"It was to the standard of the intellect in a gloomy world that he always gaily rallied," Mr. Lynd observes with truth. He saw the unbridgeable gulf which exists between aspiration and achievement. Heine once said bitterly: "You want to give the woman you love the sun, moon and stars, and all you can give her is a house on a terrace." He, like Heine, knew this sense of defeat, and it is this which made him regard "optimism as an attractive form of mental disease." As he says of Hamlet, "he passed through life annotating it with a gloss of melancholy speculation."
He felt the "weary weight of all this unintelligible world." "The twentieth century," he wrote in an article, "which cuts such a fine figure in encyclopædias is most familiarly known to the majority of its children as a new sort of headache." But he was a fighting pessimist that called for the best. "Impossibilism is a poor word and an unmanly doctrine. We have got to keep moving on and, since that is so, we had better put as good thought as we can into our itinerary. The task of civilisation was never easy. Freedom—the phrase belongs to Fichte or someone of his circle—has always been a battle and a march: it is of the nature of both that they should appear to the participants, during the heat of movement, as planless and chaotic."
Perhaps the finest definition of his philosophy of life may be found in an essay in The Day's Burden.
