desire to live should settle this well in their minds, that nerve power is the force of life and that the will has a wondrously strong and direct influence over the body through the brain and the nervous system.'[5]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Active and Moral Powers, ii. 312.
[3] Much curious information on this subject will be found in Cabanis' Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme.
[4] Kay's Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, p. 75.
[5] Mortimer Granville's How to Make the Best of Life.
CHAPTER III
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
