_A blunt and candid critic, commenting on Keats' famous axiom, "Beauty
is Truth, Truth Beauty," said: "Then what is the use of having two
words for the same thing?" And it is true that words cease to have any
real meaning when they are so loosely applied. The same mistake is
often made about happiness. It is supposed to be, not a quality, but a
condition, or rather an equipoise of qualities and conditions. It is
spoken of and thought of as if it were a sort of blend of virtue and
health and amusement and sunshiny weather, and no doubt it is often
found in combination with these things. But it is a separate quality,
for all that, and not merely a result of faculties and circumstances.
It is strangely and wilfully independent of its surroundings, and it is
not inconsistent with the gravest discomfort of body and even
affliction of mind. A ruinous combination of distressing circumstances
does not by any means inevitably produce unhappiness. The martyr who
sings at the stake among the flames is presumably happy. It may be said
that he balances one consideration against another, and decides that
his condition is, on the whole, enviable and delightful; but I do not
believe that it is a mental process at all, and if the martyr is happy,
he is so inevitably and instinctively. Some would urge that happiness
is only an effect, like colour. There is no colour in the dark, but as
soon as light is admitted, a thing that we call green, such as a leaf
or a wall-paper, has the power of selecting and reflecting the green
rays, and rejecting all rays that are not green. But the leaf or the
paper is not in itself green; it has only a power of seizing upon and
displaying greenness. So some would urge that temperaments are not
inherently happy, but have the power or the instinct for extracting the
happy elements out of life, and rejecting or nullifying the unhappy
elements. But this I believe to be a mistake; the happy temperament is
not necessarily made unhappy by being plunged in misfortune, while the
unhappy temperament has the power of secreting unhappiness out of the
most agreeable combination of circumstances. Every one must surely
recollect occasions in their own lives when, by all the rules of the
game, they ought to have been unhappy, while as a matter of fact they
were entirely tranquil and contented. I have been happy in a dentist's
chair, and by far the happiest holiday I ever spent in my life was
under surroundings of discomfort and squalor such as I never before or
since experienced. Those surroundings were certainly not in themselves
productive of happiness; but neither did they detract from it. The
pathos of the situation is that we all desire happiness--it is merely
priggish to pretend that it is otherwise--and that we do not know in
the least how to attain it. Some few people go straight for it and
reach it; some people find it by turning their back upon what they most
desire, and walking in the opposite direction. I had a friend once who
made up his mind that to be happy he must make a fortune. He went
through absurd privations and endured intolerable labours; he did make
a fortune, and retired upon it at an early age, and immediately became
a thoroughly unhappy man, having lost all power of enjoying or
employing his leisure, and finding himself hopelessly and irremediably
bored. Of course, boredom is the surest source of unhappiness, but
boredom is not the result of the things we do or avoid doing, but some
inner weariness of spirit, which imports itself into occupation and
leisure alike, if it is there. There is no nostrum, no receipt for
taking it away. A kindly adviser will say to a bored man, "All this
discontent comes from thinking too much about yourself; if only you
would throw yourself a little into the lives and problems of others, it
would all disappear!" Of course it would! But it is just what the bored
man cannot do; and the advice is just as practical as to say
encouragingly to a man suffering from toothache, "If the pain would
only go away, you would soon be well." Ruskin was once consulted by an
anxious person, who complained that he was unhappy, and said that he
attributed it to the fact that he was so useless. Ruskin replied with
trenchant good sense: "It is your duty to try to be innocently happy
first, and useful afterwards if you can."
What, then, can we do in the matter? How are we to secure happiness?
The answer is that we cannot; that we must take it as it comes, like
the sunshine and the spring. Few of us are in a position to alter at a
moment's notice the course of our lives. It is more or less laid down
for us what paths we have to tread, and in whose company. We can to a
certain extent, taught by grim experience of the habits, thoughts,
tempers, passions, anticipations, retrospects, that disturb our
tranquillity, avoid occasions of stumbling. We can undertake small
responsibilities, which we shall be ashamed to neglect; we can, so to
speak, diet our minds and hearts, avoiding unwholesome food and
debilitating excesses. To a certain extent, I say, for the old fault
has a horrid pertinacity, and even when felled in fair fight, has a
vile trick of recovering its energies and leaping on us from some
ambush by the way, as we saunter, blithely conscious of our victory. It
may be a discouraging and an oppressive thought, but the only hope lies
in good sense and patience. There are no short cuts; we have to tread
every inch of the road.
But we may at least do one thing. We may speak frankly of our
experiences, without either pose or concealment. It does us no harm to
confess our failures, and it puts courage into other pilgrims, who know
at least that they are not alone in their encounters with the
hobgoblins. And no less frankly, too, may we speak of the fine things
that we have seen and heard by the way, the blue hills and winding
waters of which we have caught a glimpse from the brow of the windswept
hill, the talk and aspect of other wayfarers whom we have met, the
noble buildings of the ancient city, the stately avenue which the dull
road intersects unaware, the embowered hamlet, the leafy forest dingle,
the bleat of sheep on the dewy upland, the birds' song at evening--all
that strikes sharp and clear and desirable upon our fresh or tired
sense.
For one thing is certain, that the end is not yet; and that there is
something done for the soul both by the morning brightness and the
evening heaviness which can be effected in no other way. And in this
spirit we may look back on our mistakes, sad as they were, and on our
triumphs, which are sometimes sadder still, and know that they were not
mere accidents and obstacles which might have been otherwise--they were
rather the very stuff and essence of the soul showing through its
enfolding garb.
And then, too, if we have suffered, as we all must suffer if we have
any heart or blood or brain at all, we can learn the blessed fact of
the utter powerlessness of suffering to hurt or darken us. Its horror
lies in the continuance of it, in the shuddering anticipation of all we
may yet have to endure; but once over, it becomes instantly either like
a cloud melting in the blue of heaven, or, better still a joyful memory
of a pain that braced and purified. No one ever gives a thought, except
a grateful one, to past suffering. If it leaves its handwriting on brow
and cheek, it leaves no shadow on the spirit within. It is so easy to
see this in the lives of others, however hard it is to realise it for
oneself. What interest is there in the record of the life of a
perfectly prosperous and equable person? And what inspiration is equal
to that which comes when we read the life of one who suffered much,
when we see the hope that rose superior to thwarted designs and broken
purposes, and the joy that came of realising that not through easy and
graceful triumph is the soul made strong? Why does one ask oneself
about the dead hero, when his life rounds itself to the view, not
whether he had enough of prosperity and honour to content him, but
whether he had enough of pain and self-reproach to perfect his
humanity? Suffering is no part of the soul; the soul has need to
suffer, but it is made to rejoice; and when it has earned its joy, it
will abide in it.
And now a word of personal experience. This book is a record of an
experiment in happiness. I had the opportunity, and I took it, of
arranging my life in every respect exactly as I desired. It was my
design to live alone in joy; not to exclude others, but to admit them
for my pleasure and at my will. I thought that by desiring little, by
sacrificing quantity of delight for quality, I should gain much. And I
will as frankly confess that I did not succeed in capturing the
tranquillity I desired. I found many pretty jewels by the way, but the
pearl of price lay hid.
And yet it would be idle to say that I regret it. I may wish that it
had all fallen out otherwise, that things had been more comfortably
arranged, that I had been allowed to dream away the days in my
hermitage; but it was not to be; and I have at least learned that not
thus can the end be attained. The story of my failure cannot be told
here, but I hope yet to find strength and skill to tell it. At present
I have but endeavoured to catch the texture of the pleasant days,
before my visions began to fade about me. And indeed I can say
sincerely that those days were happy; but the root of the mistake was
this: I have by nature a very keen appetite for the subtle flavours of
life, a sense of beauty in simple things, a relish for the absurdities
and oddities as well as for the beauties and finenesses of temperament,
a critical appreciation of the characteristic qualities of landscapes
and buildings, a sense which finds satisfaction as well in such
commonplace things as the variety of grotesque vehicles that go to
compose a luggage train, or the grass-grown, scarped, water-logged
excavations of a brick-field, as in the sharp rock-horns of some craggy
mountain, impulsive as a frozen flame, or the soft outlines of fleecy
clouds that race over a sapphire heaven. If one is thus endowed by
nature, it seems such an easy thing to seclude oneself from life, and
to find endless joy in sight and hearing and critical appreciation.
Instead of mingling with the throng, marching and fighting, fearing and
suffering, it seems easy to stand apart and let nature and art and life
unfold itself before one in a rich panorama. But not on such terms can
life be lived. One hopes to avoid suffering by aloofness; but there
falls upon the spirit a worse sickness than the weariness of toil--the
ache of pent-up activities and self-tortured mystifications. The soul
becomes involved in a dreary metaphysic, wondering fruitlessly what it
is that mars the sweet and beautiful world. The fact is that one is
purloining experience instead of paying the natural price for it,
estimating things by the outside instead of from the inside, and
growing thus to care more for the strangeness, the contrast, the
picturesqueness of it all, than for the love and the hope and the
elemental forces, of which the world is but the garb and scene.
Here in this book the mind turns from itself and its rest, when it has
satisfied its first delight in creating the home, the setting, the
scenery, so to speak, of the drama; turns to the men and women who
cross the stage, surveys their gestures and glances, interprets their
movements and silences; and then winds out into the further distance,
the towns, the buildings, the roads, that stand for the designs and
desires of pilgrims that have passed into the unknown country, leaving
their provender for later hands to use. But the whole book, if I may
say it, is the prelude to the further scene, the silent entry of Fate,
the coming of the Master to survey the servant's work.
Those pleasant days have a savour of their own for this one
reason--that they were not spent in a mere drifting indolence or a
luxurious abandonment. They were deliberately planned, intently lived,
carefully employed; behind the pleasures lay a great tract of solid
work, very diligently pursued. That was to have been the backbone of
the whole; and it is for this that I have no sense of regret or
contrition about it. It was an experiment; and if in one sense it
failed, because it did not take account of energies and elements
unused, in another sense it succeeded, because one cannot learn things
in this world by hearsay, but only by burning one's fingers in what
seemed so comfortable a flame. It was done, too, on the right lines,
with the desire not to be dependent upon diversion and stir and
business, but to approach life simply and directly, practising for the
days of loneliness and decline; and this was the error, that it tried
to mould life too much, to select from its material, to reject its
dross and debris, to rifle rather than to earn the treasure, to limit
hopes, to dip the wings of inconvenient desires.
But it is difficult, without experiment, to realise the strain of
living life too much in one mood and in one key. Neither is it the sign
of a healthy appetite to be particular about one's food. This I freely
admit. I came to see that, trained as I had been in certain habits of
life and work, habituated to certain experiences, the savour of the
interludes had owed their pungency to their economy and rarity.
And so, like some weft of opalescent mist, the sweet mirage melted in
the noonday. What I then saw I will leave to be told hereafter; but it
was not what I desired nor what I expected.
What, then, remains of the time of plenty? Not, I am thankful to say,
either vanity or vexation of spirit. It was what remains to the ruffled
bird, as he shivers in the leafless tree, in which he had sung so loud
in the high summer, embowered in greenness and rustling leafage. No
sense of the hollowness or sadness of life; but rather a quickened
knowledge of its delight and its intensity. It is the same feeling that
one has when one speeds swiftly in a train near to some place where one
lived long ago, and sees glimpses of familiar woods and roads and
houses. One knows well that others are living and working, sauntering
and dreaming, in the rooms, the gardens, the paths where one's own
energies once ran so swiftly; yet the old life seems to be there all
the time, hidden away behind the woods and walls, if one could but find
it! But I no more wish my experience away, or wish it otherwise, than I
wish I had never loved one who is gone from me, or that I had never
heard a strain of sweet music, because it has died upon the air.
Because I did not find what I was in search of, or only found a shadow
of it, I do not believe that it is not there--the wheat-flour and the
honey are in the hand of God. I should have tasted them if I had but
walked in His way! Nay, I did taste them; and when He gives me grace to
hearken, I shall be fed and satisfied._
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
Edinburgh & London
Works by Arthur G. Benson, C.V.O.
MEMOIRS OF ARTHUR HAMILTON.
ARCHBISHOP LAUD: A Study.
POEMS.
LYRICS.
ESSAYS.
LORD VYET and Other Poems.
FASTI ETONENSES.
LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP BENSON.
THE PROFESSOR and Other Poems.
THE SCHOOLMASTER.
THE HOUSE OF QUIET.
TENNYSON (Little Biographies Series).
SELECTIONS FROM WHITTIER.
THE HILL OF TROUBLE.
THE ISLES OF SUNSET.
ROSSETTI (English Men of Letters Series).
PEACE and Other Poems.
EDWARD FITZGERALD (English Men of Letters Series).
THE UPTON LETTERS.
THE THREAD OF GOLD.
WALTER PATER (English Men of Letters Series).
FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW.
THE GATE OF DEATH.
BESIDE STILL WATERS.
THE ALTAR FIRE.
AT LARGE.
POEMS (Collected).
THE SILENT ISLE.
RUSKIN: A Study in Personality.
THE LEAVES OF THE TREE.
THE CHILD OF THE DAWN.
PAUL THE MINSTREL and Other Stories.
THY ROD AND THY STAFF.
ALONG THE ROAD.
With H.F.W. Tatham
MEN OF MIGHT.
Edited, with Viscount Esher
SELECTIONS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF QUEEN VICTORIA.