Y. may have four by honors twice running; and grant that I save two points in the rubber by skill, losing six points instead of eight points, still I have the bet of £5 to pay all the same; the points are saved by the skill of the playing, but the rubbers are lost by the chance of the cards.”
Adhering to this rule, abridging the chances of the cards, concentrating his thoughts on the chances in favor of skill, this whist player, steady and safe, but without any of those inspirations which distinguish the first-rate from the second-rate player, made, I say, regularly a handsome income out of whist; and I do not believe that any first-rate whist player who takes bets can say the same, no matter what stakes he plays.
In life as in whist, hope nothing from the way cards may be dealt to you. Play the cards, whatever they be, to the best of your skill.
But, unhappily, life is not like the whist table; you have it not at your option whether to cut in or not; cut in and play your hand you must. Now, talking of proverbs, “What must be must.” It is one thing to be the braggadocio of hope, and it is another thing to be the craven of fear. A good general before fighting a battle in which he cannot choose his ground—to which he is compelled, will he, nill he—makes all the provisions left in his power, and then, since “what must be must,” never reveals to his soldiers any fear of the issue. Before it comes to the fight, it is mapping and planning. When the fight begins, it is “Forward, and St. George!”
An old poet, Lord Brook, has two striking lines, which I will quote and then qualify:—
| “For power is proud till it look down on fear, | |
| Though only safe by ever looking there.” |
Before you commence anything, provide as if all hope were against you. When you must set about it, act as if there were not such a thing as fear. When you have taken all precautions as to skill in the circumstances against which you can provide, dismiss from consideration all circumstances dependent on luck which you cannot control. When you can’t choose your ground, it is “Forward, and St. George!” But look for no help from St. George unless you have taken the same pains he did in training his horse and his dogs before he fought with the dragon. In short, hope warps judgment in council, but quickens energy in action.
There is a quality in man often mistaken for a hopeful temperament, though in fact it is the normal acquisition of that experience which is hope’s sternest corrective,—the quality of self-confidence.
As we advance in years, hope diminishes and self-confidence increases. Trials have taught us what we can do, and trained us to calculate with serene accuracy on the probable results. Hope, which has so much to do with gaming, has nothing to do with arithmetic. And as we live on, we find that for all which really belongs to the insurance against loss, we had better consult the actuary than stake against the croupier.
“Fortune,” saith a fine Latin proverb, “lends much at interest, but gives a fee simple to none.” According to the security you offer to her, Fortune makes her loans easy or ruinous.
Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces, in their relation to the world without, which results from the failures of many hopes, and the nonrealization of many fears; for the two classes of things that most rarely happen to us are the things we hoped for and the things we dreaded. But there is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience. “Patience,” says Vauvenargues, “is only hope prolonged.” It is that kind of hope which belongs to the highest order of mind, and is so essential to the enterprise of genius that Buffon calls genius itself “a long patience,” as Helvetius calls it “a sustained attention.” Patience, indeed, is the soul of speculation, “and the scope of all speculation is the performance of some action or thing to be done.” This is the true form of hope that remained at the bottom of Pandora’s Box; the more restless images or simulacra of the consolatory sustainer must have flown away among the earliest pinions that dispersed into air at the opening of the lid.
