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"Should I be even a meliorist as I am if I had?" "I must know Chichester. It's a pity I didn't know him formerly." "I don't believe that matters," said Malling, with intense conviction. "There is that in him which must strike you and affect you, whether you knew him as he was or not." "So long as I don't turn tail and run from him, all's well. I will tackle Chichester.
An optimist would stand here and wait, certain that wings would soon sprout for him to fly up; a pessimist would sit down and quit. An optimist is a fool; a pessimist is a worse fool." "And which are you?" asked Ashton. "I am neither. I am a meliorist. I am going to face the facts, and then fight for all I'm worth. What's more, you're going to do the same. Come!
She was, rather, a meliorist who hoped for better things, though tardy to come; who believed, in her own pungent phrase, "in the slow contagion of good." Of human happiness she did in one of her latest moods despair: going so far in a dark moment as to declare that the only ideal left her was duty. In a way, she grew sadder as she grew older.
This is indeed the Illusion of Illusions; for it gives us infallible and appalling assurance that if our political ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent reformers and supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps in our progress. Let the Reformer, the Progressive, the Meliorist then reconsider himself and his eternal ifs and ans which never become pots and pans.
Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious Siegfried.
One prefers to hope he didn't, with the invincible optimism one has for the behaviour of lovable people; but whether or not his kind attempt at colloquy is the first indication I can find of that active sympathy with the disabilities of his fellow-beings which stamped him later so intelligent a meliorist.
The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though in advanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than the King, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to be a successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist.
Few men think as I do, and your uncle considers me, I suspect, to be governed by my unhappy way of seeing the dark side of things. He says that I am a bewildered pessimist about politics. A pessimist I may be, but it is the habitually hopeful meliorist who is just now perplexed past power to think straight." John's interest was caught for the moment by the word, "meliorist."
The meliorist attitude, on the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong; much painful; what can we do to improve it?" And from this point of view there is something we can all do to make martyrdom less inevitable in the end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell us. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure to be unpalatable.
"What is a meliorist, sir?" he asked. "Oh, a wild insanity of hopefulness. You all have it. I dislike to talk about the sad future, and I wonder men at the North are so blind."
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