Before entering into a more particular account of the chief elements of
a happy life it may be useful to devote a few pages to some general
considerations on the subject.
One of the first and most clearly recognised rules to be observed is
that happiness is most likely to be attained when it is not the direct
object of pursuit. In early youth we are accustomed to divide life
broadly into work and play, regarding the first as duty or necessity and
the second as pleasure. One of the great differences between childhood
and manhood is that we come to like our work more than our play. It
becomes to us, if not the chief pleasure, at least the chief interest of
our lives, and even when it is not this, an essential condition of our
happiness. Few lives produce so little happiness as those that are
aimless and unoccupied. Apart from all considerations of right and
wrong, one of the first conditions of a happy life is that it should be
a full and busy one, directed to the attainment of aims outside
ourselves. Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the
bark of human happiness is most commonly wrecked. If a life of luxurious
idleness and selfish ease in some measure saves men from the first
danger, it seldom fails to bring with it the second. No change of scene,
no multiplicity of selfish pleasures will in the long run enable them
to escape it. As Carlyle says, 'The restless, gnawing ennui which, like
a dark, dim, ocean flood, communicating with the Phlegethons and Stygian
deeps, begirdles every human life so guided--is it not the painful cry
even of that imprisoned heroism?... You ask for happiness. "Oh give me
happiness," and they hand you ever new varieties of covering for the
skin, ever new kinds of supply for the digestive apparatus.... Well,
rejoice in your upholsteries and cookeries if so be they will make you
"happy." Let the varieties of them be continual and innumerable. In all
things let perpetual change, if that is a perpetual blessing to you, be
your portion instead of mine. Incur the prophet's curse and in all
things in this sublunary world "make yourselves like unto a wheel."
Mount into your railways; whirl from place to place at the rate of fifty
or, if you like, of five hundred miles an hour; you cannot escape from
that inexorable, all-encircling ocean moan of ennui. No; if you could
mount to the stars and do yacht voyages under the belts of Jupiter or
stalk deer on the ring of Saturn it would still begirdle you. You cannot
escape from it; you can but change your place in it without solacement
except one moment's. That prophetic Sermon from the Deeps will continue
with you till you wisely interpret it and do it or else till the Crack
of Doom swallow it and you.'[6]
It needs but a few years of life experience to realise the profound
truth of this passage. An ideal life would be furnished with abundant
work of a kind that is congenial both to our intellects and our
characters and that brings with it much interest and little anxiety. Few
of us can command this. Most men's work is largely determined for them
by circumstances, though in the guidance of life there are many
alternatives and much room for skilful pilotage. But the first great
rule is that we must do something--that life must have a purpose and an
aim--that work should be not merely occasional and spasmodic, but steady
and continuous. Pleasure is a jewel which will only retain its lustre
when it is in a setting of work, and a vacant life is one of the worst
of pains, though the islands of leisure that stud a crowded,
well-occupied life may be among the things to which we look back with
the greatest delight.
Another great truth is conveyed in the saying of Aristotle that a wise
man will make it his aim rather to avoid suffering than to attain
pleasure. Men can in reality do very little to mitigate the force of the
great bereavements and the other graver calamities of life. All our
systems of philosophy and reasoning are vain when confronted with them.
Innate temperament which we cannot greatly change determines whether we
sink crushed beneath the blow or possess the buoyancy that can restore
health to our natures. The conscious and deliberate pursuit of pleasure
is attended by many deceptions and illusions, and rarely leads to
lasting happiness. But we can do very much by prudence, self-restraint
and intelligent regulation so to manage life as to avoid a large
proportion of its calamities and at the same time, by preserving the
affections pure and undimmed, by diversifying interests and forming
active habits, to combat its tedium and despondency.
Another truth is that both the greatest pleasures and the keenest pains
of life lie much more in those humbler spheres which are accessible to
all than on the rare pinnacles to which only the most gifted or the most
fortunate can attain. It would probably be found upon examination that
most men who have devoted their lives successfully to great labours and
ambitions, and who have received the most splendid gifts from Fortune,
have nevertheless found their chief pleasure in things unconnected with
their main pursuits and generally within the reach of common men.
Domestic pleasures, pleasures of scenery, pleasures of reading,
pleasures of travel or of sport have been the highest enjoyment of men
of great ambition, intellect, wealth and position. There is a curious
passage in Lord Althorp's Life in which that most popular and successful
statesman, towards the close of his long parliamentary life, expressed
his emphatic conviction that 'the thing that gave him the greatest
pleasure in the world' was 'to see sporting dogs hunt.'[7] I can myself
recollect going over a country place with an old member of Parliament
who had sat in the House of Commons for nearly fifty years of the most
momentous period of modern English history. If questioned he could tell
about the stirring scenes of the great Reform Bill of 1832, but it was
curious to observe how speedily and inevitably he passed from such
matters to the history of the trees on his estate which he had planted
and watched at every stage of their growth, and how evidently in the
retrospect of life it was to these things and not to the incidents of a
long parliamentary career that his affections naturally turned. I once
asked an illustrious public man who had served his country with
brilliant success in many lands, and who was spending the evening of his
life as an active country gentleman in a place which he dearly loved,
whether he did not find this sphere too contracted for his happiness.
'Never for a day,' he answered; 'and in every country where I have been,
in every post which I have filled, the thought of this place has always
been at the back of my mind.' A great writer who had devoted almost his
whole life to one gigantic work, and to his own surprise brought it at
last to a successful end, sadly observed that amid the congratulations
that poured in to him from every side he could not help feeling, when he
analysed his own emotions, how tepid was the satisfaction which such a
triumph could give him, and what much more vivid gratification he had
come to take in hearing the approaching steps of some little children
whom he had taught to love him.
It is one of the paradoxes of human nature that the things that are most
struggled for and the things that are most envied are not those which
give either the most intense or the most unmixed joy. Ambition is the
luxury of the happy. It is sometimes, but more rarely, the consolation
and distraction of the wretched; but most of those who have trodden its
paths, if they deal honestly with themselves, will acknowledge that the
gravest disappointments of public life dwindle into insignificance
compared with the poignancy of suffering endured at the deathbed of a
wife or of a child, and that within the small circle of a family life
they have found more real happiness than the applause of nations could
ever give.
Look down, look down from your glittering heights,
And tell us, ye sons of glory,
The joys and the pangs of your eagle flights,
The triumph that crowned the story,
The rapture that thrilled when the goal was won,
The goal of a life's desire;
And a voice replied from the setting sun,
Nay, the dearest and best lies nigher.
How oft in such hours our fond thoughts stray
To the dream of two idle lovers;
To the young wife's kiss; to the child at play;
Or the grave which the long grass covers!
And little we'd reck of power or gold,
And of all life's vain endeavour,
If the heart could glow as it glowed of old,
And if youth could abide for ever.
Another consideration in the cultivation of happiness is the importance
of acquiring the habit of realising our blessings while they last. It is
one of the saddest facts of human nature that we commonly only learn
their value by their loss. This, as I have already noticed, is very
evidently the case with health. By the laws of our being we are almost
unconscious of the action of our bodily organs as long as they are
working well. It is only when they are deranged, obstructed or impaired
that our attention becomes concentrated upon them. In consequence of
this a state of perfect health is rarely fully appreciated until it is
lost and during a short period after it has been regained. Gray has
described the new sensation of pleasure which convalescence gives in
well-known lines:
See the wretch who long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost
And breathe and walk again;
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening Paradise.
And what is true of health is true of other things. It is only when some
calamity breaks the calm tenor of our ways and deprives us of some gift
of fortune we have long enjoyed that we feel how great was the value of
what we have lost. There are times in the lives of most of us when we
would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though
that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.
Sometimes, indeed, our perception of this contrast brings with it a
lasting and salutary result. In the medicine of Nature a chronic and
abiding disquietude or morbidness of temperament is often cured by some
keen though more transient sorrow which violently changes the current of
our thoughts and imaginations.
The difference between knowledge and realisation is one of the facts of
our nature that are most worthy of our attention. Every human mind
contains great masses of inert, passive, undisputed knowledge which
exercise no real influence on thought or character till something occurs
which touches our imagination and quickens this knowledge into
activity. Very few things contribute so much to the happiness of life as
a constant realisation of the blessings we enjoy. The difference between
a naturally contented and a naturally discontented nature is one of the
marked differences of innate temperament, but we can do much to
cultivate that habit of dwelling on the benefits of our lot which
converts acquiescence into a more positive enjoyment. Religion in this
field does much, for it inculcates thanksgiving as well as prayer,
gratitude for the present and the past as well as hope for the future.
Among secular influences, contrast and comparison have the greatest
value. Some minds are always looking on the fortunes that are above them
and comparing their own penury with the opulence of others. A wise
nature will take an opposite course and will cultivate the habit of
looking rather at the round of the ladder of fortune which is below our
own and realising the countless points in which our lot is better than
that of others. As Dr. Johnson says, 'Few are placed in a situation so
gloomy and distressful as not to see every day beings yet more forlorn
and miserable from whom they may learn to rejoice in their own lot.'
The consolation men derive amid their misfortunes from reflecting upon
the still greater misfortunes of others and thus lightening their own by
contrast is a topic which must be delicately used, but when so used it
is not wrong and it often proves very efficacious. Perhaps the pleasure
La Rochefoucauld pretends that men take in the misfortunes of their best
friends, if it is a real thing, is partly due to this consideration, as
the feeling of pity which is inspired by some sudden death or great
trouble falling on others is certainly not wholly unconnected with the
realisation that such calamities might fall upon ourselves. It is worthy
of notice, however, that while all moralists recognise content as one of
the chief ingredients of happiness, some of the strongest influences of
modern industrial civilisation are antagonistic to it. The whole theory
of progress as taught by Political Economy rests upon the importance of
creating wants and desires as a stimulus to exertion. There are
countries, especially in southern climates, where the wants of men are
very few, and where, as long as those wants are satisfied, men will live
a careless and contented life, enjoying the present, thinking very
little of the future. Whether the sum of enjoyment in such a population
is really less than in our more advanced civilisation is at least open
to question. It is a remark of Schopenhauer that the Idyll, which is the
only form of poetry specially devoted to the description of human
felicity, always paints life in its simplest and least elaborated form,
and he sees in this an illustration of his doctrine that the greatest
happiness will be found in the simplest and even most uniform life
provided it escapes the evil of ennui. The political economist, however,
will pronounce the condition of such a people as I have described a
deplorable one, and in order to raise them his first task will be to
infuse into them some discontent with their lot, to persuade them to
multiply their wants and to aspire to a higher standard of comfort, to a
fuller and a larger existence. A discontent with existing circumstances
is the chief source of a desire to improve them, and this desire is the
mainspring of progress. In this theory of life, happiness is sought,
not in content, but in improved circumstances, in the development of new
capacities of enjoyment, in the pleasure which active existence
naturally gives. To maintain in their due proportion in our nature the
spirit of content and the desire to improve, to combine a realised
appreciation of the blessings we enjoy with a healthy and well-regulated
ambition, is no easy thing, but it is the problem which all who aspire
to a perfect life should set before themselves. _In medio tutissimus
ibis_ is eminently true of the cultivation of character, and some of its
best elements become pernicious in their extremes. Thus prudent
forethought, which is one of the first conditions of a successful life,
may easily degenerate into that most miserable state of mind in which
men are perpetually anticipating and dwelling upon the uncertain dangers
and evils of an uncertain future. How much indeed of the happiness and
misery of men may be included under those two words, realisation and
anticipation!
There is no such thing as a Eudæmometer measuring with accuracy the
degrees of happiness realised by men in different ages, under different
circumstances, and with different characters. Perhaps if such a thing
existed it might tend to discourage us by showing that diversities and
improvements of circumstances affect real happiness in a smaller degree
than we are accustomed to imagine. Our nature accommodates itself
speedily to improved circumstances, and they cease to give positive
pleasure while their loss is acutely painful. Advanced civilisation
brings with it countless and inestimable benefits, but it also brings
with it many forms of suffering from which a ruder existence is exempt.
There is some reason to believe that it is usually accompanied with a
lower range of animal spirits, and it is certainly accompanied with an
increased sensitiveness to pain. Some philosophers have contended that
this is the best of all possible worlds. It is difficult to believe so,
as the whole object of human effort is to make it a better one. But the
success of that effort is more apparent in the many terrible forms of
human suffering which it has abolished or diminished than in the higher
level of positive happiness that has been attained.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] _Latter-day Pamphlets:_ 'Jesuitism.'
[7] Le Marchant's _Life of Althorp_, p. 143.