A certain kind of content enlivens us with the bliss of others' ignorance. Tacitus was one of the first historians in our modern sense, yet he described a motionless frozen sea in the north from which a hiss is heard as the sun plunges down into it at night; and Pliny noted that the reflection of mirrors is due to the percussion of the air thrown back upon the eyes. Kipling laughed slyly at the traveler in India who spent his time gazing at the names of the railway stations in Baedeker. When the train rushed through a station he would draw a line through the name and say, 'I've done that.' Satisfaction with our learning is confined to no age or nation. Two Frenchmen in a restaurant showing off their English opined, 'It deed rain to-morrow.' 'Yes, it was.' Satisfaction with virtue was rebuked by Francis de Sales when he told the nuns, who asked to go barefoot, to keep their shoes and change their brains. Satisfaction with our importance recalls Harlequin, who when asked what he was doing on his paper throne replied that he was reigning. Satisfaction with our future is the satisfaction of the eighth square of the chessboard where we shall all be queens together, and it's all feasting and fun.
I would not, as advocate of the Contented Heart, go so far as Walt Whitman when he said that whoever was without his volume of poems should be assassinated; but his remark suggests that extreme measures are frequently curative. Stanislaus of Poland did not hesitate to recall to his daughter the bad days they had undergone. 'See, Marie, how Providence cares for good people: you had not even a chemise in 1725, and now you are Queen of France.' To take up Dante and read about devils boiled in pitch must by comparison cheer morbid humans. The spectacle of tragedy in the lives of kings and favorites of the gods such as the Greek stage presented was believed to be wholesome because beholders thereby faced a scale of misfortune so much exceeding anything in their own lives that their mishaps appeared of slight importance in comparison. I know that after seeing _OEdipus Rex_ given by the three Salvinis and others in the old amphitheatre in Fiesole, I went off murmuring, 'What does it matter if my trunk is lost!' a state of mind to which no slighter argument had sufficed to bring me. Surely life is too interesting to spend it all knocking off its pretty scallops by aimless exaggeration of small troubles, or hanging out our large ones to flap the passer-by. Besides which, we get no more sympathy from the passer-by than did Giant Despair who sometimes, in sunshiny weather, fell into fits.