FEAR OF PUBLIC OPINION
Very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and
their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have
social relations, and more especially by those with whom they live.
It is a peculiarity of modern communities that they are divided into
sets which differ profoundly in their morals and in their beliefs. This
state of affairs began with the Reformation, or perhaps one should say
with the Renaissance, and has grown more pronounced ever since. There
were Protestants and Catholics, who differed not only in theology but
on many more practical matters. There were aristocrats who permitted
various kinds of action that were not tolerated among the bourgeoisie.
Then there came to be latitudinarians and free-thinkers who did not
recognize the duties of religious observance. In our own day throughout
the Continent of Europe there is a profound division between socialists
and others, which covers not only politics but almost every department
of life. In English-speaking countries the divisions are very numerous.
In some sets art is admired, while in others it is thought to be of the
devil, at any rate if it is modern. In some sets devotion to the Empire
is the supreme virtue, in others it is considered a vice, and in yet
others a form of stupidity. Conventional people consider adultery one
of the worst of crimes, but large sections of the population regard it
as excusable if not positively laudable. Among Catholics divorce is
totally forbidden, while most non-Catholics accept it as a necessary
alleviation of matrimony.
Owing to all these differences of outlook a person of given tastes
and convictions may find himself practically an outcast while he
lives in one set, although in another set he would be accepted as
an entirely ordinary human being. A very great deal of unhappiness,
especially among the young, arises in this way. A young man or young
woman somehow catches ideas that are in the air, but finds that these
ideas are anathema in the particular milieu in which he or she lives.
It easily seems to the young as if the only milieu with which they are
acquainted were representative of the whole world. They can scarcely
believe that in another place or another set the views which they dare
not avow for fear of being thought utterly perverse would be accepted
as the ordinary commonplaces of the age. Thus through ignorance of the
world a great deal of unnecessary misery is endured, sometimes only in
youth, but not infrequently throughout life. This isolation is not only
a source of pain, it also causes a great dissipation of energy in the
unnecessary task of maintaining mental independence against hostile
surroundings, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred produces a
certain timidity in following out ideas to their logical conclusions.
The Brontë sisters never met any congenial people until after their
books had been published. This did not affect Emily, who was heroic
and in the grand manner, but it certainly did affect Charlotte, whose
outlook, in spite of her talents, remained always to a large extent
that of a governess. Blake, like Emily Brontë, lived in extreme mental
isolation, but like her was great enough to overcome its bad effects,
since he never doubted that he was right and his critics wrong. His
attitude towards public opinion is expressed in the lines:
The only man that e’er I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli: he was both Turk and Jew.
And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?
But there are not many who have this degree of force in their inner
life. To almost everybody sympathetic surroundings are necessary to
happiness. To the majority, of course, the surroundings in which
they happen to find themselves are sympathetic. They imbibe current
prejudices in youth, and instinctively adapt themselves to the beliefs
and customs which they find in existence around them. But to a large
minority, which includes practically all who have any intellectual or
artistic merit, this attitude of acquiescence is impossible. A person
born, let us say, in some small country town finds himself from early
youth surrounded by hostility to everything that is necessary for
mental excellence. If he wishes to read serious books, other boys
despise him, and teachers tell him that such works are unsettling. If
he cares for art, his contemporaries think him unmanly, and his elders
think him immoral. If he desires any career, however respectable, which
has not been common in the circle to which he belongs, he is told that
he is setting himself up, and that what was good enough for his father
ought to be good enough for him. If he shows any tendency to criticize
his parents’ religious tenets or political affiliations, he is likely
to find himself in serious trouble. For all these reasons, to most
young men and young women of exceptional merit adolescence is a time of
great unhappiness. To their more ordinary companions it may be a time
of gaiety and enjoyment, but for themselves they want something more
serious, which they can find neither among their elders nor among their
contemporaries in the particular social setting in which chance has
caused them to be born.
When such young people go to a University they probably discover
congenial souls and enjoy a few years of great happiness. If they are
fortunate, they may succeed, on leaving the University, in obtaining
some kind of work that gives them still the possibility of choosing
congenial companions; an intelligent man who lives in a city as large
as London or New York can generally find some congenial set in which
it is not necessary to practise any constraint or hypocrisy. But if his
work obliges him to live in some smaller place, and more particularly
if it necessitates retention of the respect of ordinary people, as is
the case, for example, with a doctor or a lawyer, he may find himself
throughout his whole life practically compelled to conceal his real
tastes and convictions from most of the people that he meets in the
course of his day. This is especially true in America because of the
vastness of the country. In the most unlikely places, north, south,
east, and west, one finds lonely individuals who know from books that
there are places where they would not be lonely, but who have no chance
to live in such places, and only the rarest opportunity of congenial
conversation. Real happiness in such circumstances is impossible to
those who are built on a less magnificent scale than Blake and Emily
Brontë. If it is to become possible, some way must be found by which
the tyranny of public opinion can be either lessened or evaded, and by
which members of the intelligent minority can come to know each other
and enjoy each other’s society.
In a good many cases unnecessary timidity makes the trouble worse
than it need be. Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards
those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent
to it. A dog will bark more loudly and bite more readily when people
are afraid of him than when they treat him with contempt, and the
human herd has something of this same characteristic. If you show that
you are afraid of them, you give promise of good hunting, whereas
if you show indifference, they begin to doubt their own power and
therefore tend to let you alone. I am not, of course, thinking of
extreme forms of defiance. If you hold in Kensington the views that are
conventional in Russia, or in Russia the views that are conventional
in Kensington, you must accept the consequences. I am thinking, not
of such extremes, but of much milder lapses from conventionality,
such as failure to dress correctly or to belong to some Church or to
abstain from reading intelligent books. Such lapses, if they are done
with gaiety and insouciance, not defiantly but spontaneously, will
come to be tolerated even in the most conventional society. Gradually
it may become possible to acquire the position of licensed lunatic,
to whom things are permitted which in another man would be thought
unforgivable. This is largely a matter of a certain kind of good nature
and friendliness. Conventional people are roused to fury by departures
from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a
criticism of themselves. They will pardon much unconventionality in a
man who has enough jollity and friendliness to make it clear, even to
the stupidest, that he is not engaged in criticizing them.
This method of escaping censure is, however, impossible to many of
those whose tastes or opinions cause them to be out of sympathy with
the herd. Their lack of sympathy makes them uncomfortable and causes
them to have a pugnacious attitude, even if outwardly they conform
or manage to avoid any sharp issue. People who are not in harmony
with the conventions of their own set tend therefore to be prickly
and uncomfortable and lacking in expansive good humour. These same
people, transported into another set where their outlook is not thought
strange, will seem to change their character entirely. From being
serious, shy and retiring they may become gay and self-confident; from
being angular they may become smooth and easy; from being self-centred
they may become sociable and extravert.
Wherever possible, therefore, young people who find themselves out
of harmony with their surroundings should endeavour in the choice of
a profession to select some career which will give them a chance of
congenial companionship, even if this should entail a considerable loss
of income. Often they hardly know that this is possible, since their
knowledge of the world is very limited, and they may easily imagine
that the prejudices to which they have become accustomed at home are
world wide. This is a matter in which older men should be able to
give much assistance to the young, since a considerable experience of
mankind is essential.
It is customary in these days of psycho-analysis to assume that,
when any young person is out of harmony with his environment, the
cause must lie in some psychological disorder. This is to my mind a
complete mistake. Suppose, for example, that a young person has parents
who believe the doctrine of evolution to be wicked. Nothing except
intelligence is required in such a case to cause him to be out of
sympathy with them. To be out of harmony with one’s surroundings is, of
course, a misfortune, but it is not always a misfortune to be avoided
at all costs. Where the environment is stupid or prejudiced or cruel,
it is a sign of merit to be out of harmony with it. And to some degree
these characteristics exist in almost every environment. Galileo and
Kepler had “dangerous thoughts” (as they are called in Japan), and so
have the most intelligent men of our own day. It is not desirable that
the social sense should be so strongly developed as to cause such men
to fear the social hostility which their opinions may provoke. What is
desirable is to find ways of making this hostility as slight and as
ineffective as possible.
In the modern world the most important part of this problem arises
in youth. If a man is once launched upon the right career and in the
right surroundings, he can in most cases escape social persecution, but
while he is young and his merits are still untested, he is liable to
be at the mercy of ignorant people who consider themselves capable of
judging in matters about which they know nothing, and who are outraged
at the suggestion that so young a person may know better than they do
with all their experience of the world. Many people who have ultimately
escaped from the tyranny of ignorance have had so hard a fight and
so long a time of repression that in the end they are embittered and
their energy is impaired. There is a comfortable doctrine that genius
will always make its way, and on the strength of this doctrine many
people consider that the persecution of youthful talent cannot do much
harm. But there is no ground whatever for accepting this doctrine. It
is like the theory that murder will out. Obviously all the murders we
know of have been discovered, but who knows how many there may be which
have never been heard of? In like manner all the men of genius that
we have ever heard of have triumphed over adverse circumstances, but
that is no reason for supposing that there were not innumerable others
who succumbed in youth. Moreover, it is not a question only of genius,
but also of talent, which is just as necessary to the community. And
it is not only a question of emerging somehow, but also of emerging
unembittered and with unimpaired energy. For all these reasons the way
of youth should not be made too hard.
While it is desirable that the old should treat with respect the
wishes of the young, it is not desirable that the young should treat
with respect the wishes of the old. The reason is simple, namely that
in either case it is the lives of the young that are concerned, not
the lives of the old. When the young attempt to regulate the lives
of the old, as, for example, by objecting to the remarriage of a
widowed parent, they are quite as much in the wrong as are the old who
attempt to regulate the lives of the young. Old and young alike, as
soon as years of discretion have been reached, have a right to their
own choices, and if necessary to their own mistakes. Young people are
ill-advised if they yield to the pressure of the old in any vital
matter. Suppose, for example, that you are a young person who wishes to
go on the stage, and that your parents oppose your wish, either on the
ground that the stage is immoral or on the ground that it is socially
inferior. They may bring every kind of pressure to bear; they may tell
you that they will cast you off if you ignore their commands; they
may say that you will certainly repent within a few years; they may
mention whole strings of horrid examples of young persons who have been
rash enough to do what you contemplate doing and came to a bad end in
consequence. They may of course be right in thinking that the stage is
not the career for you; it may be that you have no talent for acting,
or that you have a bad voice. If this is the case, however, you will
soon discover it from theatrical people, and there will still be plenty
of time to adopt a different career. The arguments of parents should
not be a sufficient reason for relinquishing the attempt. If, in spite
of all they say, you carry out your intention, they will soon come
round, much sooner in fact than either you or they suppose. If on the
other hand you find professional opinion discouraging, that is another
matter, for professional opinion must always be treated with respect by
beginners.
I think that in general, apart from expert opinion, there is too much
respect paid to the opinions of others, both in great matters and in
small ones. One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is
necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything
that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary
tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of
ways. Take, for example, the matter of expenditure. Very many people
spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural
tastes would enjoin, merely because they feel that the respect of
their neighbours depends upon their possession of a good car and their
ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can
obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library
will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like
everyone else. There is, of course, no point in deliberately flouting
public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in
a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a
strength and a source of happiness. And a society composed of men
and women who do not bow too much to the conventions is a far more
interesting society than one in which all behave alike. Where each
person’s character is developed individually, differences of type are
preserved, and it is worth while to meet new people, because they are
not mere replicas of those whom one has met already. This has been one
of the advantages of aristocracy, since where status depended upon
birth behaviour was allowed to be erratic. In the modern world we are
losing this source of social freedom, and therefore a more deliberate
realization of the dangers of uniformity has become desirable. I do not
mean that people should be intentionally eccentric, which is just as
uninteresting as being conventional. I mean only that people should be
natural, and should follow their spontaneous tastes in so far as these
are not definitely anti-social.
In the modern world, owing to the swiftness of locomotion, people
are less dependent than they used to be upon their geographically
nearest neighbours. Those who have cars can regard as a neighbour any
person living within twenty miles. They have therefore a much greater
power than was formerly the case of choosing their companions. In any
populous neighbourhood a man must be very unfortunate if he cannot find
congenial souls within twenty miles. The idea that one should know
one’s immediate neighbours has died out in large centres of population,
but still lingers in small towns and in the country. It has become a
foolish idea, since there is no need to be dependent upon immediate
neighbours for society. More and more it becomes possible to choose
our companions on account of congeniality rather than on account of
mere propinquity. Happiness is promoted by associations of persons with
similar tastes and similar opinions. Social intercourse may be expected
to develop more and more along these lines, and it may be hoped that
by these means the loneliness that now afflicts so many unconventional
people will be gradually diminished almost to vanishing point. This
will undoubtedly increase their happiness, but it will of course
diminish the sadistic pleasure which the conventional at present derive
from having the unconventional at their mercy. I do not think, however,
that this is a pleasure which we need be greatly concerned to preserve.
Fear of public opinion, like every other form of fear, is oppressive
and stunts growth. It is difficult to achieve any kind of greatness
while a fear of this kind remains strong, and it is impossible to
acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for
it is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from
our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires
of those who happen to be our neighbours, or even our relations. Fear
of immediate neighbours is no doubt less than it was, but there is a
new kind of fear, namely the fear of what newspapers may say. This is
quite as terrifying as anything connected with mediæval witch-hunts.
When the newspaper chooses to make a scapegoat of some perhaps quite
harmless person, the results may be very terrible. Fortunately, as yet
this is a fate which most people escape through their obscurity, but
as publicity gets more and more perfect in its methods, there will be
an increasing danger in this novel form of social persecution. This is
too grave a matter to be treated with disdain by the individual who
is its victim, and whatever may be thought of the great principle of
the freedom of the Press, I think the line will have to be drawn more
sharply than it is by the existing libel laws, and anything will have
to be forbidden that makes life intolerable for innocent individuals,
even if they should happen to have done or said things which, published
maliciously, can cause them to become unpopular. The only ultimate cure
for this evil is, however, an increase of toleration on the part of the
public. The best way to increase toleration is to multiply the number
of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their
chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellow-men.
PART II
CAUSES OF HAPPINESS
CHAPTER X
IS HAPPINESS STILL POSSIBLE?
So far we have been considering the unhappy man; we now have the
pleasanter task of considering the happy man. From the conversation
and the books of some of my friends I have been almost led to conclude
that happiness in the modern world has become an impossibility. I
find, however, that this view tends to be dissipated by introspection,
foreign travel, and the conversation of my gardener. The unhappiness
of my literary friends I have considered in an earlier chapter; in the
present chapter I wish to make a survey of the happy people that I have
come across in the course of my life.
Happiness is of two sorts, though, of course, there are intermediate
degrees. The two sorts I mean might be distinguished as plain and
fancy, or animal and spiritual, or of the heart and of the head. The
designation to be chosen among these alternatives depends, of course,
upon the thesis to be proved. I am at the moment not concerned to
prove any thesis, but merely to describe. Perhaps the simplest way to
describe the difference between the two sorts of happiness is to say
that one sort is open to any human being, and the other only to those
who can read and write. When I was a boy I knew a man bursting with
happiness whose business was digging wells. He was of enormous height
and of incredible muscles; he could neither read nor write, and when
in the year 1885 he got a vote for Parliament, he learnt for the first
time that such an institution existed. His happiness did not depend
upon intellectual sources; it was not based upon belief in natural law,
or the perfectibility of the species, or the public ownership of public
utilities, or the ultimate triumph of the Seventh Day Adventists, or
any of the other creeds which intellectuals consider necessary to their
enjoyment of life. It was based upon physical vigour, a sufficiency
of work, and the overcoming of not insuperable obstacles in the shape
of rock. The happiness of my gardener is of the same species; he
wages a perennial war against rabbits, of which he speaks exactly as
Scotland Yard speaks of Bolsheviks; he considers them dark, designing
and ferocious, and is of opinion that they can only be met by means of
a cunning equal to their own. Like the heroes of Valhalla who spent
every day hunting a certain wild boar, which they killed every evening
but which miraculously came to life again in the morning, my gardener
can slay his enemy one day without any fear that the enemy will have
disappeared the next day. Although well over seventy, he works all day
and bicycles sixteen hilly miles to and from his work, but the fount of
joy is inexhaustible, and it is “they rabbits” that supply it.
But, you will say, these simple delights are not open to superior
people like ourselves. What joy can we experience in waging war on
such puny creatures as rabbits? The argument, to my mind, is a poor
one. A rabbit is very much larger than a yellow-fever bacillus, and yet
a superior person can find happiness in making war upon the latter.
Pleasures exactly similar to those of my gardener so far as their
emotional content is concerned are open to the most highly educated
people. The difference made by education is only in regard to the
activities by which these pleasures are to be obtained. Pleasures of
achievement demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems
doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved. This is perhaps
the chief reason why a not excessive estimate of one’s own powers is a
source of happiness. The man who underestimates himself is perpetually
being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself
is just as often surprised by failure. The former kind of surprise is
pleasant, the latter unpleasant. It is therefore wise to be not unduly
conceited, though also not too modest to be enterprising.
Of the more highly educated sections of the community, the happiest in
the present day are the men of science. Many of the most eminent of
them are emotionally simple, and obtain from their work a satisfaction
so profound that they can derive pleasure from eating and even
marrying. Artists and literary men consider it _de rigueur_ to
be unhappy in their marriages, but men of science quite frequently
remain capable of old-fashioned domestic bliss. The reason of this is
that the higher parts of their intelligence are wholly absorbed by
their work, and are not allowed to intrude into regions where they
have no functions to perform. In their work they are happy because in
the modern world science is progressive and powerful, and because its
importance is not doubted either by themselves or by laymen. They have
therefore no necessity for complex emotions, since the simpler emotions
meet with no obstacles. Complexity in emotions is like foam in a river.
It is produced by obstacles which break the smoothly flowing current.
But so long as the vital energies are unimpeded, they produce no ripple
on the surface, and their strength is not evident to the unobservant.
All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of
science. He has an activity which utilizes his abilities to the full,
and he achieves results which appear important not only to himself
but to the general public, even when it cannot in the smallest degree
understand them. In this he is more fortunate than the artist. When
the public cannot understand a picture or a poem, they conclude that
it is a bad picture or a bad poem. When they cannot understand the
theory of relativity they conclude (rightly) that their education has
been insufficient. Consequently Einstein is honoured while the best
painters are left to starve in garrets, and Einstein is happy while
the painters are unhappy. Very few men can be genuinely happy in a
life involving continual self-assertion against the scepticism of
the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie
and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need
of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his
colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of
having to choose between being despised and being despicable. If his
powers are of the first order, he must incur one or the other of these
misfortunes--the former if he uses his powers, the latter if he does
not. This has not been the case always and everywhere. There have been
times when even good artists, even when they were young, were thought
well of. Julius II, though he might ill-treat Michael Angelo, never
supposed him incapable of painting pictures. The modern millionaire,
though he may shower wealth upon elderly artists after they have lost
their powers, never imagines that their work is as important as his
own. Perhaps these circumstances have something to do with the fact
that artists are on the average less happy than men of science.
It must, I think, be admitted that the most intelligent young people in
Western countries tend to have that kind of unhappiness that comes of
finding no adequate employment for their best talents. This, however,
is not the case in Eastern countries. The intelligent young at the
present day are probably happier in Russia than anywhere else in the
world. They have there a new world to create, and an ardent faith
in accordance with which to create it. The old have been executed,
starved, exiled, or in some other way disinfected, so that they cannot,
as in every Western country, compel the young to choose between doing
harm and doing nothing. To the sophisticated Occidental the faith of
the young Russian may seem crude, but, after all, what is there to be
said against it? He _is_ creating a new world; the new world is
to his liking; the new world will almost certainly, when created, make
the average Russian happier than he was before the Revolution. It may
not be a world in which the sophisticated Western intellectual would be
happy, but the sophisticated Western intellectual does not have to live
in it. By any pragmatic test, therefore, the faith of young Russia is
justified, and to condemn it as crude can have no justification except
on a basis of theory.
In India, China, and Japan, external circumstances of a political
sort interfere with the happiness of the young intelligentsia, but
there is no such internal obstacle as exists in the West. There are
activities which appear important to the young, and, in so far as these
activities succeed, the young are happy. They feel that they have
an important part to play in the national life, and aims to pursue
which, though difficult, are not impossible to realize. Cynicism such
as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young
men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort
with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is
worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just
endurable. Throughout the East the University student can hope for more
influence upon public opinion than he can have in the modern West, but
he has much less opportunity than in the West of securing a substantial
income. Being neither powerless nor comfortable, he becomes a reformer
or a revolutionary, not a cynic. The happiness of the reformer or
revolutionary depends upon the course of public affairs, but probably
even while he is being executed he enjoys more real happiness than
is possible for the comfortable cynic. I remember a young Chinese
visitor to my school who was going home to found a similar school in a
reactionary part of China. He expected the result to be that his head
would be cut off. Nevertheless he enjoyed a quiet happiness that I
could only envy.
I do not wish to suggest, however, that these high-flown kinds of
happiness are the only possible ones. They are in fact open only to a
minority, since they require a kind of ability and a width of interest
which cannot be very common. It is not only eminent scientists who can
derive pleasure through work, nor is it only leading statesmen who
can derive pleasure through advocacy of a cause. The pleasure of work
is open to anyone who can develop some specialized skill, provided
that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without
demanding universal applause. I knew a man who had lost the use of both
legs in early youth, but he had remained serenely happy throughout a
long life; he had achieved this by writing a work in five volumes on
rose blight, on which I always understood he was the leading expert. I
have not had the pleasure of knowing any large number of conchologists,
but from those who have I have always understood that the study of
shells brings contentment to those who engage in it. I knew a man once
who was the best compositor in the world, and was sought out by all
those who devoted themselves to inventing artistic types; he derived
joy, not so much from the very genuine respect in which he was held
by persons whose respect was not lightly bestowed, as from the actual
delight in the exercise of his craft, a delight not wholly unlike that
which good dancers derive from dancing. I have known also compositors
who were experts in setting up mathematical type, or Nestorian script,
or cuneiform, or anything else that was out of the way and difficult. I
did not discover whether these men’s private lives were happy, but in
their working hours their constructive instincts were fully gratified.
It is customary to say that in our machine age there is less room than
formerly for the craftsman’s joy in skilled work. I am not at all sure
that this is true: the skilled workman nowadays works, it is true, at
quite different things from those that occupied the attention of the
mediæval guilds, but he is still very important and quite essential in
the machine economy. There are those who make scientific instruments
and delicate machines, there are designers, there are aeroplane
mechanics, chauffeurs, and hosts of others who have a trade in which
skill can be developed to almost any extent. The agricultural labourer
and the peasant in comparatively primitive communities is not, so far
as I have been able to observe, nearly as happy as a chauffeur or an
engine-driver. It is true that the work of the peasant who cultivates
his own land is varied; he ploughs, he sows, he reaps. But he is at
the mercy of the elements, and is very conscious of his dependence,
whereas the man who works a modern mechanism is conscious of power,
and acquires the sense that man is the master, not the slave, of
natural forces. It is true, of course, that work is very uninteresting
to the large body of mere machine-minders who repeat some mechanical
operation over and over again with the minimum of variation, but the
more uninteresting the work becomes, the more possible it is to get it
performed by a machine. The ultimate goal of machine production--from
which, it is true, we are as yet far removed--is a system in which
everything uninteresting is done by machines, and human beings are
reserved for the work involving variety and initiative. In such a
world the work will be less boring and less depressing than it has
been at any time since the introduction of agriculture. In taking to
agriculture mankind decided that they would submit to monotony and
tedium in order to diminish the risk of starvation. When men obtained
their food by hunting, work was a joy, as one can see from the fact
that the rich still pursue these ancestral occupations for amusement.
But with the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long
period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now
being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. It is all very
well for sentimentalists to speak of contact with the soil and the ripe
wisdom of Hardy’s philosophic peasants, but the one desire of every
young man in the countryside is to find work in towns where he can
escape from the slavery of wind and weather and the solitude of dark
winter evenings into the reliable and human atmosphere of the factory
and the cinema. Companionship and co-operation are essential elements
in the happiness of the average man, and these are to be obtained in
industry far more fully than in agriculture.
Belief in a cause is a source of happiness to large numbers of people.
I am not thinking only of revolutionaries, socialists, nationalists in
oppressed countries, and such; I am thinking also of many humbler kinds
of belief. The men I have known who believed that the English were the
lost ten tribes were almost invariably happy, while as for those who
believed that the English were only the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh,
their bliss knew no bounds. I am not suggesting that the reader should
adopt this creed, since I cannot advocate any happiness based upon what
seem to me to be false beliefs. For the same reason I cannot urge the
reader to believe that men should live exclusively upon nuts, although,
so far as my observation goes, this belief invariably ensures perfect
happiness. But it is easy to find some cause which is in no degree
fantastic, and those whose interest in any such cause is genuine are
provided with an occupation for their leisure hours and a complete
antidote to the feeling that life is empty.
Not so very far removed from the devotion to obscure causes is
absorption in a hobby. One of the most eminent of living mathematicians
divides his time equally between mathematics and stamp-collecting.
I imagine that the latter affords consolation at the moments when
he can make no progress with the former. The difficulty of proving
propositions in the theory of numbers is not the only sorrow that
stamp-collecting can cure, nor are stamps the only things that can
be collected. Consider what a vast field of ecstasy opens before the
imagination when one thinks of old china, snuff-boxes, Roman coins,
arrow-heads, and flint implements. It is true that many of us are
too “superior” for these simple pleasures. We have all experienced
them in boyhood, but have thought them, for some reason, unworthy of
a grown man. This is a complete mistake; any pleasure that does no
harm to other people is to be valued. For my part, I collect rivers: I
derive pleasure from having gone down the Volga and up the Yangtse, and
regret very much having never seen the Amazon or the Orinoco. Simple
as these emotions are, I am not ashamed of them. Or consider again the
passionate joy of the baseball fan: he turns to his newspaper with
avidity, and the radio affords him the keenest thrills. I remember
meeting for the first time one of the leading literary men of America,
a man whom I had supposed from his books to be filled with melancholy.
But it so happened that at that moment the most crucial baseball
results were coming through on the radio; he forgot me, literature, and
all the other sorrows of our sublunary life, and yelled with joy as his
favourites achieved victory. Ever since this incident I have been able
to read his books without feeling depressed by the misfortunes of his
characters.
Fads and hobbies, however, are in many cases, perhaps most, not a
source of fundamental happiness, but a means of escape from reality,
of forgetting for the moment some pain too difficult to be faced.
Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be
called a friendly interest in persons and things.
A friendly interest in persons is a form of affectionateness, but
not the form which is grasping and possessive and seeking always an
emphatic response. This latter form is very frequently a source of
unhappiness. The kind that makes for happiness is the kind that likes
to observe people and finds pleasure in their individual traits, that
wishes to afford scope for the interests and pleasures of those with
whom it is brought into contact without desiring to acquire power over
them or to secure their enthusiastic admiration. The person whose
attitude towards others is genuinely of this kind will be a source of
happiness and a recipient of reciprocal kindness. His relations with
others, whether slight or serious, will satisfy both his interests
and his affections; he will not be soured by ingratitude, since he
will seldom suffer it and will not notice when he does. The same
idiosyncrasies which would get on another man’s nerves to the point
of exasperation will be to him a source of gentle amusement. He
will achieve without effort results which another man, after long
struggles, will find to be unattainable. Being happy in himself, he
will be a pleasant companion, and this in turn will increase his
happiness. But all this must be genuine; it must not spring from an
idea of self-sacrifice inspired by a sense of duty. A sense of duty
is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish
to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation. To like many
people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all
sources of personal happiness.
I spoke also in the last paragraph of what I call a friendly interest
in things. This phrase may perhaps seem forced; it may be said that
it is impossible to feel friendly to things. Nevertheless, there is
something analogous to friendliness in the kind of interest that
a geologist takes in rocks, or an archæologist in ruins, and this
interest ought to be an element in our attitude to individuals or
societies. It is possible to have an interest in things which is
hostile rather than friendly. A man might collect facts concerning
the habitats of spiders because he hated spiders and wished to live
where they were few. This kind of interest would not afford the same
satisfaction as the geologist derives from his rocks. An interest
in impersonal things, though perhaps less valuable as an ingredient
in everyday happiness than a friendly attitude towards our fellow
creatures, is nevertheless very important. The world is vast and our
own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely
in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life
more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way
of getting even less than is possible. The man who can forget his
worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent,
or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his
excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm
which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will
in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as
possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that
interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
This preliminary survey of the possibilities of happiness will be
expanded in subsequent chapters, together with suggestions as to ways
of escaping from psychological sources of misery.
CHAPTER XI
ZEST
In this chapter I propose to deal with what seems to me the most
universal and distinctive mark of happy men, namely zest.
Perhaps the best way to understand what is meant by zest will be to
consider the different ways in which men behave when they sit down to
a meal. There are those to whom a meal is merely a bore; no matter how
excellent the food may be, they feel that it is uninteresting. They
have had excellent food before, probably at almost every meal they have
eaten. They have never known what it was to go without a meal until
hunger became a raging passion, but have come to regard meals as merely
conventional occurrences, dictated by the fashions of the society in
which they live. Like everything else, meals are tiresome, but it is
no use to make a fuss, because nothing else will be less tiresome.
Then there are the invalids who eat from a sense of duty, because the
doctor has told them that it is necessary to take a little nourishment
in order to keep up their strength. Then there are the epicures, who
start hopefully, but find that nothing has been quite so well cooked as
it ought to have been. Then there are the gormandizers, who fall upon
their food with eager rapacity, eat too much, and grow plethoric and
stertorous. Finally there are those who begin with a sound appetite,
are glad of their food, eat until they have had enough, and then stop.
Those who are set down before the feast of life have similar attitudes
towards the good things which it offers. The happy man corresponds to
the last of our eaters. What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in
relation to life. The man who is bored with his meals corresponds to
the victim of Byronic unhappiness. The invalid who eats from a sense
of duty corresponds to the ascetic, the gormandizer to the voluptuary.
The epicure corresponds to the fastidious person who condemns half the
pleasures of life as unæsthetic. Oddly enough, all these types, with
the possible exception of the gormandizer, feel contempt for the man of
healthy appetite and consider themselves his superior. It seems to them
vulgar to enjoy food because you are hungry or to enjoy life because it
offers a variety of interesting spectacles and surprising experiences.
From the height of their disillusionment they look down upon those
whom they despise as simple souls. For my part I have no sympathy with
this outlook. All disenchantment is to me a malady, which, it is true,
certain circumstances may render inevitable, but which none the less,
when it occurs, is to be cured as soon as possible, not to be regarded
as a higher form of wisdom. Suppose one man likes strawberries and
another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no
abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or
that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good; to
the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them
has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life
is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both
must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in
more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that
extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is
still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for
reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. The
more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness
he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one
thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested
in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as
are necessary to fill our days. We are all prone to the malady of the
introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out
before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But
let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert’s
unhappiness.
There were once upon a time two sausage machines, exquisitely
constructed for the purpose of turning pig into the most delicious
sausages. One of these retained his zest for pig and produced sausages
innumerable; the other said: “What is pig to me? My own works are far
more interesting and wonderful than any pig.” He refused pig and set
to work to study his inside. When bereft of its natural food, his
inside ceased to function, and the more he studied it, the more empty
and foolish it seemed to him to be. All the exquisite apparatus by
which the delicious transformation had hitherto been made stood still,
and he was at a loss to guess what it was capable of doing. This second
sausage machine was like the man who has lost his zest, while the first
was like the man who has retained it. The mind is a strange machine
which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing
ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless,
and unlike the sausage machine it must seize its materials for itself,
since events only become experiences through the interest that we take
in them: if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them. The
man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy
of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can
find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most
varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and
recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns.
The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be
remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the
street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had
come down in the world as the result of drink, and that his wife was
no longer so fond of him as she used to be. Life could never be boring
to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest.
Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a
country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the
vegetation, another in the geology, yet another in the agriculture, and
so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and,
other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them
is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.
How extraordinarily different, again, are the attitudes of different
people to their fellow-men. One man, in the course of a long train
journey, will fail entirely to observe any of his fellow travellers,
while another will have summed them all up, analysed their characters,
made a shrewd guess at their circumstances, and perhaps even
ascertained the most secret histories of several of them. People differ
just as much in what they feel towards others as in what they ascertain
about them. Some men find almost everybody boring, others quickly and
easily develop a friendly feeling towards those with whom they are
brought in contact, unless there is some definite reason for feeling
otherwise. Take again such a matter as travel: some men will travel
through many countries, going always to the best hotels, eating exactly
the same food as they would eat at home, meeting the same idle rich
whom they would meet at home, conversing on the same topics upon which
they converse at their own dinner-table. When they return, their only
feeling is one of relief at having done with the boredom of expensive
locomotion. Other men wherever they go see what is characteristic, make
the acquaintance of people who typify the locality, observe whatever
is of interest either historically or socially, eat the food of the
country, learn its manners and its language, and come home with a new
stock of pleasant thoughts for winter evenings.
In all these different situations the man who has the zest for life has
the advantage over the man who has none. Even unpleasant experiences
have their uses to him. I am glad to have smelt a Chinese crowd
and a Sicilian village, though I cannot pretend that my pleasure
was very great at the moment. Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks,
mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant
experiences, provided they do not go so far as to impair health. They
say to themselves in an earthquake, for example, “So that is what an
earthquake is like”, and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge
of the world increased by this new item. It would not be true to say
that such men are not at the mercy of fate, for if they should lose
their health they would be very likely to lose their zest at the same
time, though this is by no means certain. I have known men die at
the end of years of slow torture, and yet retain their zest almost
till the last moment. Some forms of ill-health destroy zest, others
do not. I do not know whether the biochemists are able as yet to
distinguish between these kinds. Perhaps when biochemistry has made
further advances we shall all be able to take tablets that will ensure
our feeling an interest in everything, but until that day comes we are
compelled to depend upon common-sense observation of life to judge what
are the causes that enable some men to take an interest in everything,
while compelling others to take an interest in nothing.
Zest is sometimes general, sometimes specialized. It may be very
specialized indeed. Readers of Borrow may remember a character who
occurs in _Lavengro_. He had lost his wife, to whom he was
devoted, and felt for a time that life had grown utterly barren. But by
profession he was a tea merchant, and in order to endure life he taught
himself unaided to read the Chinese inscriptions on the tea-chests
that passed through his hands. In the end this gave him a new interest
in life, and he began to study with avidity everything that concerned
China. I have known men who were entirely absorbed in the endeavour to
find out all about the Gnostic heresy, and other men whose principal
interest lay in collating the manuscripts and early editions of Hobbes.
It is quite impossible to guess in advance what will interest a man,
but most men are capable of a keen interest in something or other,
and when once such an interest has been aroused their life becomes
free from tedium. Very specialized interests are, however, a less
satisfactory source of happiness than a general zest for life, since
they can hardly fill the whole of a man’s time, and there is always
the danger that he may come to know all there is to know about the
particular matter that has become his hobby.
It will be remembered that among our different types at the banquet
we included the gormandizer, whom we were not prepared to praise. The
reader may think that the man with zest whom we have been praising does
not differ in any definable way from the gormandizer. The time has come
when we must try to make the distinction between the two types more
definite.
The ancients, as everyone knows, regarded moderation as one of
the essential virtues. Under the influence of romanticism and the
French Revolution this view was abandoned by many, and overmastering
passions were admired, even if, like those of Byron’s heroes, they
were of a destructive and anti-social kind. The ancients, however,
were clearly in the right. In the good life there must be a balance
between different activities, and no one of them must be carried so
far as to make the others impossible. The gormandizer sacrifices all
other pleasures to that of eating, and by so doing diminishes the
total happiness of his life. Many other passions besides eating may
be carried to a like excess. The Empress Josephine was a gormandizer
in regard to clothes. At first Napoleon used to pay her dressmaker’s
bills, though with continually increasing protest. At last he told her
that she really must learn moderation, and that in future he would
only pay her bills when the amount seemed reasonable. When her next
dressmaker’s bill came in, she was for a moment at her wits’ end,
but presently she bethought herself of a scheme. She went to the War
Minister and demanded that he should pay her bill out of the funds
provided for the war. Since he knew that she had the power to get him
dismissed, he did so, and the French lost Genoa in consequence. So
at least some books say, though I am not prepared to vouch for the
exact truth of the story. For our purpose it is equally apt whether
true or an exaggeration, since it serves to show how far the passion
for clothes may carry a woman who has the opportunity to indulge
it. Dipsomaniacs and nymphomaniacs are obvious examples of the same
kind of thing. The principle in these matters is fairly obvious.
All our separate tastes and desires have to fit into the general
framework of life. If they are to be a source of happiness they must
be compatible with health, with the affection of those whom we love,
and with the respect of the society in which we live. Some passions
can be indulged to almost any extent without passing beyond these
limits, others cannot. The man, let us say, who loves chess, if he
happens to be a bachelor with independent means, need not restrict
his passion in any degree, whereas if he has a wife and children and
no independent means, he will have to restrict it very severely. The
dipsomaniac and the gormandizer, even if they have no social ties, are
unwise from a self-regarding point of view, since their indulgence
interferes with health, and gives them hours of misery, in return for
minutes of pleasure. Certain things form a framework within which any
separate passion must live if it is not to become a source of misery.
Such things are health, the general possession of one’s faculties, a
sufficient income to provide for necessaries, and the most essential
social duties, such as those towards wife and children. The man
who sacrifices these things for chess is essentially as bad as the
dipsomaniac. The only reason we do not condemn him so severely is that
he is much less common, and that only a man of somewhat rare abilities
is likely to be carried away by absorption in so intellectual a game.
The Greek formula of moderation practically covers these cases. The man
who likes chess sufficiently to look forward throughout his working
day to the game that he will play in the evening is fortunate, but
the man who gives up work in order to play chess all day has lost the
virtue of moderation. It is recorded that Tolstoy, in his younger and
unregenerate days, was awarded the military cross for valour in the
field, but when the time came for him to be presented with it, he was
so absorbed in a game of chess that he decided not to go. We can
hardly find fault with Tolstoy on this account, since to him it might
well be a matter of indifference whether he won military decorations or
not, but in a lesser man such an act would have been one of folly.
As a limitation upon the doctrine that has just been set forth,
it ought to be admitted that some performances are considered so
essentially noble as to justify the sacrifice of everything else on
their behalf. The man who loses his life in the defence of his country
is not blamed if thereby his wife and children are left penniless. The
man who is engaged in experiments with a view to some great scientific
discovery or invention is not blamed afterwards for the poverty that
he has made his family endure, provided that his efforts are crowned
with ultimate success. If, however, he never succeeds in making the
discovery or the invention that he was attempting, public opinion
condemns him as a crank, which seems unfair, since no one in such
an enterprise can be sure of success in advance. During the first
millennium of the Christian era a man who abandoned his family for a
saintly life was praised, though nowadays it would be held that he
ought to make some provision for them.
I think there is always some deep-seated psychological difference
between the gormandizer and the man of healthy appetite. The man in
whom one desire runs to excess at the expense of all others is usually
a man with some deep-seated trouble, who is seeking to escape from a
spectre. In the case of the dipsomaniac this is obvious: men drink in
order to forget. If they had no spectres in their lives, they would
not find drunkenness more agreeable than sobriety. As the legendary
Chinaman said: “Me no drinkee for drinkee, me drinkee for drunkee.”
This is typical of all excessive and one-sided passions. It is not
pleasure in the object itself that is sought, but oblivion. There is,
however, a very great difference according as oblivion is sought in a
sottish manner or by the exercise of faculties in themselves desirable.
Borrow’s friend who taught himself Chinese in order to be able to
endure the loss of his wife was seeking oblivion, but he sought it in
an activity that had no harmful effects, but on the contrary improved
his intelligence and his knowledge. Against such forms of escape there
is nothing to be said. It is otherwise with the man who seeks oblivion
in drinking or gambling or any other form of unprofitable excitement.
There are, it is true, border-line cases. What should we say of the man
who runs mad risks in aeroplanes or on mountain tops, because life has
become irksome to him? If his risks serve any public object, we may
admire him, but if not, we shall have to place him only slightly above
the gambler and drunkard.
Genuine zest, not the sort that is really a search for oblivion, is
part of the natural make-up of human beings except in so far as it
has been destroyed by unfortunate circumstances. Young children are
interested in everything that they see and hear; the world is full of
surprises to them, and they are perpetually engaged with ardour in the
pursuit of knowledge, not, of course, of scholastic knowledge, but
of the sort that consists in acquiring familiarity with the objects
that attract their attention. Animals, even when adult, retain their
zest provided they are in health. A cat in an unfamiliar room will not
sit down until it has sniffed at every corner on the off-chance that
there may be a smell of mouse somewhere. The man who has never been
fundamentally thwarted will retain his natural interest in the external
world, and so long as he retains it he will find life pleasant unless
his liberty is unduly curtailed. Loss of zest in civilized society is
very largely due to the restrictions upon liberty which are essential
to our way of life. The savage hunts when he is hungry, and in so doing
is obeying a direct impulse. The man who goes to his work every morning
at a certain hour is actuated fundamentally by the same impulse,
namely the need to secure a living, but in his case the impulse does
not operate directly and at the moment when it is felt: it operates
indirectly through abstractions, beliefs and volitions. At the moment
when the man starts off to his work he is not feeling hungry, since he
has just had his breakfast. He merely knows that hunger will recur,
and that going to his work is a means of satisfying future hunger.
Impulses are irregular, whereas habits, in a civilized society, have to
be regular. Among savages, even collective enterprises, in so far as
they exist, are spontaneous and impulsive. When the tribe is going to
war the tom-tom rouses military ardour, and herd excitement inspires
each individual to the necessary activity. Modern enterprises cannot
be managed in this way. When a train has to be started at a given
moment it is impossible to inspire the porters, the engine-driver, and
the signalman by means of barbaric music. They must each do their job
merely because it has to be done; their motive, that is to say, is
indirect: they have no impulse towards the activity, but only towards
the ultimate reward of the activity. A great deal of social life has
the same defect. People converse with each other, not from any wish to
do so, but because of some ultimate benefit that they hope to derive
from co-operation. At every moment of life the civilized man is hedged
about by restrictions of impulse: if he happens to feel cheerful he
must not sing or dance in the street, while if he happens to feel sad
he must not sit on the pavement and weep, for fear of obstructing
pedestrian traffic. In youth his liberty is restricted at school, in
adult life it is restricted throughout his working hours. All this
makes zest more difficult to retain, for the continual restraint tends
to produce weariness and boredom. Nevertheless, a civilized society
is impossible without a very considerable degree of restraint upon
spontaneous impulse, since spontaneous impulse will only produce the
simplest forms of social co-operation, not those highly complex forms
which modern economic organization demands. In order to rise above
these obstacles to zest a man needs health and superabundant energy,
or else, if he has that good fortune, work that he finds interesting
on its own account. Health, so far as statistics can show, has been
steadily improving in all civilized countries during the last hundred
years, but energy is more difficult to measure, and I am doubtful
whether physical vigour in moments of health is as great as it was
formerly. The problem here is to a great extent a social problem, and
as such I do not propose to discuss it in the present volume. The
problem has, however, a personal and psychological aspect which we have
already discussed in connection with fatigue. Some men retain their
zest in spite of the handicaps of civilized life, and many men could do
so if they were free from the inner psychological conflicts upon which
a great part of their energy is expended. Zest demands energy more that
sufficient for the necessary work, and this in turn demands the smooth
working of the psychological machine. Of the causes promoting the
smooth working I shall have more to say in later chapters.
In women, less nowadays than formerly, but still to a very large
extent, zest has been greatly diminished by a mistaken conception of
respectability. It was thought undesirable that women should take an
obvious interest in men, or that they should display too much vivacity
in public. In learning not to be interested in men they learned very
frequently to be interested in nothing, or at any rate in nothing
except a certain kind of correct behaviour. To teach an attitude of
inactivity and withdrawal towards life is clearly to teach something
very inimical to zest, and to encourage a certain kind of absorption in
self which is characteristic of highly respectable women, especially
when they are uneducated. They do not have the interest in sport that
average men have, they care nothing about politics, towards men their
attitude is one of prim aloofness, towards women their attitude is
one of veiled hostility based upon the conviction that other women
are less respectable than they are themselves. They boast that they
keep themselves to themselves; that is to say, their lack of interest
in their fellow creatures appears to them in the light of a virtue.
For this, of course, they are not to blame; they are only accepting
the moral teaching that has been current for thousands of years where
women are concerned. They are, however, victims, much to be pitied, of
a system of repression whose iniquity they have failed to perceive. To
such women all that is ungenerous appears good and all that is generous
appears evil. In their own social circle they do what they can to kill
joy, in politics they love repressive legislation. Fortunately the type
is growing less common, but it is still far more prevalent than is
supposed by those who live in emancipated circles. I recommend anyone
who doubts this statement to go the round of a number of lodging-houses
seeking a lodging, and to take note of the landladies that he will meet
during his search. He will find that they are living by a conception of
female excellence which involves as an essential part the destruction
of all zest for life, and that their minds and hearts are dwarfed
and stunted as a result. Between male and female excellence rightly
conceived there is no difference, or at any rate no difference such
as tradition inculcates. For women as for men zest is the secret of
happiness and well-being.
CHAPTER XII
AFFECTION
One of the chief causes of lack of zest is the feeling that one is
unloved, whereas conversely the feeling of being loved promotes
zest more than anything else does. A man may have the feeling of
being unloved for a variety of reasons. He may consider himself such
a dreadful person that no one could possibly love him; he may in
childhood have had to accustom himself to receiving less love than
fell to the share of other children; or he may in fact be a person
whom nobody loves. But in this latter event the cause probably lies
in a lack of self-confidence due to early misfortune. The man who
feels himself unloved may take various attitudes as a result. He
may make desperate efforts to win affection, probably by means of
exceptional acts of kindness. In this, however, he is very likely to be
unsuccessful, since the motive of the kindnesses is easily perceived
by their beneficiaries, and human nature is so constructed that it
gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it. The
man, therefore, who endeavours to purchase affection by benevolent
actions becomes disillusioned by experience of human ingratitude. It
never occurs to him that the affection which he is trying to buy is
of far more value than the material benefits which he offers as its
price, and yet the feeling that this is so is at the basis of his
actions. Another man, observing that he is unloved, may seek revenge
upon the world, either by stirring up wars and revolutions, or by a
pen dipped in gall, like Dean Swift. This is an heroic reaction to
misfortune, requiring a force of character sufficient to enable a
man to pit himself against the rest of the world. Few men are able
to reach such heights; the great majority, both of men and women, if
they feel themselves unloved, sink into a timid despair relieved only
by occasional gleams of envy and malice. As a rule, the lives of such
people become extremely self-centred, and the absence of affection
gives them a sense of insecurity from which they instinctively seek
to escape by allowing habit to dominate their lives utterly and
completely. For those who make themselves the slaves of unvarying
routine are generally actuated by fear of a cold outer world, and by
the feeling that they will not bump into it if they walk along the same
paths that they have walked along on previous days.
Those who face life with a feeling of security are much happier than
those who face it with a feeling of insecurity, at any rate so long
as their sense of security does not lead them to disaster. And in a
very great many cases, though not in all, a sense of security will
itself help a man to escape dangers to which another would succumb.
If you are walking over a chasm on a narrow plank, you are much more
likely to fall if you feel fear than if you do not. And the same thing
applies to the conduct of life. The fearless man may, of course, meet
with sudden disaster, but it is likely that he will pass unscathed
through many difficult situations in which a timid man would come to
grief. This useful kind of self-confidence has, of course, innumerable
forms. One man is confident on mountains, another on the sea, and yet
another in the air. But general self-confidence towards life comes more
than anything else from being accustomed to receive as much of the
right sort of affection as one has need for. And it is this habit of
mind considered as a source of zest that I wish to speak about in the
present chapter.
It is affection received, not affection given, that causes this
sense of security, though it arises most of all from affection
which is reciprocal. Strictly speaking, it is not only affection
but also admiration that has this effect. Persons whose trade is to
secure public admiration, such as actors, preachers, speakers, and
politicians, come to depend more and more upon applause. When they
receive their due meed of public approbation their life is full of
zest; when they do not, they become discontented and self-centred.
The diffused good will of a multitude does for them what is done
for others by the more concentrated affection of the few. The child
whose parents are fond of him accepts their affection as a law of
nature. He does not think very much about it, although it is of great
importance to his happiness. He thinks about the world, about the
adventures that come his way and the more marvellous adventures that
will come his way when he is grown up. But behind all these external
interests there is the feeling that he will be protected from disaster
by parental affection. The child from whom for any reason parental
affection is withdrawn is likely to become timid and unadventurous,
filled with fears and self-pity, and no longer able to meet the world
in a mood of gay exploration. Such a child may set to work at a
surprisingly early age to meditate on life and death and human destiny.
He becomes an introvert, melancholy at first, but seeking ultimately
the unreal consolations of some system of philosophy or theology. The
world is a higgledy-piggledy place, containing things pleasant and
things unpleasant in haphazard sequence. And the desire to make an
intelligible system or pattern out of it is at bottom an outcome of
fear, in fact a kind of agoraphobia or dread of open spaces. Within
the four walls of his library the timid student feels safe. If he can
persuade himself that the universe is equally tidy, he can feel almost
equally safe when he has to venture forth into the streets. Such a man,
if he had received more affection, would have feared the real world
less, and would not have had to invent an ideal world to take its place
in his beliefs.
By no means all affection, however, has this effect in encouraging
adventurousness. The affection given must be itself robust rather than
timid, desiring excellence even more than safety on the part of its
object, though of course by no means indifferent to safety. The timid
mother or nurse, who is perpetually warning children against disasters
that may occur, who thinks that every dog will bite and that every cow
is a bull, may produce in them a timidity equal to her own, and may
cause them to feel that they are never safe except in her immediate
neighbourhood. To the unduly possessive mother this feeling on the
part of a child may be agreeable: she may desire his dependence upon
herself more than his capacity to cope with the world. In that case
her child is probably worse off in the long run than he would be if he
were not loved at all. The habits of mind formed in early years are
likely to persist through life. Many people when they fall in love look
for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of
being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are
not praiseworthy. To many men home is a refuge from the truth: it is
their fears and their timidities that make them enjoy a companionship
in which these feelings are put to rest. They seek from their wives
what they obtained formerly from an unwise mother, and yet they are
surprised if their wives regard them as grown-up children.
To define the best kind of affection is not altogether easy, since
clearly there will be _some_ protective element in it. We do
not feel indifferent to the hurts of people whom we love. I think,
however, that apprehension of misfortune, as opposed to sympathy
with a misfortune that has actually occurred, should play as small a
part as possible in affection. Fear for others is only a shade better
than fear for ourselves. Moreover, it is very often a camouflage for
possessiveness. It is hoped that by rousing their fears a more complete
empire over them can be obtained. This, of course, is one of the
reasons why men have liked timid women, since by protecting them they
came to own them. The amount of solicitude of which a person can be the
object without damage to himself depends upon his character: a person
who is hardy and adventurous can endure a great deal without damage,
whereas a timid person should be encouraged to expect little in this
way.
Affection received has a two-fold function. We have spoken of it
hitherto in connection with security, but in adult life it has an even
more essential biological purpose, namely parenthood. To be unable
to inspire sex love is a grave misfortune to any man or woman, since
it deprives him or her of the greatest joys that life has to offer.
This deprivation is almost sure sooner or later to destroy zest and
produce introversion. Very frequently, however, previous misfortunes
in childhood have produced defects of character which are the cause of
failure to obtain love in later years. This is perhaps more true where
men are concerned than it is as regards women, for on the whole women
tend to love men for their character while men tend to love women for
their appearance. In this respect, it must be said, men show themselves
the inferiors of women, for the qualities that men find pleasing in
women are on the whole less desirable than those that women find
pleasing in men. I am not at all sure, however, that it is easier to
acquire a good character than a good appearance; at any rate, the steps
necessary for the latter are better understood and more readily pursued
by women than are the steps necessary for the former by men.
We have been speaking hitherto of the affection of which a person is
the object. I wish now to speak of the affection that a person gives.
This also is of two different kinds, one of which is perhaps the
most important expression of a zest for life, while the other is an
expression of fear. The former seems to me wholly admirable, while the
latter is at best a consolation. If you are sailing in a ship on a fine
day along a beautiful coast, you admire the coast and feel pleasure in
it. This pleasure is one derived entirely from looking outward, and has
nothing to do with any desperate need of your own. If, on the other
hand, your ship is wrecked and you swim towards the coast, you acquire
for it a new kind of love: it represents security against the waves,
and its beauty or ugliness becomes an unimportant matter. The better
sort of affection corresponds to the feeling of the man whose ship is
secure, the less excellent sort corresponds to that of the shipwrecked
swimmer. The first of these kinds of affection is only possible in so
far as a man feels safe, or at any rate is indifferent to such dangers
as beset him; the latter kind, on the contrary, is caused by the
feeling of insecurity. The feeling caused by insecurity is much more
subjective and self-centred than the other, since the loved person is
valued for services rendered, not for intrinsic qualities. I do not,
however, wish to suggest that this kind of affection has no legitimate
part to play in life. In fact, almost all real affection contains
something of both kinds in combination, and in so far as affection
does really cure the sense of insecurity, it sets a man free to feel
again that interest in the world which in moments of danger and fear
is obscured. But while recognizing the part that such affection has
to play in life, we must still hold that it is less excellent than
the other kind, since it depends upon fear, and fear is an evil, and
also because it is more self-centred. In the best kind of affection
a man hopes for a new happiness rather than for escape from an old
unhappiness.
The best type of affection is reciprocally life-giving; each receives
affection with joy and gives it without effort, and each finds the
whole world more interesting in consequence of the existence of this
reciprocal happiness. There is, however, another kind, by no means
uncommon, in which one person sucks the vitality of the other, one
receives what the other gives, but gives almost nothing in return. Some
very vital people belong to this bloodsucking type. They extract the
vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow
interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull. Such
people use others as means to their own ends, and never consider them
as ends in themselves. Fundamentally they are not interested in those
whom for the moment they think they love; they are interested only in
the stimulus to their own activities, perhaps of a quite impersonal
sort. Evidently this springs from some defect in their nature, but
it is one not altogether easy either to diagnose or to cure. It is
a characteristic frequently associated with great ambition, and is
rooted, I should say, in an unduly one-sided view of what makes human
happiness. Affection in the sense of a genuine reciprocal interest of
two persons in each other, not solely as means to each other’s good,
but rather as a combination having a common good, is one of the most
important elements of real happiness, and the man whose ego is so
enclosed within steel walls that this enlargement of it is impossible
misses the best that life has to offer, however successful he may be
in his career. Ambition which excludes affection from its purview is
generally the result of some kind of anger or hatred against the human
race, produced by unhappiness in youth, by injustices in later life, or
by any of the causes which lead to persecution mania. A too powerful
ego is a prison from which a man must escape if he is to enjoy the
world to the full. A capacity for genuine affection is one of the
marks of the man who has escaped from this prison of self. To receive
affection is by no means enough; affection which is received should
liberate the affection which is to be given, and only where both exist
in equal measure does affection achieve its best possibilities.
Obstacles, psychological and social, to the blossoming of reciprocal
affection are a grave evil, from which the world has always suffered
and still suffers. People are slow to give admiration for fear it
should be misplaced; they are slow to bestow affection for fear
that they should be made to suffer either by the person upon whom
they bestow it or by a censorious world. Caution is enjoined both
in the name of morality and in the name of worldly wisdom, with the
result that generosity and adventurousness are discouraged where the
affections are concerned. All this tends to produce timidity and
anger against mankind, since many people miss throughout life what is
really a fundamental need, and to nine out of ten an indispensable
condition of a happy and expansive attitude towards the world. It is
not to be supposed that those who are what is called immoral are in
this respect superior to those who are not. In sex relations there
is very often almost nothing that can be called real affection; not
infrequently there is even a fundamental hostility. Each is trying
not to give himself or herself away, each is preserving fundamental
loneliness, each remains intact and therefore unfructified. In such
experiences there is no fundamental value. I do not say that they
should be carefully avoided, since the steps necessary to this end
would be likely to interfere also with the occasions where a more
valuable and profound affection could grow up. But I do say that the
only sex relations that have real value are those in which there is no
reticence and in which the whole personality of both becomes merged in
a new collective personality. Of all forms of caution, caution in love
is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FAMILY
Of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past none
is in the present day so disorganized and derailed as the family.
Affection of parents for children and of children for parents is
capable of being one of the greatest sources of happiness, but in
fact at the present day the relations of parents and children are, in
nine cases out of ten, a source of unhappiness to both parties, and
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a source of unhappiness to at
least one of the two parties. This failure of the family to provide
the fundamental satisfaction which in principle it is capable of
yielding is one of the most deep-seated causes of the discontent which
is prevalent in our age. The adult who wishes to have a happy relation
with his own children or to provide a happy life for them must reflect
deeply upon parenthood, and, having reflected, must act wisely. The
subject of the family is far too vast to be dealt with in this volume
except in relation to our own special problem, namely the conquest of
happiness. And even in relation to that problem we can deal with it
only in so far as amelioration lies within the power of each individual
without alterations in the social structure.
This is, of course, a very grave limitation, for the causes of family
unhappiness in our day are of the most diverse sorts, psychological,
economic, social, educational, and political. Where the well-to-do
sections of the community are concerned, two causes have combined to
make women feel parenthood a burden far heavier than it was ever felt
to be in former times. These two causes are, on the one hand, the
opening of careers to single women; on the other hand, the decay of
domestic service. In old days women were driven into marriage by the
intolerable conditions of life for the spinster. The spinster had to
live at home in economic dependence, first upon her father, and then
upon some reluctant brother. She had no occupations to fill her days
and no liberty to enjoy herself outside the sheltered walls of the
family mansion. She had neither the opportunity nor the inclination
for sexual adventure, which she herself profoundly believed to be an
abomination except within marriage. If, in spite of all safeguards,
she lost her virtue through the wiles of some designing fascinator,
her situation was pitiable in the extreme. It is delineated quite
accurately in _The Vicar of Wakefield_:
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from ev’ry eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom is--to die.
The modern spinster does not consider death necessary in these
circumstances. If she has had a good education, she has no difficulty
in making a comfortable living, and is therefore independent of
parental approval. Since parents have lost their economic power over
their daughters, they have become much more chary of expressing moral
disapproval of them; there is not much use in scolding a person who
won’t stay to be scolded. The unmarried young woman of the professional
classes is therefore able nowadays, provided she is not below the
average in intelligence and attractiveness, to enjoy a thoroughly
agreeable life so long as she can keep free from the desire for
children. But if this desire overwhelms her, she is compelled to
marry, and almost certainly to lose her job. She sinks to a much lower
level of comfort than that to which she has been accustomed, since
her husband’s income is very likely no larger than that which she was
previously earning, and has to provide for a family instead of only a
single woman. After having enjoyed independence, she finds it galling
to have to look to another for every penny of necessary expenditure.
For all these reasons such women hesitate to embark upon maternity.
A woman who nevertheless does take the plunge finds herself, as
compared with the women of former generations, confronted with a new
and appalling problem, namely the paucity and bad quality of domestic
service. In consequence of this, she becomes tied to her house,
compelled to perform herself a thousand trivial tasks quite unworthy
of her ability and training, or, if she does not perform them herself,
to ruin her temper by scolding the maids who neglect them. In regard
to the physical care of her children, if she has taken pains to
become well-informed in this matter, she finds that it is impossible,
without grave risk of disaster, to entrust the children to nurses, or
even to leave to others the most elementary precautions in regard to
cleanliness and hygiene, unless she can afford a nurse who has had
an expensive training at some institute. Weighed down by a mass of
trivial detail, she is fortunate indeed if she does not soon lose all
her charm and three-quarters of her intelligence. Too often through
the mere performance of necessary duties such women become wearisome
to their husbands and a nuisance to their children. When the evening
comes and her husband returns from his work, the woman who talks
about her day-time troubles is a bore, and the woman who does not is
absent-minded. In relation to her children, the sacrifices that she
has made in order to have them are so present to her mind that she
is almost sure to demand more reward than it is desirable to expect,
while the constant habit of attending to trivial details will have made
her fussy and small-minded. This is the most pernicious of all the
injustices that she has to suffer: that in consequence of doing her
duty by her family she has lost their affection, whereas if she had
neglected them and remained gay and charming they would probably have
loved her.[4]
These troubles are essentially economic, and so is another which is
almost equally grave. I mean the difficulties in regard to housing
which result from the concentration of populations in large cities. In
the Middle Ages cities were as rural as the country is now. Children
still sing the nursery rhyme:
Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree
As full of apples as may be,
The little boys of London town
They run with sticks to knock them down.
And then they run from hedge to hedge
Until they come to London Bridge.
Paul’s steeple is gone, and I do not know at what date the hedges
disappeared between St. Paul’s and London Bridge. It is many centuries
since the little boys of London town could enjoy such pleasures as
this rhyme suggests, but until not so very long ago the bulk of the
population lived in the country. The towns were not very vast; it was
easy to get out of them, and by no means uncommon to find gardens
attached to many houses in them. Nowadays there is in England an
immense preponderance of the urban over the rural population. In
America this preponderance is as yet slight, but it is very rapidly
increasing. Cities like London and New York are so large that it takes
a very long time to get out of them. Those who live in the city usually
have to be content with a flat, to which, of course, not a square
inch of soil is attached, and in which people of moderate means have
to be content with the absolute minimum of space. If there are young
children, life in a flat is difficult. There is no room for them to
play, and there is no room for their parents to get away from their
noise. Consequently professional men tend more and more to live in the
suburbs. This is undoubtedly desirable from the point of view of the
children, but it adds considerably to the fatigue of the man’s life,
and greatly diminishes the part which he can play in the family.
Such large economic problems, however, it is not my intention to
discuss, since they lie outside the problem with which we are
concerned, namely what the individual can here and now do to find
happiness. We come nearer to this problem when we pass to the
psychological difficulties which exist in the present age in the
relations of parents and children. These are really part of the
problems raised by democracy. In old days there were masters and
slaves: the masters decided what was to be done, and on the whole
liked their slaves, since their slaves ministered to their happiness.
The slaves may possibly have hated their masters, though this did
not happen nearly so universally as democratic theory would have
us suppose. But even if they did hate their masters, their masters
remained unaware of this fact, and the masters at any rate were
happy. With the general acceptance of democratic theory all this was
changed: slaves who had acquiesced before ceased to acquiesce; masters
who had formerly had no doubts as to their rights became hesitant
and uncertain. Friction arose and caused unhappiness on both sides.
I am not saying all this as an argument against democracy, for the
troubles in question are only such as are inevitable in any important
transition. But it is no use to blink the fact that, while this
transition is in progress, it makes the world uncomfortable.
The change in the relation between parents and children is a particular
example of the general spread of democracy. Parents are no longer sure
of their rights as against their children; children no longer feel
that they owe respect to their parents. The virtue of obedience, which
was formerly exacted without question, has become unfashionable, and
rightly so. Psycho-analysis has terrified educated parents with the
fear of the harm they may unwittingly do their children. If they kiss
them, they may produce an Œdipus complex; if they do not they may
produce a fury of jealousy. If they order the children to do things
they may be producing a sense of sin; if they do not, the children
acquire habits which the parents think undesirable. When they see their
baby sucking his thumb, they draw all kinds of terrifying inferences,
but they are quite at a loss as to what to do to stop him. Parenthood,
which used to be a triumphant exercise of power, has become timid,
anxious, and filled with conscientious doubts. The old simple joys are
lost, and that at the very moment when, owing to the new freedom of
single women, the mother has had to sacrifice much more than formerly
in deciding upon maternity. In these circumstances conscientious
mothers ask too little of their children, and unconscientious mothers
ask too much. Conscientious mothers restrain their natural affection
and become shy; unconscientious mothers seek in their children a
compensation for the joys that they have had to forgo. In the one
case the child’s affections are starved, in the other they are
over-stimulated. In neither case is there any of that simple and
natural happiness that the family at its best can provide.
In view of all these troubles, is it any wonder that the birth-rate
declines? The decline of the birth-rate in the population at large has
reached a point which shows that the population will soon begin to
dwindle, but among the well-to-do classes this point has long ago been
passed, not only in one country, but in practically all the most highly
civilized countries. There are not very many statistics available as
to the birth-rate among the well-to-do, but two facts may be quoted
from Jean Ayling’s book alluded to above. It appears that in Stockholm
in the years 1919 to 1922 the fertility of professional women was only
one-third of that of the population at large, and that among the four
thousand graduates of Wellesley College, U.S.A., in the period 1896
to 1913 the total number of children is about three thousand, whereas
to prevent an actual dwindling of the stock there should have been
eight thousand children none of whom had died young. There can be
no doubt that the civilization produced by the white races has this
singular characteristic, that in proportion as men and women absorb
it, they become sterile. The most civilized are the most sterile; the
least civilized are the most fertile; and between the two there is a
continual gradation. At present the most intelligent sections of the
Western nations are dying out. Within a very few years the Western
nations as a whole will be diminishing in numbers except in so far
as their stocks are replenished by immigration from less civilized
regions. And as soon as the immigrants acquire the civilization of
the country of their adoption they in turn will become comparatively
sterile. It is clear that a civilization which has this characteristic
is unstable; unless it can be induced to reproduce its numbers, it
must sooner or later die out and give place to some other civilization
in which the urge towards parenthood has retained enough strength to
prevent the population from declining.
Official moralists in every Western country have endeavoured to treat
this problem by means of exhortations and sentimentality. On the one
hand, they say that it is the duty of every married couple to have
as many children as God wills, regardless of any prospect that such
children may have of health and happiness. On the other hand, male
divines prate about the sacred joys of motherhood and pretend that a
large family of diseased and poverty-stricken infants is a source
of happiness. The State joins in with the argument that an adequate
crop of cannon fodder is necessary, for how can all these exquisite
and ingenious weapons of destruction function adequately unless there
are sufficient populations left for them to destroy? Strange to say,
the individual parent, even if he accepts these arguments as applied
to others, remains entirely deaf to them as applied to himself. The
psychology of the divines and the patriots is at fault. The divines
may succeed so long as they can successfully threaten hell-fire, but
it is only a minority of the population that now takes this threat
seriously. And no threat short of this is adequate to control behaviour
in a matter so essentially private. As for the State, its argument
is altogether too ferocious. People may agree that others ought to
provide cannon fodder, but they are not attracted by the prospect of
having their own children used in this way. All that the State can do,
therefore, is to endeavour to keep the poor in ignorance, an effort
which, as the statistics show, is singularly unsuccessful except in
the most backward of Western countries. Very few men or women will
have children from a sense of public duty, even if it were far clearer
than it is that any such public duty exists. When men and women have
children, they do so either because they believe that children will
add to their happiness, or because they do not know how to prevent
them. The latter reason still operates very powerfully, but it is
steadily diminishing in potency. And nothing that either the State
or the Churches can do will prevent this diminution from continuing.
It is necessary, therefore, if the white races are to survive, that
parenthood should again become capable of yielding happiness to parents.
When one considers human nature apart from the circumstances of the
present day, it is clear, I think, that parenthood is psychologically
capable of providing the greatest and most enduring happiness that
life has to offer. This, no doubt, is more true of women than of men,
but it is more true of men than most moderns are inclined to suppose.
It is taken for granted in almost all literature before the present
age. Hecuba cares more for her children than for Priam; MacDuff cares
more for his children than for his wife. In the Old Testament both men
and women are passionately concerned to leave descendants; in China
and Japan this attitude has persisted down to our own day. It will be
said that this desire is due to ancestor worship. I think, however,
that the contrary is the truth, namely that ancestor worship is a
reflection of the interest people take in the persistence of their
family. Reverting to the professional women whom we were considering
a moment ago, it is clear that the urge to have children must be very
powerful, for otherwise none of them would make the sacrifices required
in order to satisfy it. For my own part, speaking personally, I have
found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other that I have
experienced. I believe that when circumstances lead men or women to
forgo this happiness, a very deep need remains ungratified, and that
this produces a dissatisfaction and listlessness of which the cause
may remain quite unknown. To be happy in this world, especially when
youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated
individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life
flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. As a
conscious sentiment, expressed in set terms, this involves no doubt
a hyper-civilized and intellectual outlook upon the world, but as a
vague instinctive emotion it is primitive and natural, and it is its
absence that is hyper-civilized. A man who is capable of some great
and remarkable achievement which sets its stamp upon future ages may
gratify this feeling through his work, but for men and women who have
no exceptional gifts, the only way to do so is through children. Those
who have allowed their procreative impulses to become atrophied have
separated themselves from the stream of life, and in so doing have
run a grave risk of becoming desiccated. For them, unless they are
exceptionally impersonal, death ends all. The world that shall come
after them does not concern them, and because of this their doings
appear to themselves trivial and unimportant. To the man or woman
who has children and grandchildren and loves them with a natural
affection, the future is important, at any rate to the limit of their
lives, not only through morality or through an effort of imagination,
but naturally and instinctively. And the man whose interests have
been stretched to this extent beyond his personal life is likely to
be able to stretch them still further. Like Abraham, he will derive
satisfaction from the thought that his seed are to inherit the promised
land even if this is not to happen for many generations. And through
such feelings he is saved from the sense of futility which otherwise
deadens all his emotions.