I see that Dean Inge has been lamenting that he did not live a couple
of generations ago. He seems to think that the world was a much more
desirable place then, that it has been going to the dogs ever since,
and that the only comfortable thought that we can cultivate in this
degenerate time is that we shall soon be out of it. Assuming for the
moment that the world was a happier place fifty or sixty years ago, I
doubt whether it follows that the Dean would have been happier in it
than he is in our world to-day. The measure of personal happiness is
fortunately not dependent on external circumstances. It is affected
by them, of course. Most of us are more agreeable people when we
have dined than when we are hungry, when we have slept well than when
we have not slept at all, when our horse or our party has won than
when it has lost, when things go right than when things go wrong. No
philosophy is an anodyne for the toothache, and the east wind plays
havoc with the feelings of the best of us. In these and a thousand
other ways we are the sport of circumstance, but in this respect we
are no better and no worse off than our forbears fifty years ago or
five hundred years ago, or than our descendants will be fifty or five
hundred years hence.
But our essential happiness or unhappiness is independent of these
things. It is a quality of character. It may have a physical basis.
Our happiness, said the French lady to Boswell, depends upon the
circulation of the blood. It may equally depend on our nervous
constitution or the functioning of our organs. I cannot doubt that
the Carlyles would have been happier people if they had had better
digestions. They lived in that period which is held up to us as the
time when it was good to be alive, but it is doubtful whether two
more miserable people than they were are to be found on earth to-day,
and Carlyle himself damned his own time even more bitterly than the
Dean damns this. He would have damned any time in which he had the
misfortune to live, for life would always have been a sorrowful
affair to him. It was his habit of mind. And the world for each of
us is what the mind makes it.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
In short, whether life is a comedy or a tragedy or just a humdrum
affair that cannot be called either, does not depend upon the time in
which we happen to live, for it is all these things at all times. It
depends upon our point of view. I fancy Little Tich would have found
the world as amusing as a country fair if he had lived in the Rome of
Caligula, and I am sure that Carlyle would have found it as sad as a
funeral if he had lived in the Garden of Eden. There is no question
of merit or virtue in the matter. If there is, it is not the
meritorious or the virtuous who are usually the most happy. It is
they who take life lightly and indifferently who get the most fun out
of it. I doubt whether there was ever a more odious monster on earth
than Sulla, whose savageries and debaucheries made him not so much a
man as a satyr. Yet, except for the hideous disease from which he
died, there can hardly ever have been a more fortunate man or one who
found the world, in a gross sense, a more amusing place. Even when
his corpse was burned with the accustomed solemnities, the wind blew
and the rain fell in perfect time and sequence, "so that," as
Plutarch says, "his good fortune was firm even to the last, and did
as it were officiate at his funeral." Dean Swift cursed the day he
was born, though he lived in the relatively comfortable time of Queen
Anne, and being the man he was, he would have cursed the day he was
born no matter what period of history he had lived in. He carried an
unhappy world in the terrific gloom of his own mind.
Indeed, if we want to play with the idea of how we might have been
happy, it is not the thought of living in other times that will
satisfy us, but the thought of living other men's lives. If I had
the privilege of antedating my birth, I would not bother about the
period, but would choose very carefully my personality. Among the
ancients I should select to be Herodotus, whose immortal work is
saturated with the sunshine of as delighted a spirit as ever walked
the earth. And among the moderns I would choose with equal
confidence to live the life of Macaulay. It is true that he wept
very copiously. I have amused myself sometimes in reading his
"Life," by collating the occasions on which he was in tears. He
could have said with Michelet, "Le don que Saint Louis demande et
n'obtient pas, je l'eus 'Le don des larmes.'" Novels and poetry were
bedewed with his tears. He wept whenever he was reminded of the
sister he had lost, when he visited his old home in Bloomsbury, when
he said "Hail!" and when he said "Farewell!" when friends fell away,
and when foes, like Peel, passed into silence. But, in spite of his
overcharged affection, what a rich, full, joyous life it was! What
zest, what kindliness, what noble feeling, what fine living! I put
Macaulay lower in the scale of literature than I once did, but in the
scale of humanity there is none higher.
There never was a golden age in which happiness was the universal
portion, nor one in which it was denied to those who had the gift
within. It is a personal affair, not an affair of time, place or
condition, and if we are sad, it is idle to lament that we were not
born in days when we could have been merry. Sancho Panza is happy in
any age, and Don Quixote is always sorrowful.