and who is attempting
to convey to us not only his life-philosophy, but also his aches and
pains, his likes and dislikes, and the limitations of his own
experience. When doleful sounds come from the oracle, we take it for
granted that something is the matter with the universe, when all that
has happened is that one estimable gentleman, on a particular morning,
was out of sorts when he took pen in hand.

At Christmas time, when we naturally want to be on good terms with our
fellow men, and when our pursuit of happiness takes the unexpectedly
genial form of plotting for their happiness, the disposition of our
favorite writers becomes a matter of great importance to us. A surly,
sour-tempered person, taking advantage of our confidence, can turn us
against our best friends. If he has an acrid wit he may make us ashamed
of our highest enthusiasms. He may so picture human life as to make the
message "Peace on earth, good will to men" seem a mere mockery.

I have a friend who has in him the making of a popular scientist, having
an easy flow of extemporaneous theory, so that he is never closely
confined to his facts. One of his theories is that pessimism is purely
a literary disease, and that it can only be conveyed through the printed
page. In having a single means of infection it follows the analogy of
malaria, which in many respects it resembles. No mosquito, no malaria;
so no book, no pessimism. Of course you must have a particular kind of
mosquito, and he must have got the infection somewhere; but that is his
concern, not yours. The important thing for you is that he is the
middleman on whom you depend for the disease. In like manner, so my
friend asserts, the writer is the middleman through whom the public gets
its supply of pessimism.

I am not prepared to give an unqualified assent to this theory, for I
have known some people who were quite illiterate who held very gloomy
views. At the same time it seems to me there is something in it.

When an unbookish individual is in the dumps, he is conscious of his own
misery, but he does not attribute it to all the world. The evil is
narrowly localized. He sees the dark side of things because he is so
unluckily placed that that alone is visible, but he is quite ready to
believe that there is a bright side somewhere.

I remember several pleasant half-hours spent in front of a cabin on the
top of a far western mountain. The proprietor of the cabin, who was
known as "Pat," had