How far our Happiness depends on Nature and Fate.
I. _Our Bodily and Mental Constitutions._
To live happily, we must in the first place _live_. Transparent
truism, but how often forgotten! How many of our pleasures tend to
weaken life, rather than to strengthen and to lengthen it!
Some philosophers have found the sense of existence a sufficient
synonym for happiness. Sir William Hamilton expressed this opinion
with perhaps an ambiguous under-meaning when he said,――“To lead a
happy life is to live all the days of one’s life;” but Dr. Johnson,
moralizing on the learned pig, expanded the idea more clearly when he
maintained that the mere prolongation of existence is a sufficient
compensation for a very considerable amount of suffering. We see the
correctness of his observation in the multitude of examples of those
who cherish their years when poverty, old age, and disease would seem
to have robbed them of all value. When nothing else is left but life,
life alone becomes worth all else.
Self-preservation, therefore, which means the care of life and health,
is the first and a necessary condition of personal happiness. But what
a task is this!
When the child wakes to consciousness and surveys the scene around
him, he finds himself on a battle-field divided between two mighty
combatants in unremitting conflict――Necessity and Chance, the laws of
Nature and the caprices of Accident. Not even the gods, said the
ancient Greeks, can struggle with Fate and Fortune, those elemental
powers, Anangke and Tyke. What is man that he dare venture the fray?
Each individual is scarcely more than a volume of quotations from the
works of his ancestors, selected with little appropriateness to the
Essay on Life which he has himself to compose. Mysterious and
unrecorded influences extending over untold generations have combined
to make him what he is, and to endow him with a personality which he
can never escape from, nor transcend. The boy, the man, can no more
run away from his parents than he can from himself. He may renounce
and cast out the traits which he has inherited, but he cannot get rid
of them. Unbidden and unnoticed, they will slink back and abide with
him forever. They are not his servants, but belong to his family, his
clan, his race. He can change or dismiss them no easier than he can
the color of his skin or the shape of his skull.
These are the laws of Heredity. They bind the individual as with a
tether to an immovable stake. But the tether is not a fetter. It
allows him a certain freedom, so that within the limits of those laws
he can wonderfully modify himself and better his fortunes. More than
that, he can “cozen the gods,” and outwit both Fate and Fortune, if he
sets about it right. And how is that? By learning the laws of his own
nature and of the physical surroundings which environ him. Knowing
them, he can turn them to his own advantage.
Let us see what these are; and first, those which concern the bodily
and mental constitution of the individual, so far as they bear upon
his happiness in life.
Those who have studied this subject, physicians and physiologists,
draw a twofold distinction in the traits of the individual,
discriminating between those which he has by birth, and those which
can be traced to incidents in his own history after birth. Of the
former, some are “hereditary,” that is, traceable with reasonable
surety to his ancestors; and others “congenital,” meaning those which
appear to be due to incidents in his own history before birth. To this
latter curious class belongs the development of what anatomists call
“monsters;” and there are thousands such in the moral world from
allied causes, of whom the anatomist takes no heed, the whole
complexion of whose lives has been changed by some light impression at
this infinitely susceptible period.
Of hereditary traits, the most salient are those which stamp on the
individual his racial and ethnic characteristics. He is a white man or
a negro, a Mongolian or an American Indian; he is, within these
limits, a Jew or a Greek, a Chinaman or a Japanese; each with his own
features, color of skin, straight or crisp hair, and all the other
marks, mental and physical, which belong to his particular race and
people. Each one of these will help or handicap him in the pursuit of
happiness.
Less prominent, but yet indefinitely potent, are those characteristics
which he inherits from his family or clan, and from his immediate
parents. To these he generally owes his stature, his physical
strength, his symmetry and beauty, or his lack of these, his
constitutional diseases, his longevity, and his language,――all mighty
agents in turning the kaleidoscopic pictures of his future life. From
this source he probably also derives that which physicians call his
“temperament,” which is in many instances the trait which decides on
his general happiness or unhappiness in life; for it is often observed
that a particular temperament descends for generations in the same
family.
The “congenital” peculiarities are those which especially mark the
individual. Sex is one of these. Physiologists now know that the human
individual commences of the neuter gender, and that the decision as to
whether it shall be masculine or feminine is an incident, or more
justly an accident, of its later life. Certain diseases,
malformations, and bodily marks are also congenital, as well as those
slight variations of the form and features which make up the physical
personality; and more than all, to the obscure and momentous period
when the spirit is folded in the womb does the individual owe his
strongest tastes and inclinations, his talents, and, when he possesses
it, the divine endowment of genius. Therefore the physicians of
ancient times established the maxim,――“_Ingenium est ingenitum_.”
With this miscellaneous stock of heirlooms, with this farrago of
festering rags and family jewels, poisoned fangs of serpents and
fragments of holy crosses, ancient formulas of withering curses and
saintly blessings whispered by a thousand generations of ancestors,
the babe is born into the world. His one duty in life is to battle
with these unseen but fateful influences, to defend his freedom
against their subtle approaches, to master their armories, and to
maintain and develop ever more and more his own separate
individuality, utilizing his inherited powers and tendencies or
destroying them, as they make for or against his own true happiness.
To accomplish this, he will call to his aid such powerful allies as
education, self-training, personal hygiene, the establishment of
desirable habits, and the assistance of trusty friends. By such aids
he can modify his own nature, and Fate cannot wholly prevail against
him. He will realize the meaning of the noble words of Buddha, the
Awakened,――“Self is the Lord of Self; who else should be the Lord?”
Let us see in some detail what he has to contend with, and how he
should set about it.
Nature is equitable. The more inflexible her laws, the wider the
liberty they allow; the stronger the rivets of her chains, the longer
they are. Thus it is that racial peculiarities, though the most
indelible of all, do not stand in the way of man’s enjoyment. They do
indeed limit the quality, but probably not the quantity, of pleasure
in life. The race which anatomists consider the lowest, the African
negroes, is famous for its gayety and buoyant spirits. Danger,
poverty, even slavery, do not quench their cheery, care-free
disposition. The majority of them are like Hamlet’s friend, Horatio,
with naught but their good spirits to feed and clothe them. Little
reck they of the future. Music and song, talk and laughter, are all
they want to fill their days.
How different the American Indian! not that he is the solemn and
taciturn savage whom the romance-writers depict. In his native state
he is light-hearted, too; but there is one poison a single drop of
which embitters all his cup of joy, the poison of restriction. Lessen
his liberty ever so little, and all light is shut out of his days.
Everywhere the race is the same. Its surroundings count as nothing. In
the long Arctic night the Eskimo is blithe and carolsome, far from the
approach of the white man; while amid the glorious scenery and
Eden-like climate of Central America, the native languages have a
dozen words for pain and misery and sorrow for one with any cheerful
signification.
The white race has a greater range and a higher quality in sensation
and emotion than any other. Modern psychologists――who are in fact
physiologists――have demonstrated this by experiments. The white race
alone responds to the most delicate stimuli in art, in religion, and
in scientific thought; and probably its members alone are, as a race,
capable of the highest degrees of happiness; though single individuals
of the other races doubtless may equal them in this respect.
Let the individual of any race not despair of joy. Let him pursue it
with a firm intent and a clear understanding of what it is, and he
will surely receive it to the capacity of which his nature is capable.
The barriers of race or nation fence him off from no flowery fields or
sun-lit pastures. There are gates, if he will seek them, which open on
them all.
More ominous to his welfare are the traits he inherits from his own
family, his immediate ancestors. How true it is that a man’s worst
enemies may be those of his own household! How dreadful it is that
they may be those who love him most, who brought him into the world,
who would die for him! As in Ibsen’s terrible drama, the ghosts of the
follies of our fathers may ever hover near us, poisoning our blood,
darkening our daylight, blighting our lives, transmitting to us the
seeds of insanity, the mortal leaven of consumption, or the loathsome
virus sucked from the breasts of illicit pleasure. Who can deliver us
from the body of this death?
No one but ourselves. Here more than elsewhere it is vain to sit by
the wayside and cry to the passers-by for aid. Scant is the
consolation and slight the assistance they can proffer us. We must
ourselves search the arid plains for such meagre roses and shriveled
leaves as remain for us to twine the chaplets of pleasure. He who is
born to an inheritance of disease――and the majority are――should boldly
recognize it as his special danger, and should study the means of its
prevention. If of the serious character of those I have mentioned, he
should make it his main business to escape its inroads by choosing an
appropriate avocation, by removal to other surroundings, and by
adopting a course of life which medical science prescribes as that
most likely to postpone indefinitely its outbreak. There are thousands
of such wise men in every civilized community, who were born with
these blood-taints, but who successfully escape them,――till they fall
a victim to some other malady. Nor have these by any means the worst
part of life. The habit of constant watchfulness and forethought thus
engendered is one of the most valuable guarantees of personal
happiness; this is why among confirmed and chronic invalids we often
meet a degree of cheerfulness and even gayety which surprises us.
These beings are doubly fortunate; for they have escaped not only
their particular malady, but another not less dangerous to their own
well-being and that of those around them――a morbid valetudinarianism,
a perpetual fussiness about their own ills and ails. The victims of
this complaint are the _malades imaginaires_, constantly coddling
themselves, thinking of no one but themselves, of whom we meet an
endless number in the wealthier classes of society. It must have been
of such as these that old Dr. Johnson blurted out his rough
judgment,――“Every sick man is a scoundrel!” They usually forfeit more
than they win by such selfish concentration. It is a symptom of
disease to think constantly about one’s health. The most effectual
remedy for it is to think about increasing the comfort of others.
There is no need for me to go into details of what such a training
should be to protect one as much as possible against the development
of hereditary diseases. The precepts must be adapted to the particular
case and circumstances, and in this age Personal Hygiene is a science
by itself, with abundant and competent instructors. Its scope is not
limited to the prevention of disease, but extends to the strengthening
and symmetrical development of the whole body. No one who
intelligently pursues his happiness will omit the study and practice
of its precepts. Health is not indispensable to happiness.
Fortunately, no one condition is indispensable. But there is no other
condition which so generally and potently contributes to it.
Therefore, he who intelligently seeks enjoyment will pay early and
frequent attention to athletic culture; he will seek some healthful
and agreeable physical exercise; his posture will be erect and his
breathing full; his periods of effort will be prolonged to positive
fatigue, and will be judiciously alternated by others of changed
activity or complete repose.
The trainer of athletes lays down for his pupils a rigid discipline.
He is as far from encouraging overstrain and excessive exercise as he
is indolence. He condemns stimulants and narcotics beyond a most
moderate use; and he is solicitous about such things as sleep, and
food, and cleanliness. If his pupils find it repays them to submit to
his stringent dicta for the hope of winning a champion’s belt or a
silver medal, is it not worth while to accept the much less severe
regimen necessary to obtain the Olympian garland woven of the joys
which a sound and elastic health offers?
All that I have said on this subject applies with even greater force
to girls and women than it does to youths and men. Women, alas, as I
have before remarked, have the worser part in life. No one but a
physician sees how much of their wretchedness is owing to ignorance or
neglect of the laws of physical health. There is no excuse for this in
this day. The wicked old doctrine which taught that ignorance of their
own nature is a necessary condition of innocence in girls ought long
since to have been cast out of window. It is as false as that the
seclusion of a harem is necessary to insure the virtue of wives. In
nine cases out of ten a woman’s health in life depends on the care she
exercises between early puberty and the birth of her first child; and
this is the precise period when the prejudices of society strive to
keep her in profoundest ignorance of the laws which govern her own
bodily functions!
More delightful to any true woman than the pleasures of health or the
praise of her faculties is the adoration compelled by her beauty.
Madame de Stael regretted that she could not exchange her magnificent
powers and her literary fame for the personal charms of Madame
Recamier. She was right. Let no woman be persuaded to abate one jot or
tittle in her cult and culture of the comely in face and form. Only
cramped bigots and dull pedants cheapen the value of beauty.
Beauty is real; it is that which alone is permanent and visible; it
lurks behind a thousand masks and distorted countenances, ever
struggling to body itself forth; it is the manifestation of potent and
mysterious natural laws, which but for it would remain forever hidden
from us. Its proud power is to awaken Love with all her joyous train;
and Love means the unconscious attraction of the Ideal, the noblest
incitement to human endeavor.
These are not mere phrases. They are facts proved by the life-history
of the human race. As nations advance in civilization from the savage
condition to one of enlightenment, their ideals of physical beauty
steadily near a definite and the same conception of the perfect human
form, the underlying motive of which is the highest function and a
perfected capacity. This progress is rapid in proportion as that which
is peculiarly human in man is cultivated beyond that which is merely
animal. Not that any rigid canon of proportion or mechanical norm will
ever be attained; because the endeavor is toward the Ideal, and this
is beyond the reach of mortals.
These are the teachings of the learned in the Science of Man; they are
constantly supported by the experience of history. Beauty is and ever
has been the Desire of all Nations. For it, in all time, men have
counted as nought their honor, their gold, and their hopes of heaven.
For it, they have poured their heart’s blood on a thousand stricken
fields, and laughed at death and hell. Think you that the noblest of
the race would have thus reckoned the world well lost, and paid all
that, wisdom holds precious for a smile from the lips of loveliness,
were there not some strange and wondrous compensation, some immortal
and unearthly significance, in Beauty itself?
There is such significance, and nowhere is it so visible as in the
perfect female face and form. This is the most beautiful of all
objects in nature or art. To it we turn to gaze, forgetting the works
of the greatest masters which may be spread before us; unmindful of
the sublimest scenes which mountain and lake may combine to show us.
Nearer than anything else does it bring us to that Ideal World whose
margin forever recedes as we approach it; louder in its presence sound
the tinkling bells of that Fairyland which guards the fruition of our
sweetest hopes and dreams.
The beauty of woman has been the incentive of physical progress in the
race and the inspiration of its noblest arts. It shadows forth the
embodied ideal of humanity, and in its resistless strength binds men
as slaves to its chariot. But does it confer happiness on the
possessor? Sad and faithful is the reply of the poet,――
“In every land
I saw, wherever light illumineth,
Beauty and Anguish walking hand in hand
The downward slope to death.”
_La fatale donna di bellezza_, “the fatal gift of beauty,” says the
proverb of the Italians. Perilous is the path of mortals who walk too
near the gods. The brightest beacons are those which most attract the
foul birds of night. The men or the women who shine beyond their
fellows through the bounteous gifts of nature are the chosen targets
for envy and hatred and calumny and all their ugly crew. In the clash
of violent emotions excited by the radiance of fair faces, in the
contention of love and jealousy, despair and passion, it is rare that
the cause of it all escapes scot free. Her wisdom is also weakened by
the adoration she receives; she assumes that it is for herself,
forgetful that a passing disease or the accident of a moment may rob
her of her charms forever. She has yet to learn that those alone are
worthy of admiration to whom it is not a necessity.
Thus it happens that the _vis superba formæ_, the “proud strength of
beauty,” so often proves a fatal weakness to its possessor. American
women who have followed the fortunes of generations of belles tell me
that those distinguished for their physical charms have as a rule met
with less success and less happiness in their after life than their
plainer sisters. This is not as it should be. Regularity of features,
mobility of expression, harmony of coloring, symmetry of form, and
gracefulness of motion are the five sides of the mystic pentagram of
beauty, and, like that of the ancient astrologers, it should have
power to exorcise and banish all evil spirits, and constrain men and
demons to the willing service of ennobling joys.
A beautiful woman is the nearest approach we have to the perfected
ideal of humanity in general. When in their statues of Apollo, Adonis,
and the Hellenized Antinous, the ancient Greek sculptors portrayed
their highest conception of manly beauty, in many points they
approximated the male to the female form, recognizing in the lines of
the latter a superior artistic excellence and the consummate
expression of the ideal of the beautiful; nay, even the embodiment of
the supreme of intellectual gifts. “Something feminine,” observed
Coleridge in his Table Talk, “is discoverable in the countenances of
all men of genius.” Therefore the artists represent angels as of that
age when the male is most similar to the female,――_tra giovane e
fanciullo_, between youth and childhood, as Tasso describes the
archangel Gabriel.
Great is the value of physical culture; but let there be no
misunderstanding as to what this value is. Such culture, under
whatever title it appears, is but a means to an end. They miss its
meaning who make it an end in itself. Its sole worth is to aid in
bringing about that mental condition or process which we term
felicity, or joyousness.
This point is more easily carried in some constitutions than in
others. Much depends on what is called the “temperament,” and so much
has been written about temperaments that I cannot afford to omit a
reference to them. To be sure, they do not fill so many pages in
modern writings as in those of an earlier age; but this may be because
they are not now so well marked as they once were. Functions, like
fashions, are subject to the law of periodicity.
The four leading temperaments with their mental traits are as follows:
the sanguine, characterized by buoyant hope and strong self-confidence;
the nervous, with rapid alternations of confidence and anxiety, prone
to enthusiasm and to dejection; the phlegmatic, equally remote from
the extremes of exaltation and despair, collected, temperate, and
slow; and the bilious, inclined to take the gloomy view of events and
to dwell on their darker side.
Most people can be classed under the one or the other of these, and
the arrangement is not useless in self-culture, for it will furnish
hints as to the manner of training required to correct unwholesome
mental tendencies.
The temperament toward which they should all be modified is not
included in the list. It is the _cheerful_ temperament, that which is
lighted by the rays of reasonable hope and a confidence in one’s own
powers grounded on a knowledge of their strength.
Cheerfulness, however, is a coy favorite, and is not to be had for the
asking. It is a condition of mind which a man cannot think himself
into, nor reason himself into, nor directly acquire by an effort of
the will. No man can seat himself in his chair and say to
himself,――“Go to! I will be merry!” It can in part be secured by a
skillful disposition of the emotions at our command; but it is, in the
main, the mental result of physical processes, and the profitable
study of it must begin with these.
So very physical is it, that physiologists have undertaken to locate
its exact seat in the human body. They place it in the great ganglia
of the sympathetic nervous system, near the stomach and the heart,
where also is located the seat of the sense of general miserableness
that the French call _malaise_. No one feels happy in his head or in
his foot; but we do speak of being light of heart, as well as
heart-heavy and heart-broken. Those savage tribes who believe that the
soul dwells in the pit of the stomach are not the worst physiologists.
The mental condition in certain diseases show how correct this is.
Those which directly involve the stomach, the liver, the heart, and
the intestinal canal are always associated with undue depression of
spirits; while those which are confined to the lungs or the brain,
though of the most fatal gravity, may be connected with undiminished
cheerfulness. The _spes phthisica_, the hopefulness of the
consumptive, is proverbial among physicians, but as deceptive to them
as to others. A friend of mine, a medical man, who had fought this
disease for three years, wrote me three days before his death,
sketching a series of literary schemes which he had decided to
undertake! Another malady of similar character is a variety of
paralysis, always fatal, not uncommon among overworked business men of
middle life. The patient will never acknowledge that he is ill or
feels badly, and when so paralyzed that he cannot rise from his couch
will insist that he is in splendid health and is merely lazy! How
different from the dyspeptic, always magnifying his symptoms; from the
hypochondriac with engorged liver; or from the sufferer from heart
disease, with his long and inexplicable spells of low spirits!
The moral of these facts is evident. If we wish to have a cheerful
disposition we must begin with attention to our physical functions.
Even slight symptoms of dyspepsia, liver complaints, and disturbances
of the digestive organs must receive appropriate treatment. In this
country malarial poisoning is common, and as it spends its force on
the spleen, it is always associated with low spirits. Hemorrhoids,
which are usually connected with deficient action of the liver, and in
women many diseases peculiar to their sex, act directly in inducing a
condition of gloom and anxiety.
Of course, it is no part of my plan to suggest the proper treatment
for these ails. But it does come within its purview to offer some
hints to those who, without assignable physical cause, are subject to
periodic depression of spirits, to what we familiarly call “an attack
of the blues.”
This is generally a reaction from mental overstrain or mental
lethargy,――from the too intent pursuit of an object, or from having no
object to pursue. A life without leisure and a life without labor are
equally fatal to cheerfulness. The hurry and rush of business affairs,
the atmosphere of excitement and unrest which surrounds them, are
dangerous to a mind not extremely well poised. Not less so are the
alternate phases of gloom and exaltation which attend religious
revivals, prayer meetings, and the various manifestations of
fanaticism. “That way madness lies,” and our asylums show a heavy
percentage of inmates who have lost their reason from religious
excitement. The prolonged concentration of attention on one’s heavenly
interests is just as detrimental as on those of this world.
Self-isolation is fatal; and anxiety for self-salvation is but one of
its varieties.
While the multiplicity of rapid impressions leads to exhaustion and
mental lassitude, variety and novelty are desirable. Change of diet is
as salutary for the mind as for the body. One should have some
agreeable occupation outside of his business, to which he can turn in
his leisure moments and at the time when he quits active affairs. How
many have I seen with enough to retire _on_, but with nothing to
retire _to_! They are the unhappiest of mortals.
An occasional fit of depression can be broken by some simple measures.
The hot bath is one of these. It is highly physiological, as its
imperative summons of the nervous force to the periphery of the body
breaks up the stagnation about the ganglionic centres. For the same
reason the cold shower is excellent. No man leaves it in the same
train of thought with which he entered it. Active exercise, society,
games, and amusements will occur to all. Stimulants and narcotics are
perilous palliatives. Better try Lord Lytton’s advice, and resolutely
attack a new language; or Ruskin’s, to drive a restless horse or sail
a cranky skiff, where the least inattention to what you have in hand
means immediate danger to your life. You will have no time for the
blues.
Self-preservation, I have said, is the prime condition of happiness. A
long life, therefore, is the desire of all sane minds. Old age, that
which all abhor, is the hope of all. It alone justifies a man to
himself and before others. The sage is he whose life is a consistent
whole, and who carries out in his age the plans which he laid in
youth. They are not many; but even they deceive us by their number. On
the ocean of existence, who counts the shipwrecked? We see the votive
offerings of the saved displayed with ostentation, but who notes the
number of the drowned? In the scenery of the drama of human life, the
most conspicuous buildings are the hospitals and asylums, and into
these sooner or later most of the actors disappear.
A learned French physician has maintained that the normal duration of
human life is one hundred years; only a fifth of those born reach one
half that age. Longevity is partly a birthright; it runs in families;
but it is still more a question of occupation, mode of life, and
personal hygiene. The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life
than the non-Jewish citizens, because they avoid unsanitary avocations
and observe wiser rules of diet. I know a skillful physician who
claims that he can lengthen the life of an individual a decade beyond
the average of his ancestors by a judicious system of safeguards. Such
an adviser is acquainted with the special dangers to which age is
exposed. He knows, for instance, that at seventy-five exposure to cold
is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age.
The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of
youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of
paying dividends. “A short life and a merry one,” is the maxim of many
a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of his philosophy is the
belief that happiness belongs to youth alone. I have already referred
to this dangerous fallacy. The bliss of youth, as portrayed by poets
and romancers, did not belong to the youth I had, nor does it to the
youths I know. The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a
common class of illusions. There is greater charm in beauty
half-concealed than wholly shown, in the dawn rather than in the day,
in the promise of youth rather than in the maturity of manhood.
Potentialities please more than actualities, because they excite our
imagination and release us from the fetters of facts.
He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray
by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any
large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore,
not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. Rather he will consider the
problem of life akin to a problem of Euclid, the _quod erat
demonstrandum_ of which is reached only in the last line. He will guard
the fires of youth, that he may not in age have to sit by the cold
ashes of exhausted pleasures.
Sad indeed is the fate of those men who live to outlive themselves.
You find them in every community, and especially in those classes of
society which offer the greatest opportunities for early liberty and
enjoyment. They suffer from a kind of premature senility. They have
fallen in the struggle, though they are not visibly wounded. To them,
life has lost its zest and action its aim. Usually this is the result
of the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments; but it may proceed
from some blow of disappointed ambition, from a violent shock to the
emotions, from the vertigo of unlooked-for prosperity, or the
discouragement of persistent adversity. The stroke has fallen, and no
voice can awake them to action again.
* * * * *
The continuing satisfaction of an intense love of living,――that would
be a fairly good definition of happiness, and not far from one which
Fichte proposed.
* * * * *
Few at any age could say with Fontenelle at ninety-three,――“Had I my
life to live again, I should change nothing.”
* * * * *
What nobler compliment could be paid a man than this, which Vittoria
Colonna wrote to Michael Angelo,――“You have disposed the labor of your
whole life as one single great work of art.”
* * * * *
No road is the right one to him who knows not whither he is going.
* * * * *
If you _will_ stand in the rain, why pray the gods to keep you dry?
* * * * *
Many a defeat, claimed as a victory, passes for one.
* * * * *
Joys that are present are alone those that are real.
* * * * *
There is wisdom in the Spanish saying, “The water of your own village
is better than the wine of Rome.”
* * * * *
Think over this, that Walt Whitman wrote:――
Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the
best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but in this place, not
for another hour but this hour.
* * * * *
The two misfortunes of life are, that we are born young, and become
old.
* * * * *
True, the mind of a child is a plot of virgin soil; but, like this, it
is made up of strata of incalculable antiquity.
* * * * *
The moral lessons of our youth are like our old love letters,――carefully
preserved, but never read.
* * * * *
Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.
* * * * *
The mellowest fruits of life should ripen in its autumn; but if the
spring had not its seeding, and the summer its flowers, what harvest
can we look for?
* * * * *
Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age, and his
age in repairing misconduct in his youth.
* * * * *
The old story says that the flowers you gather in Fairyland prove to
be withered weeds on your return.
* * * * *
It is folly to be youthful unless you are young.
* * * * *
An old man who indulges in love-making had better derive his pleasure
from his own sentiments, than from the hope that they will be
reciprocated.
* * * * *
“Old men become frivolous,” once said to me Weir Mitchell, poet,
physician, philosophic observer of life. Yes, frivolous and
sense-bound. Youth is earnest and spiritual, because it is sentient of
creative force.
* * * * *
It is with health as with money; we wait till our stock is diminishing
before we give it careful attention.
* * * * *
A Chinese proverb says, it is easy enough to die, but difficult to die
at the right time. Many a man has lived to destroy his own well-earned
reputation or fortune.
* * * * *
The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near shore.
* * * * *
Hurry to reap ruins the harvest. To garner the grain we must bide from
the sowing till the seed-time.
* * * * *
Pleasure is an expenditure of stored force. We must save up in order
to have a good time. Nature is a merciless usurer, and demands heavy
interest on her advances.
II. _Our Physical Surroundings._
Palpably the nearest to us of all our physical surroundings is our
clothing. Philosophers do not agree whether man originally adopted
some covering for his body out of the desire of warmth, the sense of
modesty, or the love of decoration. Enough that at present all these
motives are operative, and all are to be respected.
The first purpose of clothing is to preserve the health by keeping out
the cold. There is more in this than mere comfort. Warm clothing
economizes nervous energy, which otherwise has to be expended on the
extremities of the nerves to maintain the capillaries in activity. A
man when comfortably warm can think more clearly than when he feels
chilly. Mind and body are alike benumbed by extreme cold. Exposure to
even a moderately low temperature is dangerous to the aged and the
frail. Those who have studied the meteorology of health have
established the maxim,――“Waves of cold are waves of death.”
In his clothing the sensible man will conform to the customs and
station of society in which he moves. He will leave to his tailor the
cut of his coat. It is a sign of greater weakness to affect a fashion
of one’s own than to follow that of others. He will not be without a
dress suit in civilized lands, and will not wear top boots in drawing
rooms, as did in London a semi-celebrated American poet.
A century or two ago the dress of men was far more costly and
significant. That they have now adopted a simple and uniform style
shows that higher interests are occupying their minds. The first sign
that women are approaching the same level will be their
enfranchisement from the slavery of dress and fashion, to which so
many of them devote the best part of their lives. To woman, clothing
will always be more a question of art than utility. But most of the
modes which she now follows are caricatures of art. For them, however,
she will sacrifice not only good taste but good morals. Vanity in
dress, not the deception of men, leads the majority of fallen women to
their life. They feel more degraded by an unbecoming costume than by a
tarnished reputation.
A man changes his character with his garments. Dirty clothes excuse
dirty actions. I heard of a carpenter who was at a fire where he could
easily have carried off articles; but he explained that he had on his
best clothes, and that prevented him. The reason why sermons have so
little effect is that we lay aside our Sunday suits on Monday morning.
This is the value of uniform. Dress a hundred men alike, and they will
think alike. The character is subdued to what ’tis clothed in.
Outward, develops inward conformity. The world recognizes this, and
accepts the clothing as the index of the mind. A well-dressed man is
supposed to be a gentleman, and an officer with sword and epaulettes
is regarded as a tactician and a hero. Would you change the current of
your thoughts, change your raiment, and you will at once feel the
effect. Would you assuage your grief, lay aside your mourning.
Next to our clothing, our immediate surroundings are the room and its
furniture. A third of our lives is passed in our sleeping apartment,
and most of the remainder in sitting-room, library, or office. It is
well worth while, therefore, to give it attention. How much pleasure
it can be made to render! The genial Xavier de Maistre consumed a
month in making his celebrated _Voyage autour de ma Chambre_, and then
regretted his time was so short. What harmonies of light and color,
shade and perspective, even the humblest adornment of a room is
capable of yielding! How each article of furniture comes to take its
place in our lives and memories! The clock, the desk, the lounge,
these are what make up the sense of Home. Even the noble sentiment of
patriotism is founded upon them. To defend our hearth is its intimate
purpose, and love of our easy-chair is a large share of our love of
country. To all women and many men the most constant happiness of life
is centred in the room and its furniture. Here is the temple of the
Goddess of the Household, and her name should be Lætitia.
How much, therefore, depends on the selection of our living rooms!
They should be light, bright, dry, airy, well-ventilated, equably
warmed, appropriately furnished, free from bad odors, far from brutal
noises, screened from impertinent curiosity. All these requirements
ought to be easily obtained and at no great cost. But so little does
modern architecture consider the true comfort and the real happiness
of house-dwellers that it is rare that one can find all combined.
If he can, therefore, the wise man will prefer to build his own house.
Some will question this. Somewhere in his works――they are too
voluminous for me to look up the reference――Rousseau argues that a
philosopher will not desire a house of his own, but will prefer to
live in one that is rented. He will thus consult his independence, be
free to come and go, not engage his affections on inanimate objects,
find his fatherland wherever he may be, and the like.
For myself, I incline rather to the opinion of Abraham Cowley, less of
a philosopher than Rousseau but more in sympathy with the general
sentiments of mankind. I agree with him that “the pleasantest work of
human industry is the improvement of something which we may call our
own.” There is something in itself delightful in the mere sense of
ownership of a part of the surface of the earth. It was not mere greed
in Cosmo de Medici, who, when asked why he preferred his villa in the
Apennines to his palace in Florence, replied,――“Because there, every
foot of land I see is my own.” No prospect is quite so pleasing as
that of our own acres, and those governments are strongest which base
their institutions on the personal tenure of land.
The old proverb prescribes the chief duties of a man to be to build a
house and beget a child. The character of his child he can but
slightly control; the plan of his house is in his own hands, and his
health and happiness are deeply involved in it. “He that builds a fair
house on an ill site,” observes Bacon, “committeth himself to prison;”
and I may add, he that builds an ill house on any site, sends himself
and family to a hospital. One half of the deaths in England are from
preventable causes, and one-half of these are causes connected with
defective house building. The most perfect buildings are the gaols.
Both in England and America the best care is taken of the worst men.
The chances of life for the convict who is in prison is seven times
better than when he is at liberty. If health is the highest good, we
had better all apply to be sent to gaol.
The principal foes to fight are dampness, darkness, chilliness,
draughtiness, insufficient ventilation, sewer-gas or other poisonous
effluvia, contaminated or scanty water supply, and unhealthful
situation. Architects know little about these matters. Decorative
effects rather than sanitary perfection are what occupy their
attention. Every house-builder should be his own architect to the
extent of clearly knowing what he wants, and seeing that it is looked
after in the plans.
A beautiful feature of American life is the ease with which every one
can acquire his own home. Rapid transit facilitates this even for
those who dwell in great cities.
The possession of his own house is within the reasonable ambition of
every man, and should ever form a part of it. What if it must be a
small house? He can say with Socrates――“Lucky me, if I have friends
enough to fill it!”
“Cosiness!” how much that word implies! What pictures of intimate
delights it brings before the mind! But who can imagine it in great,
straggling mansions, or in “palace chambers far apart”? In the vast
and gloomy palace of the Escorial, the only rooms I saw which would
not induce an attack of melancholia to live in were a suite not larger
than those in an ordinary American house, in which the royal family
sought escape from the pressure of their own magnificence in their
occasional visits to this famous pile. Happiness dwells not in
spacious halls and stately apartments, and he who seeks it will not
envy their possessors.
Has a house ever been built with an eye solely to the highest
happiness of its inmates? to their health, sometimes; to their
comfort, occasionally; to the parade of their riches, constantly; but
to their happiness? I doubt. Conveniences, sanitary arrangements,
agreeable vistas, balconies, porches, fireplaces, these would not be
omitted, but would be merely the beginning of the plan. How to
conciliate isolation with social relations, how to promote harmony
between those serving and those served, how to provide that the
employments of one do not jar with those of others, these would be
some of the questions to consider. How many family troubles could be
avoided by a properly built house! Faulty architecture is more
frequently the ruin of family felicity than is heterodox doctrine.
The Greeks called man the “earth-born,” and the love of his native
place is ever one of the most responsive of his heartstrings. Some say
it is lacking in Americans, because they are so restless, but this is
an error. The poor boy who wanders away from his native village to
make his fortune does not forget the scenes of his childhood, and
should his dreams be realized, returns to the old familiar places to
leave at least some token of his affection. More than half the public
libraries in New England towns have been given wholly or in large part
by those who were to the manor born, but who had found fortune under
strange skies.
The scenery of our dreams is generally that with which we were first
familiar, and the dying old man babbles of the green fields of his
boyhood. We may admire grand views from foreign belvederes, but those
which we first saw remain unsurpassed. I crossed the ocean with an
intelligent woman returning from the Rhine and the Alps; but her
longing was for the vast, treeless prairies of Illinois, her girlish
home, where sky meets earth all round the horizon, and the soul feels
no confinement of mountains or forests.
Love of place rather than love of persons leads to the unhappy
condition of homesickness. As “nostalgia,” it becomes an actual
disease of body and mind, and men will die of it, unless allowed to
return to their native land. Haunting, imperious thirst of the soul
for the scenes of its early pleasures! Heaven cannot be imagined
without them.
The thoughtful writer, Herder, who was the first to cultivate history
as the seed-field of philosophy, was of opinion that it is less the
earth on which we tread, than the air we breathe, which gives the
peculiar charm to the scenes of childhood; meaning that it is the
climate, and the sequence of the seasons which leave the chief impress
on the budding observation of our surroundings. The eternal summer of
the tropics becomes monotonous to the native of temperate latitudes,
and the Eskimo or the Laplander in the more genial climes pines for
the short, hot summer and bitter winter to which he has been
accustomed. The desire, therefore, for more favorable climates, except
for purposes of health, is an illusion. The “summer isles of Eden”
would fatigue with their monotony and enervate by their excellence.
The enjoyment of life is independent of the thermometer, if we
determine it shall be. Sunshine within more than compensates for its
absence without.
By climate we usually mean the weather, and this unquestionably exerts
a powerful influence on human happiness. That of most portions of the
United States keeps the character which William Penn gave it two
hundred years ago――“constant in nothing but inconstancy.” Many a
project of pleasure does it mar, and many a discomfort does it create!
but in its very changeableness there is something attractive, as
always lurks in the unexpected. If we travel the same road every day
in the year, on no two are sky and landscape the same. Daily, new
scenes are offered to our sight, each with its peculiar charm, if we
take the trouble to look for it. Almost can one reason himself into an
equality with that unapproachable philosopher, the Shepherd of
Salisbury Plain, who, when asked what the weather would be on the
morrow, replied that it would be just what he preferred; and on
further inquiry as to what this might be, triumphantly answered,
“Whatever the Lord sends.”
On some temperaments, a low barometer produces a peculiarly depressing
effect. The advice often given them is to make renewed exertion at
their customary employments, and combat the disinclination with the
Will. My advice would be more agreeable; they should lay aside the
customary routine, if possible, and seek in change, recreation, and
amusements the cheerfulness which their ordinary employment refuses
them. Do not spur the jaded horse, but rather offer repose and variety
of motion.
The pressure of the atmosphere as indicated by the barometer has a
great deal to do directly with health and spirits, and therefore with
happiness. Those with a tendency to heart disease should seek a
residence at the sea level, while many who have weak lungs will
improve where the air is rarefied by a high altitude. What the Swiss
call _le mal des montagnes_ is a general sense of discomfort which
some feel a few thousand feet above the sea, and which even prolonged
residence does not entirely banish. An asthmatic can have no pleasure
in life unless he finds the climate where he can breathe with comfort.
Worst of all for personal happiness is a malarial climate, and,
unfortunately, they are very common in this country. The miasmatic
poison is peculiarly depressing to the mind, and is always associated
with debility and despondency. Malarial regions cannot be left
uninhabited, but those whose evil fortune it is to be condemned to
dwell in them have a heavy additional burden laid upon them in life.
* * * * *
We are all more or less like those lower animals whose colors change
with their surroundings.
* * * * *
Seek the open air; the fruits which grow outdoors are alone those
which ripen in season.
* * * * *
He who loves his country more than he does his kind, loves himself
more than either.
* * * * *
To die for our country is truly noble, when our country is the world
and our fellow-citizens all mankind.
* * * * *
Love of country is sometimes a fine phrase for love of comfort.
* * * * *
Woman, like the Emperor Tiberius, is smothered with clothes.
* * * * *
Woman is philocosmic because she is philanthropic.
* * * * *
Fine clothes are the stilts to individuality.
* * * * *
A new suit is a new sensation.
* * * * *
We do not wholly leave our bed-room all day long.
* * * * *
Make the places you must occupy as pleasure-giving as possible.
* * * * *
Frugality is never better displayed than in furnishing.
* * * * *
Outdoors, let Action rule in the ascendant; indoors, Repose.
* * * * *
Houses used to be built to protect from foes without; the need now is
more protection for friends within.
III. _Luck and its Laws._
When the wisest of the seven wise men of Greece was asked to name some
happy person, he cited several, all of whom were among the dead. “And
do you know none living who is happy?” queried his royal host, who had
expected his own name to be mentioned among the fortunate few. “Call
no man happy,” replied the sage, “until he is dead.” He forgot not
that in the temples of his native land, Tyche, Goddess of Chance, was
represented holding in one hand a rudder, for it is she who guides the
affairs of men; but in the other hand a sphere, to warn of the
instability of her favors. Like the King of Lydia, most of her modern
votaries remember her former but forget her latter attribute.
Science preaches that the progress of thought has been from a time
when Caprice and Chance were deemed everything in nature and Law was
nothing, to the present day, when Law is known to be everything and
Caprice and Chance are nothing.
Science may preach till it is hoarse, but there is something in the
human mind ever insisting that the ancient Goddess, or some other
inscrutable fatality, coerces the history of the individual; and that,
from his birth, luck, good or bad, merriment or melancholy, marks him
for her own. Rarely have I asked a man of large experience who denied
the mighty influence of the unforeseen and unforeseeable in practical
affairs. Some of the most extensive enterprises are based on the
recognition of this truth, and it is mathematically demonstrable; for
mathematicians are prepared to show that disorder itself is orderly,
and that the vagaries of chance are bound by laws, and pinned in a
straight jacket of formulas.
But what their apparatus of signs and symbols does not show, where it
completely breaks down, is precisely the only point of human interest
in the whole matter,――in its application to the individual life and
fortunes. Averages and general laws they give us; but it is also a
mathematical law that the average is never applicable to the
individual. What is true of the whole series is never true of any one
member of the series. No man who insured his life ever died at the
precise minute which, according to the actuary’s tables, terminated
his calculable expectation of life.
Let us see what, from this point of view, these computations about
luck or chance teach.
In mathematics they are included in the Calculus of Probabilities, the
discovery of which is attributed to Pascal. A gambling nobleman asked
him what are the chances of turning a red or black card in cutting the
pack a given number of times. As all the cards are either red or
black, Pascal replied that it would be expressed by the formula x/2.
In ordinary language, this means that when two events are equally
probable, they will occur equally in the long run; and in practical
affairs, when we neither know nor suspect things are unequal, we must
assume them to be equal.
On these simple principles all calculations of chances, to be worth
anything, must be based. But they are not so simple as they sound.
Pascal’s formula, like all formulas of the higher mathematics,
expresses an abstract truth only, and one that can never be realized
in fact. The longer the run, the more certain will it be that the two
events never will occur equally; and the more frequent will be long
series of the recurrence of one or the other.
Turning aside from abstruse calculations, which can be readily found
elsewhere by those who would like to see them, let us inquire as to
the practical results of this Logic of Chance when applied to the
fortunes of the individual.
These observed and calculated results establish the following
interesting rule:――In matters of pure luck, about two-thirds of any
given number of persons will come out substantially even, in any large
number of trials; of the remaining third, about one-half will be
noticeably lucky, and the remaining one-half noticeably unlucky. Thus,
of six who venture, four will have no special fortune, good or bad;
one will be quite “in vein”; one quite “out of vein.”
Suppose the players are thirty-six, and we select the lucky six, and
pit them against each other, as in “progressive” games; the same law
will hold good, one coming out noticeably better, one noticeably worse
than the rest; and so on indefinitely, the number of the extremes
diminishing at the rate of six to one at each new trial.
This is the Law of Luck; but it is obvious that it leaves luck, good
and bad, a real fact; and among a million men, or in a great city like
New York or London, we must find extraordinary examples of
“sequences,” both of the favors and the frowns of fortune; not in
gambling only, but in those thousands of accidental events which make
up the welfare or misery of personal experience.
All the moralists I have read on the subject seem to blink and stagger
at this obvious and necessary conclusion,――that the history of many
individuals is and must be enormously controlled, in spite of any
efforts of their own, by pure luck. In cutting the cards twenty times
in succession, about twenty people in a million will cut red every
time and another twenty will cut black every time; and so it will be
with all other matters of pure chance in life. There is no use in
trying to dodge this certain result of a sum in simple division. We
must count it in, in all plans and calculations for success and
happiness in our individual life.
The important question is, what value must we assign to it?
Here is where men make several frequent and disastrous errors.
The most common is an error in arithmetic which the little I have
above said on the calculus of chance should be enough to correct. It
is putting faith in their good luck, or falling into discouragement
from their bad luck. Each is equally silly. A sequence of any kind of
luck does not offer the slightest presumption that it will continue.
The chances remain precisely as at the beginning, and are about six to
one against the continuance of either extreme in the same individual.
In matters of pure chance no sustained coincidence in either direction
adds the least probability to its continuance. This is what is so
difficult for men to believe; and so it comes about that faith in good
luck is the source of most bad luck. A “run of good luck” has wrecked
the lives of more men than has the repetition of disasters.
The reason for this is easily shown. The general rule in life is that
a man’s prosperity is conditioned closely by the amount and kind of
his knowledge, and his skill in the use of it. But the man who “trusts
to luck” distinctly renounces the advantages of knowledge, and builds
his hopes on his acknowledged impotence to influence the results. He
abandons himself to the current of events, and makes no effort to look
forward and see whether it will suck him into a whirlpool, or land him
on some sunny shore. Scarcely any state of mind could be fraught with
greater peril to his future.
We have the sayings, “dumb luck” and “a fool for luck;” and the
Italians their proverb that one must have a little of the fool in him,
_un poco di matto_, to be lucky. Most men are fools, so it is
inherently probable that the lucky man will belong to the majority;
but beyond that, _his_ folly is conspicuous who bases his hopes of
fortune rather on luck than on labor and forethought. The immorality
of gambling and its ruinous influence on the happiness of life lie in
the fact that it disclaims as useless every precept which prudence,
skill, and knowledge lay down as essential to individual success.
It is mathematically certain that some people will have an astonishing
succession of fortunate experiences which they have nowise aided in
bringing about, ripe plums dropping into their mouths from invisible
trees. They are popularly called “lucky fellows.” But the ancient
Greeks, with that wonderful acumen in practical affairs which was
their own, considered them peculiarly dangerous associates, to be
avoided as partners in regular business, scarcely safe to associate
with as companions. When Polycrates, King of Samos, was crowned with
such repeated successes that it seemed as if the very gods might envy
him, his friend, the King of Egypt, advised him to throw his most
precious jewel, a wonderfully carved signet-ring, into the sea; and
when this was brought back the next day by a fisherman, who had found
it in the belly of a fish that had swallowed it, the King of Egypt
withdrew his fleet and severed his treaty; for he knew some dreadful
disaster awaited such unheard-of fortune; and it soon came when
Polycrates fell into the hands of his enemy, and was crucified alive
on the Asian strand.
The story is probably a fable; but its moral is an eternal truth. The
hour of prosperity is ever dangerous; but when the prosperity has come
without labor or effort or forethought, it is nearly always fatal.
Unexpected success enervates the will and fosters illusions of the
mind. The ancients represented the goddess Fortuna as proffering a cup
of intoxicating wine to her favorites. Either they recognize their
success as the result of pure chance, and persuade themselves that
they are fortune’s favorite children, and can safely hazard any risks;
or their vanity leads them to attribute what was the result of chance
to their own miraculous sagacity, and they thus magnify to a dangerous
degree their own capacities. Either conclusion leads them surely on
the downward road to ruin.
Nowhere is this mental debility which seizes the believers in luck
more absurdly shown than in the return to primeval superstition which
it brings with it. The gambler, in his faith in caprice and chance,
sinks to the level of the primitive savage, and accepts the
superstitions of that level with equal readiness. The most cultivated
habitué of Monte Carlo has his fetishes; he watches for signs and
omens; he is as much the slave of auspicious or inauspicious auguries
as an Australian cannibal. Pitiable retrogression of the human
intellect! What absurdity will he not commit to “break the run of the
luck” when it is against him! He will turn his chair thrice around; he
will avoid playing if a red-whiskered man opposite him stakes; he will
go to his hotel and change his coat. He knows that every principle of
right reason and sound logic teaches that events cannot be modified by
actions in no way relating to them, but he quietly renounces reason
and logic as his guides!
Surely no man who is engaged in the intelligent pursuit of happiness
will put himself in that position! I do not forget the pleasure of the
game. That will be considered on a later page. But there is no need to
argue that a pleasure which leads to the habitual disregard of reason
as a monitor cannot be trusted as a permanent contributor to
happiness.
One important practical point remains to be noted. Neither in the
gambling room, nor outside, is there half so much mere luck in affairs
as most people imagine. The cards are stacked, the dice are loaded,
the balls are weighted. Only the gulls believe the game is fair.
Shrewd men in business transactions like to conceal their hands, and
persuade their clients and associates that much is the result of
accident which they themselves have brought about. The plan has many
advantages, and plays successfully on the most responsive chords of
human weakness. It is said that the late Baron Rothschild of London
declined to embark in an enterprise unless its promoters were known as
lucky men. Do not imagine that he was governed by any foolish
superstition. He knew, perhaps better than any one, what is the real
significance of constant luck in the stock market; and would have been
the last to have accepted it in the sense of the guileless gambler.
Much that in the lives of others we are apt to attribute to luck turns
out on closer examination to be the natural though infrequent result
of certain cultivated qualities. I have heard of several persons who
have had handsome legacies left them by strangers in unexpected
acknowledgment of kindness shown. Uniform courtesy is almost sure to
be followed sooner or later by some such reward. People who are what
we call “quick-witted,” whose judgment is cool and action prompt, are
apt to be lucky even in misfortune. William of Normandy, landing for
the conquest of England, tripped and fell on the sand. It was an evil
presage, and his soldiers shrank back in terror. But William, seizing
a handful of the soil, cried――“Thus I grasp this earth, and, by the
splendor of God, I shall keep it.” With this he turned the gloomy
portent into one the most auspicious. Moderate luck with good sense
will repair any blunder, while folly will spoil the best of chances.
“Fortune favors the bold,” simply because they have the courage to
act; but she rarely favors them when they act without knowledge and
prudence. When Shakespeare in the familiar passage says, “There is a
tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to
fortune,” he assumes that the fortunate man knows when flood-tide
arrives.
As we are thus often deceived in the lives of others, so we are almost
as frequently the dupes of our own experience. It is not easy to
decide, concerning our successes and failures, which are owing to luck
and which to ourselves. Confucius advises those who fail to follow the
example of the archer when he misses the target, and examine first the
instruments employed, and then themselves, as the cause of failure is
likely to be in one or the other. Some minds are more exhilarated by
gains than they are depressed by losses; others deplore losses more
keenly than they enjoy successes; few estimate both at a just relative
value.
Even the very unlucky should feel some cheerfulness when he reflects
how in modern times we have learned to conciliate the Fates, and
compel even the most adverse destiny to drop the ugliest of its masks.
This we accomplish through the various forms of _insurance_, all of
them based on the study of the very caprices of Fortune herself.
Marvelous example of mind setting at nought the threats of brute
nature! The very disasters before which our ancestors bowed most
hopeless and most helpless, are those whose attacks we dread the
least. Hail and lightning, storms on the ocean and fire in populous
cities, we read about with small concern providing our property is
well insured. By the same process we can protect our children from
poverty and our own old age from want. Beneficent discovery, which in
its varied forms has added incalculably to the happiness of man by
freeing him from the terrors of the unknown, and providing him with a
shield behind which he can afford to smile at the gloomiest frowns of
Fate!
Subtler than any beast of the field is man, and filled with Promethean
courage to rob the gods themselves! But behind the impenetrable veil,
through which he sees not even darkly, are powers who smile in
derision at his attempts to free himself from their eternal mastery.
No logic can explain and no calculus compute the workings of their
mysterious ways. Against the elemental wrath of fire and water man can
guard himself; but against the results of the most thoughtless of his
words or the slightest of his actions he has no protection, for he has
not and cannot form the least idea of their consequences. Here Destiny
rules undisputed and supreme.
Such reflections led the great Goethe in his old age to dwell more and
more on the illimitable influence of trifling events, _bedeutende
Kleinigkeiten_. Dull critics have misunderstood and some of the
dullest have even made merry about his insistence on this pivotal
truth in the history of every individual and in that of the world. The
fate of nations has ever been decided by the most trivial occurrences.
Cæsar, going to the Senate, refused to read a letter which was handed
him, saying, “Business for to-morrow.” Had he opened it, the greatest
empire that ever was would have had a different story to transmit to a
different posterity. One summer morning the pretty Arleta, daughter of
a Norman butcher, tripped down to the brook to wash her mother’s
soiled linen. Had she waited a few minutes later, Robert the Devil
would have already passed, and neither their son, the bastard William
of Normandy, nor his thousands of knights would have set their iron
heels on English soil. Louis XVI stops at St. Ménéhould to eat a pig’s
foot, and the great and famous line of the Bourbons of France is
extinguished by that single dish.
These are celebrated examples. But the thoughtful man will recognize
in his own life and in the lives of those around him how they have
been altered, directed, completely transformed by such slightest of
incidents. His decision to pursue this or that avocation, that as to
where he should settle, the first meeting with her who is his wife,
the conversation which led to such or such an investment of the first
importance, these, the most momentous actions of his life, turned on
such casual and insignificant incidents that it makes him shiver to
think of it! In such moments he is ready to exclaim,
“We do confess ourselves the slaves of chance
And flies of every wind that blows.”
The prime motors of the thought of the world have not been the
ponderous tomes of schoolmen nor the decrees of councils and
universities. What, asks a philosophical historian, were the two most
important events in the intellectual history of England during the
seventeenth century? The Paradise Lost? The King James’ Version? No.
One was the commitment of a strolling tinker to Bedford Jail; the
other the decision of a distempered youth to make himself a coat of
leather and go to live in a hollow tree. The one gave us the
“Pilgrim’s Progress;” the other the immortal doctrine that faith, the
true faith, “finds center everywhere,” and cares not to fix itself in
form.
“Slaves of Chance!” Of Chance? Have I the right word? Is it Chance
which through millions of years has steadily guided the increasing
purpose which runs through all nature, which has multiplied the organs
of animals and widened the minds of men with the progress of the suns;
which has disabled the armies of kings by the weaponless words of a
peasant; which has confounded wisdom by folly and foiled strength by
weakness; never anywhere losing sight of the goal, unseen of men but
surely divined, toward which tends the Motion of the World?
Chance? No. But by what other name shall I name it? Shall I take
refuge in the jargon of the pulpit and call these “special
providences?” Helpless evasion of the question! Impotent effort to
distinguish between the special and the general designs of the
Designer, obscuring the one central point to be kept in sight, that
the special is the general and the general the special.
But why seek a name? A name becomes a fetish as much as a stock or a
stone, and men bow down to it and worship it with as much abasement of
their better natures. Enough, if in the fates of mighty nations and in
each lightest act of the individual life we recognize the same
Directing Force, invisible but nowise unintelligible, rather speaking
with sun-clear words to our enlightened reason of conscious purpose
and definite intention, to which the iron laws of Nature and the wild
vagaries of Chance are ductile instruments and obedient servants.
This is the ultimate expression of abstract science and of that solid
philosophy which is built on the inductive study of both nature and
man. Its lesson to the individual is, that he is neither the helpless
creature of necessity nor the slave of chance; that he is master of
his immediate action, but of its consequences he is not master; that
there are unseen forces at work arranging the incidents and accidents
of his life, and these forces he can in no wise control; but if he is
alert and diligent they cannot entangle his own individuality in the
mesh of events, he can rise superior to them, can be _himself_, and
win happiness to some degree in any surroundings; and he may go
forward in the sublime and certain confidence that his existence is an
essential part of an eternal plan, which asks neither faith nor
authority for its recognition, for it is the logical condition of the
very reason by which he knows that he is Himself and not another.
* * * * *
The calculus of probabilities has already destroyed the gods; if it
could rule out the unexpected, it would promote man to their seats;
but the fleshless face of old Time wears a perpetual though silent
grin.
* * * * *
Fortune-tellers are put in jail because they deceive; they should be
hanged, did they tell the truth. How dull were life, could it be read
ahead! Only a weak nature, such as his, would say with Hartley
Coleridge, “Happiness is the exclusion of all _hap_, that is, chance.”
More virile are the words of Charles James Fox, inveterate gambler
that he was, “The next best thing to winning is to lose.” The
uncertainty of the future is the only stimulus to exertion, and its
obscurity is the source of our chief delights.
* * * * *
Always expect a change of luck. Then, if it is from good to bad, you
will be prepared for it; and if from bad to good, you will have
enjoyed the pleasure of expecting it, as well as its arrival.
* * * * *
“Give your son luck and throw him in the sea,” says a Spanish proverb.
* * * * *
There are men who succeed through their misfortunes rather than their
good fortunes.
* * * * *
People regard bad luck as a kind of injustice. They secretly say with
Louis XIV, when his armies were defeated in Flanders, “Has God
forgotten all I have done for Him?”
* * * * *
The ancients reckoned a man’s luck, good or bad, among the gifts with
which he is endowed by nature.
* * * * *
In very strong characters there is something which eludes analysis and
defies definition, the very goad of destiny, driving them on their
allotted paths with unrelenting and inevitable impulse. This is what
the ancient Greeks, and among the moderns especially Goethe,
recognized as the “demonic force.” It endows a life with dramatic
unity and historic completeness.
* * * * *
Fate lies in fetters, so she no longer rules the stage.
* * * * *
The folly of some men turns out better than the foresight of others.
* * * * *
With Courage and Civility as allies you can often take captive
Good-luck.
* * * * *
He who has well considered all the chances is prepared for the worst.
* * * * *
Because one cannot see ahead clearly, should he put out his eyes?
* * * * *
The captain who prefers trusting to luck to taking an observation is
not the man to sail with.
* * * * *
Bacon advises to use such as have been lucky because of the confidence
they breed in others and the effort they will make “to maintain their
prescription.”
* * * * *
The first principle of success in the game of life is to be willing to
lose. The player who will not sacrifice his pawns will soon have his
king in check.
* * * * *
Keep your wits about you. In the immediate exigencies of life a full
pocketbook is more useful than a fine bank balance.
* * * * *
Do you ever ask yourself why you expect good fortune to come without
effort and bad fortune to stay away without precautions?