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Title: The conquest of happiness
Author: Bertrand Russell
Release date: February 9, 2026 [eBook #77894]
Language: English
Original publication: London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930
Credits: Sean/IB@DP, Karin Spence and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS ***
THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS
_Other Books by the same Author_
PHILOSOPHY
THE ANALYSIS OF MIND
INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD
AN OUTLINE OF PHILOSOPHY
SCEPTICAL ESSAYS
SOCIAL SCIENCE
PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
ROADS TO FREEDOM
JUSTICE IN WAR-TIME
FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA
MARRIAGE AND MORALS
EDUCATIONAL
ON EDUCATION: ESPECIALLY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
THE PROBLEM OF CHINA
WITH DORA RUSSELL:
THE PROSPECTS OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION
WITH SCOTT NEARING:
BOLSHEVISM AND THE WEST
BERTRAND RUSSELL
THE CONQUEST
OF
HAPPINESS
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
MUSEUM STREET
FIRST PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1930
SECOND IMPRESSION NOVEMBER 1930
THIRD IMPRESSION DECEMBER 1930
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
WALT WHITMAN
PREFACE
This book is not addressed to the learned, or to those who regard a
practical problem merely as something to be talked about. No profound
philosophy or deep erudition will be found in the following pages. I
have aimed only at putting together some remarks which are inspired
by what I hope is common sense. All that I claim for the recipes
offered to the reader is that they are such as are confirmed by my
own experience and observation, and that they have increased my own
happiness whenever I have acted in accordance with them. On this ground
I venture to hope that some among those multitudes of men and women
who suffer unhappiness without enjoying it, may find their situation
diagnosed and a method of escape suggested. It is in the belief that
many people who are unhappy could become happy by well-directed effort
that I have written this book.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE 9
PART I.--CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS
I. WHAT MAKES PEOPLE UNHAPPY? 15
II. BYRONIC UNHAPPINESS 27
III. COMPETITION 45
IV. BOREDOM AND EXCITEMENT 57
V. FATIGUE 69
VI. ENVY 83
VII. THE SENSE OF SIN 96
VIII. PERSECUTION MANIA 111
IX. FEAR OF PUBLIC OPINION 126
PART II.--CAUSES OF HAPPINESS
X. IS HAPPINESS STILL POSSIBLE? 143
XI. ZEST 158
XII. AFFECTION 175
XIII. THE FAMILY 186
XIV. WORK 208
XV. IMPERSONAL INTERESTS 219
XVI. EFFORT AND RESIGNATION 230
XVII. THE HAPPY MAN 241
INDEX 249
PART I
CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS
CHAPTER I
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE UNHAPPY?
Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human
beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not,
at least in a great majority of cases. If you are unhappy yourself,
you will probably be prepared to admit that you are not exceptional
in this. If you are happy, ask yourself how many of your friends are
so. And when you have reviewed your friends, teach yourself the art of
reading faces; make yourself receptive to the moods of those whom you
meet in the course of an ordinary day.
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe
says Blake. Though the kinds are different, you will find that
unhappiness meets you everywhere. Let us suppose that you are in New
York, the most typically modern of great cities. Stand in a busy
street during working hours, or on a main thoroughfare at a week-end,
or at a dance of an evening; empty your mind of your own ego, and let
the personalities of the strangers about you take possession of you
one after another. You will find that each of these different crowds
has its own trouble. In the work-hour crowd you will see anxiety,
excessive concentration, dyspepsia, lack of interest in anything but
the struggle, incapacity for play, unconsciousness of their fellow
creatures. On a main road at the week-end you will see men and women,
all comfortably off, and some very rich, engaged in the pursuit of
pleasure. This pursuit is conducted by all at a uniform pace, that of
the slowest car in the procession; it is impossible to see the road for
the cars, or the scenery since looking aside would cause an accident;
all the occupants of all the cars are absorbed in the desire to pass
other cars, which they cannot do on account of the crowd; if their
minds wander from this preoccupation, as will happen occasionally to
those who are not themselves driving, unutterable boredom seizes upon
them and stamps their features with trivial discontent. Once in a way a
car-load of coloured people will show genuine enjoyment, but will cause
indignation by erratic behaviour, and ultimately get into the hands of
the police owing to an accident: enjoyment in holiday time is illegal.
Or, again, watch people at a gay evening. All come determined to be
happy, with the kind of grim resolve with which one determines not to
make a fuss at the dentist’s. It is held that drink and petting are the
gateways to joy, so people get drunk quickly, and try not to notice how
much their partners disgust them. After a sufficient amount of drink,
men begin to weep, and to lament how unworthy they are, morally, of
the devotion of their mothers. All that alcohol does for them is to
liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.
The causes of these various kinds of unhappiness lie partly in the
social system, partly in individual psychology--which, of course, is
itself to a considerable extent a product of the social system. I
have written before about the changes in the social system required
to promote happiness. Concerning the abolition of war, of economic
exploitation, of education in cruelty and fear, it is not my intention
to speak in this volume. To discover a system for the avoidance of war
is a vital need of our civilization; but no such system has a chance
while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less
dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day. To prevent
the perpetuation of poverty is necessary if the benefits of machine
production are to accrue in any degree to those most in need of them;
but what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves
are miserable? Education in cruelty and fear is bad, but no other kind
can be given by those who are themselves the slaves of these passions.
These considerations lead us to the problem of the individual: what can
a man or woman, here and now, in the midst of our nostalgic society,
do to achieve happiness for himself or herself? In discussing this
problem, I shall confine my attention to those who are not subject to
any extreme cause of outward misery. I shall assume a sufficient income
to secure food and shelter, sufficient health to make ordinary bodily
activities possible. I shall not consider the great catastrophes, such
as loss of all one’s children, or public disgrace. There are things to
be said about such matters, and they are important things, but they
belong to a different order from the things that I wish to say. My
purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness
from which most people in civilized countries suffer, and which is
all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it
appears inescapable. I believe this unhappiness to be very largely
due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits
of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for
possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals,
ultimately depends. These are matters which lie within the power of
the individual, and I propose to suggest the changes by which his
happiness, given average good fortune, may be achieved.
Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to
advocate will be a few words of autobiography. I was not born happy. As
a child, my favourite hymn was: “Weary of earth and laden with my sin.”
At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy,
I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I
felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of
suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know
more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost
say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due
partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired,
and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due
to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire--such as
the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other--as
essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing
preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education,
I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings.
I seemed to myself--no doubt justly--a miserable specimen. Gradually
I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to
centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state
of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I
felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own
possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in
some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains
of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do
those that spring from disgust with self. And every external interest
inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive,
is a complete preventive of _ennui_. Interest in oneself, on the
contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to
the keeping of a diary, to getting psycho-analysed, or perhaps to
becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of
the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which
he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a
crossing-sweeper, provided he were compelled to remain one. External
discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose
self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.
Self-absorption is of various kinds. We may take the sinner, the
narcissist, and the megalomaniac as three very common types.
When I speak of “the sinner”, I do not mean the man who commits sins:
sins are committed by everyone or no one, according to our definition
of the word. I mean the man who is absorbed in the consciousness of
sin. This man is perpetually incurring his own disapproval, which, if
he is religious, he interprets as the disapproval of God. He has an
image of himself as he thinks he ought to be, which is in continual
conflict with his knowledge of himself as he is. If, in his conscious
thought, he has long since discarded the maxims that he was taught
at his mother’s knee, his sense of sin may be buried deep in his
unconscious, and only emerge when he is drunk or asleep. Nevertheless,
it may suffice to take the savour out of everything. At bottom he still
accepts all the prohibitions he was taught in infancy. Swearing is
wicked; drinking is wicked; ordinary business shrewdness is wicked;
above all, sex is wicked. He does not, of course, abstain from any
of these pleasures, but they are all poisoned for him by the feeling
that they degrade him. The one pleasure that he desires with his whole
soul is that of being approvingly caressed by his mother, which he can
remember having experienced in childhood. This pleasure being no longer
open to him, he feels that nothing matters; since he _must_ sin,
he decides to sin deeply. When he falls in love he looks for maternal
tenderness, but cannot accept it, because, owing to the mother-image,
he feels no respect for any woman with whom he has sexual relations.
Then, in his disappointment, he becomes cruel, repents of his cruelty,
and starts afresh on the dreary round of imagined sin and real remorse.
This is the psychology of very many apparently hard-boiled reprobates.
What drives them astray is devotion to an unattainable object (mother
or mother-substitute) together with the inculcation, in early years, of
a ridiculous ethical code. Liberation from the tyranny of early beliefs
and affections is the first step towards happiness for these victims of
maternal “virtue”.
Narcissism is, in a sense, the converse of an habitual sense of sin; it
consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired.
Up to a point it is, of course, normal, and not to be deplored; it
is only in its excesses that it becomes a grave evil. In many women,
especially rich Society women, the capacity for feeling love is
completely dried up, and is replaced by a powerful desire that all
men should love them. When a woman of this kind is sure that a man
loves her, she has no further use for him. The same thing occurs,
though less frequently, with men; the classic example is the hero of
_Liaisons Dangereuses_. When vanity is carried to this height,
there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real
satisfaction to be obtained from love. Other interests fail even more
disastrously. A narcissist, for example, inspired by the homage paid
to great painters, may become an art student; but, as painting is for
him a mere means to an end, the technique never becomes interesting,
and no subject can be seen except in relation to self. The result is
failure and disappointment, with ridicule instead of the expected
adulation. The same thing applies to those novelists whose novels
always have themselves idealized as heroines. All serious success in
work depends upon some genuine interest in the material with which
the work is concerned. The tragedy of one successful politician after
another is the gradual substitution of narcissism for an interest in
the community and the measures for which he stands. The man who is
only interested in himself is not admirable, and is not felt to be so.
Consequently the man whose sole concern with the world is that it shall
admire him is not likely to achieve his object. But even if he does, he
will not be completely happy, since human instinct is never completely
self-centred, and the narcissist is limiting himself artificially just
as truly as is the man dominated by a sense of sin. The primitive man
might be proud of being a good hunter, but he also enjoyed the activity
of the chase. Vanity, when it passes beyond a point, kills pleasure
in every activity for its own sake, and thus leads inevitably to
listlessness and boredom. Often its source is diffidence, and its cure
lies in the growth of self-respect. But this is only to be gained by
successful activity inspired by objective interests.
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes
to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than
loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in
history. Love of power, like vanity, is a strong element in normal
human nature, and as such is to be accepted; it becomes deplorable
only when it is excessive or associated with an insufficient sense of
reality. Where this occurs it makes a man unhappy or foolish, if not
both. The lunatic who thinks he is a crowned head may be, in a sense,
happy, but his happiness is not of a kind that any sane person would
envy. Alexander the Great was psychologically of the same type as
the lunatic, though he possessed the talent to achieve the lunatic’s
dream. He could not, however, achieve his own dream, which enlarged its
scope as his achievement grew. When it became clear that he was the
greatest conqueror known to fame, he decided that he was a God. Was he
a happy man? His drunkenness, his furious rages, his indifference to
women, and his claim to divinity, suggest that he was not. There is
no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human
nature at the expense of all the others, nor in viewing all the world
as raw material for the magnificence of one’s own ego. Usually the
megalomaniac, whether insane or nominally sane, is the product of some
excessive humiliation. Napoleon suffered at school from inferiority to
his schoolfellows, who were rich aristocrats, while he was a penurious
scholarship boy. When he allowed the return of the _émigrés_, he
had the satisfaction of seeing his former schoolfellows bowing down
before him. What bliss! Yet it led to the wish to obtain a similar
satisfaction at the expense of the Czar, and this led to Saint Helena.
Since no man can be omnipotent, a life dominated wholly by love of
power can hardly fail, sooner or later, to meet with obstacles that
cannot be overcome. The knowledge that this is so can only be prevented
from obtruding on consciousness by some form of lunacy, though if a man
is sufficiently great he can imprison or execute those who point this
out to him. Repressions in the political and in the psycho-analytic
senses thus go hand in hand. And wherever psycho-analytic repression in
any marked form takes place, there is no genuine happiness. Power kept
within its proper bounds may add greatly to happiness, but as the sole
end of life it leads to disaster, inwardly if not outwardly.
The psychological causes of unhappiness, it is clear, are many and
various. But all have something in common. The typical unhappy man is
one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction,
has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other,
and has therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together
with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the
activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development
which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely
thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction
and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of “pleasure”. That is to say,
he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for
example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely
negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. The narcissist and the
megalomaniac believe that happiness is possible, though they may adopt
mistaken means of achieving it; but the man who seeks intoxication, in
whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case, the
first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is desirable.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the
fact. Perhaps their pride is like that of the fox who had lost his
tail; if so, the way to cure it is to point out to them how they can
grow a new tail. Very few men, I believe, will deliberately choose
unhappiness if they see a way of being happy. I do not deny that such
men exist, but they are not sufficiently numerous to be important.
I shall therefore assume that the reader would rather be happy than
unhappy. Whether I can help him to realize this wish, I do not know;
but at any rate the attempt can do no harm.
CHAPTER II
BYRONIC UNHAPPINESS
It is common in our day, as it has been in many other periods of the
world’s history, to suppose that those among us who are wise have
seen through all the enthusiasms of earlier times and have become
aware that there is nothing left to live for. The men who hold this
view are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness,
which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to
be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man. Their pride in
their unhappiness makes less sophisticated people suspicious of its
genuineness; they think that the man who enjoys being miserable is
not miserable. This view is too simple; undoubtedly there is some
slight compensation in the feeling of superiority and insight which
these sufferers have, but it is not sufficient to make up for the
loss of simpler pleasures. I do not myself think that there is any
superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy
as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the
universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else
instead. This is what I wish to prove in the present chapter. I wish
to persuade the reader that, whatever the arguments may be, reason
lays no embargo upon happiness; nay, more, I am persuaded that those
who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the
universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they
are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this
unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics
of the world in which they live.
For modern Americans the point of view that I wish to consider has been
set forth by Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch in a book called _The Modern
Temper_; for our grandfathers’ generation it was set forth by Byron;
for all time it was set forth by the writer of Ecclesiastes. Mr. Krutch
says: “Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural
universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should
rather die as men than live as animals.” Byron says:
There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling’s dull decay.
The author of Ecclesiastes says:
Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than
the living which are yet alive.
Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who
hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.
All these three pessimists arrived at these gloomy conclusions after
reviewing the pleasures of life. Mr. Krutch has lived in the most
intellectual circles of New York; Byron swam the Hellespont and had
innumerable love affairs; the author of Ecclesiastes was even more
varied in his pursuit of pleasure: he tried wine, he tried music,
“and that of all sorts”, he built pools of water, he had men-servants
and maid-servants, and servants born in his house. Even in these
circumstances his wisdom departed not from him. Nevertheless he saw
that all is vanity, even wisdom.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and
folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow.
His wisdom seems to have annoyed him; he made unsuccessful efforts to
get rid of it.
I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth,
therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity.
But his wisdom remained with him.
Then I said in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it
happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said
in my heart, that this also is vanity.
Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under
the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of
spirit.
It is fortunate for literary men that people no longer read anything
written long ago, for if they did they would come to the conclusion
that, whatever may be said about pools of water, the making of new
books is certainly vanity. If we can show that the doctrine of
Ecclesiastes is not the only one open to a wise man, we need not
trouble ourselves much with the later expressions of the same mood.
In an argument of this sort we must distinguish between a mood and
its intellectual expression. There is no arguing with a mood; it can
be changed by some fortunate event, or by a change in our bodily
condition, but it cannot be changed by argument. I have frequently
experienced myself the mood in which I felt that all is vanity; I
have emerged from it not by means of any philosophy, but owing to
some imperative necessity of action. If your child is ill, you may be
unhappy, but you will not feel that all is vanity; you will feel that
the restoring of the child to health is a matter to be attended to
regardless of the question whether there is ultimate value in human
life or not. A rich man may, and often does, feel that all is vanity,
but if he should happen to lose his money, he would feel that his
next meal was by no means vanity. The feeling is one born of a too
easy satisfaction of natural needs. The human animal, like others, is
adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means
of great wealth _homo sapiens_ can gratify all his whims without
effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential
ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which
he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of
desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition,
he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who
has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some
of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
So much for the mood. There are, however, also intellectual arguments
in Ecclesiastes.
The rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.
There is no new thing under the sun.
There is no remembrance of former things.
I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I
should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.
If one were to attempt to set up these arguments in the style of a
modern philosopher they would come to something like this: Man is
perpetually toiling, and matter is perpetually in motion, yet nothing
abides, although the new thing that comes after it is in no way
different from what has gone before. A man dies, and his heir reaps the
benefits of his labours; the rivers run into the sea, but their waters
are not permitted to stay there. Over and over again in an endless
purposeless cycle men and things are born and die without improvement,
without permanent achievement, day after day, year after year. The
rivers, if they were wise, would stay where they are. Solomon, if he
were wise, would not plant fruit trees of which his son is to enjoy the
fruit.
But in another mood how different all this looks. No new thing under
the sun? What about skyscrapers, aeroplanes, and the broadcast speeches
of politicians? What did Solomon[1] know about such things? If he
could have heard on the wireless the speech of the Queen of Sheba
to her subjects on her return from his dominions, would it not have
consoled him among his futile trees and pools? If he could have had a
press-cutting agency to let him know what the newspapers said about
the beauty of his architecture, the comforts of his harem, and the
discomfitures of rival sages in argument with him, could he have gone
on saying that there is no new thing under the sun? It may be that
these things would not have wholly cured his pessimism, but he would
have had to give it a new expression. Indeed, one of Mr. Krutch’s
complaints of our time is that there are so many new things under
the sun. If either the absence or the presence of novelty is equally
annoying, it would hardly seem that either could be the true cause of
despair. Again, take the fact that “all the rivers run into the sea,
yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again”. Regarded as ground for pessimism, this
assumes that travel is unpleasant. People go to health resorts in the
summer, yet return again unto the place whence they came. This does
not prove that it is futile to go to health resorts in the summer. If
the waters were endowed with feeling, they would probably enjoy the
adventurous cycle after the manner of Shelley’s _Cloud_. As for
the painfulness of leaving things to one’s heir, that is a matter that
may be looked at from two points of view: from the point of view of
the heir it is distinctly less disastrous. Nor is the fact that all
things pass in itself any ground for pessimism. If they were succeeded
by worse things, that would be a ground, but if they are succeeded by
better things, that is a reason for optimism. What are we to think
if, as Solomon maintains, they are succeeded by things exactly like
themselves? Does not this make the whole process futile? Emphatically
not, unless the various stages of the cycle are themselves painful.
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning
of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one.
There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
Life is not to be conceived on the analogy of a melodrama in which the
hero and heroine go through incredible misfortunes for which they are
compensated by a happy ending. I live and have my day, my son succeeds
me and has his day, his son in turn succeeds him. What is there in all
this to make a tragedy about? On the contrary, if I lived for ever the
joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is,
they remain perennially fresh.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
This attitude is quite as rational as that of indignation with death.
If, therefore, moods were to be decided by reason, there would be quite
as much reason for cheerfulness as for despair.
“Ecclesiastes” is tragic; Mr. Krutch’s _Modern Temper_ is pathetic.
Mr. Krutch, at bottom, is sad because the old mediæval certainties
have crumbled, and also some that are of more recent origin. “As for
this present unhappy time,” he says, “haunted by ghosts from a dead
world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike
the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient
himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was
passed.” This statement is entirely correct as applied to a certain
section of intellectuals, those, namely, who, having had a literary
education, can know nothing of the modern world, and, having throughout
their youth been taught to base belief upon emotion, cannot divest
themselves of that infantile desire for safety and protection which the
world of science cannot gratify. Mr. Krutch, like most other literary
men, is obsessed with the idea that science has not fulfilled its
promises. He does not, of course, tell us what these promises were,
but he seems to think that sixty years ago men like Darwin and Huxley
expected something of science which it has not given. I think this is
an entire delusion, fostered by those writers and clergymen who do
not wish their specialties to be thought of little value. That the
world contains many pessimists at the present moment is true. There
have always been many pessimists whenever there have been many people
whose income has diminished. Mr. Krutch, it is true, is an American,
and American incomes, on the whole, have been increased by the War,
but throughout the Continent of Europe the intellectual classes have
suffered terribly, while the War itself gave everyone a sense of
instability. Such social causes have a great deal more to do with the
mood of an epoch than has its theory as to the nature of the world. Few
ages have been more despairing than the thirteenth century, although
that faith which Mr. Krutch so regrets was then firmly entertained by
everyone except the Emperor and a few great Italian nobles. Thus Roger
Bacon says: “For more sins reign in these days of ours than in any past
age, and sin is incompatible with wisdom. Let us see all conditions
in the world, and consider them diligently everywhere: we shall
find boundless corruption, and first of all in the Head.... Lechery
dishonours the whole court, and gluttony is lord of all.... If then
this is done in the Head, how is it in the members? See the prelates:
how they hunt after money and neglect the cure of souls.... Let us
consider the Religious Orders: I exclude none from what I say. See
how far they are fallen, one and all, from their right state; and the
new Orders (of Friars) are already horribly decayed from their first
dignity. The whole clergy is intent upon pride, lechery, and avarice:
and wheresoever clerks are gathered together, as at Paris and Oxford,
they scandalize the whole laity with their wars and quarrels and other
vices.... None care what is done, or how, by hook or by crook, provided
only that each can fulfil his lust.” Concerning the pagan sages of
antiquity, he says: “Their lives were beyond all comparison better
than ours, both in all decency and in contempt of the world, with all
its delights and riches and honours; as all men may read in the works
of Aristotle, Seneca, Tully, Avicenna, Alfarabius, Plato, Socrates,
and others; and so it was that they attained to the secrets of wisdom
and found out all knowledge.”[2] Roger Bacon’s opinion was that of all
his literary contemporaries, not one of whom liked the age in which he
found himself. I do not for a moment believe that this pessimism had
any metaphysical cause. Its causes were war, poverty, and violence.
One of Mr. Krutch’s most pathetic chapters deals with the subject
of love. It appears that the Victorians thought very highly of it,
but that we with our modern sophistication have come to see through
it. “For the more skeptical of the Victorians, love performed some
of the functions of the God whom they had lost. Faced with it, many
of even the most hard-headed turned, for the moment, mystical. They
found themselves in the presence of something which awoke in them
that sense of reverence which nothing else claimed, and something
to which they felt, even in the very depth of their being, that an
unquestioning loyalty was due. For them love, like God, demanded all
sacrifices; but like Him, also, it rewarded the believer by investing
all the phenomena of life with a meaning not yet analysed away. We
have grown used--more than they--to a Godless universe, but we are not
yet accustomed to one which is loveless as well, and only when we have
so become shall we realize what atheism really means.” It is curious
how different the Victorian age looks to the young of our time from
what it seemed when one was living in it. I remember two old ladies,
both typical of certain aspects of the period, whom I knew well in
my youth. One was a Puritan, and the other a Voltairean. The former
regretted that so much poetry deals with love, which, she maintained,
is an uninteresting subject. The latter remarked: “Nobody can say
anything against me, but I always say that it is not so bad to break
the seventh commandment as the sixth, because at any rate it requires
the consent of the other party.” Neither of these views was quite like
what Mr. Krutch presents as typically Victorian. His ideas are derived
evidently from certain writers who were by no means in harmony with
their environment. The best example, I suppose, is Robert Browning. I
cannot, however, resist the conviction that there is something stuffy
about love as he conceived it.
God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!
This assumes that combativeness is the only possible attitude towards
the world at large. Why? Because the world is cruel, Browning would
say. Because it will not accept you at your own valuation, we should
say. A couple may form, as the Brownings did, a mutual admiration
society. It is very pleasant to have someone at hand who is sure
to praise your work, whether it deserves it or not. And Browning
undoubtedly felt that he was a fine, manly fellow when he denounced
Fitzgerald in no measured terms for having dared not to admire Aurora
Leigh. I cannot feel that this complete suspension of the critical
faculty on both sides is really admirable. It is bound up with fear
and with the desire to find a refuge from the cold blasts of impartial
criticism. Many old bachelors learn to derive the same satisfaction
from their own fireside. I lived too long myself in the Victorian
age to be a modern according to Mr. Krutch’s standards. I have by no
means lost my belief in love, but the kind of love that I can believe
in is not the kind that the Victorians admired; it is adventurous and
open-eyed, and, while it gives knowledge of good, it does not involve
forgetfulness of evil, nor does it pretend to be sanctified or holy.
The attribution of these qualities to the kind of love that was admired
was an outcome of the sex taboo. The Victorian was profoundly convinced
that most sex is evil, and had to attach exaggerated adjectives to the
kind of which he could approve. There was more sex hunger than there
is now, and this no doubt caused people to exaggerate the importance
of sex just as the ascetics have always done. We are at the present
day passing through a somewhat confused period, when many people
have thrown over the old standards without acquiring new ones. This
leads them into various troubles, and as their unconscious usually
still believes in the old standards, the troubles, when they come,
produce despair, remorse, and cynicism. I do not think the number of
people to whom this happens is very large, but they are among the most
vocal people of our time. I believe that if one took the average of
well-to-do young people in our day and in the Victorian epoch, one
would find that there is now a great deal more happiness in connection
with love, and a great deal more genuine belief in the value of love,
than there was sixty years ago. The reasons which lead certain persons
to cynicism are connected with the tyranny of the old ideals over
the unconscious, and with the absence of a rational ethic by which
present-day people can regulate their conduct. The cure lies not in
lamentation and nostalgia for the past, but in a more courageous
acceptance of the modern outlook and a determination to root out
nominally discarded superstitions from all their obscure hiding-places.
To say shortly why one values love is not easy; nevertheless, I will
make the attempt. Love is to be valued in the first instance--and this,
though not its greatest value, is essential to all the rest--as in
itself a source of delight.
Oh Love! they wrong thee much
That say thy sweet is bitter,
When thy rich fruit is such
As nothing can be sweeter.
The anonymous author of these lines was not seeking a solution for
atheism, or a key to the universe; he was merely enjoying himself. And
not only is love a source of delight, but its absence is a source of
pain. In the second place, love is to be valued because it enhances
all the best pleasures, such as music, and sunrise in mountains, and
the sea under the full moon. A man who has never enjoyed beautiful
things in the company of a woman whom he loved has not experienced to
the full the magic power of which such things are capable. Again, love
is able to break down the hard shell of the ego, since it is a form of
biological co-operation in which the emotions of each are necessary to
the fulfilment of the other’s instinctive purposes. There have been in
the world at various times various solitary philosophies, some very
noble, some less so. The Stoics and the early Christians believed that
a man could realize the highest good of which human life is capable by
means of his own will alone, or at any rate without _human_ aid;
others again have regarded power as the end of life, and yet others
mere personal pleasure. All these are solitary philosophies in the
sense that the good is supposed to be something realizable in each
separate person, not only in a larger or smaller society of persons.
All such views, to my mind, are false, and not only in ethical
theory, but as expressions of the better part of our instincts. Man
depends upon co-operation, and has been provided by nature, somewhat
inadequately, it is true, with the instinctive apparatus out of which
the friendliness required for co-operation can spring. Love is the
first and commonest form of emotion leading to co-operation, and those
who have experienced love with any intensity will not be content with
a philosophy that supposes their highest good to be independent of
that of the person loved. In this respect parental feeling is even
more powerful, but parental feeling at its best is the result of love
between the parents. I do not pretend that love in its highest form is
common, but I do maintain that in its highest form it reveals values
which must otherwise remain unknown, and has itself a value which is
untouched by scepticism, although sceptics who are incapable of it may
falsely attribute their incapacity to their scepticism.
True love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never dead, never cold,
From itself never turning.
I come next to what Mr. Krutch has to say about tragedy. He contends,
and in this I cannot but agree with him, that Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ is
inferior to _King Lear_. “No increased powers of expression, no
greater gift for words, could have transformed Ibsen into Shakespeare.
The materials out of which the latter created his works--his
conception of human dignity, his sense of the importance of human
passions, his vision of the amplitude of human life--simply did not
and could not exist for Ibsen, as they did not and could not exist for
his contemporaries. God and Man and Nature had all somehow dwindled
in the course of the intervening centuries, not because the realistic
creed of modern art led us to seek out mean people, but because this
meanness of human life was somehow thrust upon us by the operation of
that same process which led to the development of realistic theories
of art by which our vision could be justified.” It is undoubtedly the
case that the old-fashioned kind of tragedy which dealt with princes
and their sorrows is not suitable to our age, and when we try to treat
in the same manner the sorrows of an obscure individual the effect is
not the same. The reason of this is not, however, any deterioration
in our outlook on life, but quite the reverse. It is due to the fact
that we can no longer regard certain individuals as the great ones of
the earth, who have a right to tragic passions, while all the rest
must merely drudge and toil to produce the magnificence of those few.
Shakespeare says:
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
In Shakespeare’s day this sentiment, if not literally believed, at
least expressed an outlook which was practically universal and most
profoundly accepted by Shakespeare himself. Consequently the death
of Cinna the poet is comic, whereas the deaths of Cæsar, Brutus and
Cassius are tragic. The cosmic significance of an individual death
is lost to us because we have become democratic, not only in outward
forms, but in our inmost convictions. High tragedy in the present
day, therefore, has to concern itself rather with the community than
with the individual. I would give as an example of what I mean Ernst
Toller’s _Massenmench_.[3] I do not maintain that this work is as
good as the best that has been done in the best ages in the past, but
I do maintain that it is justly comparable; it is noble, profound and
actual, concerned with heroic action, and “purging the reader through
pity and terror”, as Aristotle said it should. There are as yet few
examples of this modern kind of tragedy, since the old technique and
the old traditions have to be abandoned without being replaced by mere
educated commonplace. To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To
feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives, not
only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews. Mr. Krutch talks
throughout his book at intervals about despair, and one is touched by
his heroic acceptance of a bleak world, but the bleakness is due to
the fact that he and most literary men have not yet learnt to feel the
old emotions in response to new stimuli. The stimuli exist, but not
in literary coteries. Literary coteries have no vital contact with the
life of the community, and such contact is necessary if men’s feelings
are to have the seriousness and depth within which both tragedy and
true happiness proceed. To all the talented young men who wander about
feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should
say: “Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go
out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in
Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of
elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.” I do
not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who
suffer from the disease which Mr. Krutch diagnoses. I believe that,
after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will find
that in spite of his efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and
when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.
CHAPTER III
COMPETITION
If you ask any man in America, or any man in business in England, what
it is that most interferes with his enjoyment of existence, he will
say: “The struggle for life.” He will say this in all sincerity; he
will believe it. In a certain sense it is true; yet in another, and
that a very important sense, it is profoundly false. The struggle for
life is a thing which does, of course, occur. It may occur to any of us
if we are unfortunate. It occurred, for example, to Conrad’s hero Falk,
who found himself on a derelict ship, one of the two men among the crew
who were possessed of fire-arms, with nothing to eat but the other
men. When the two men had finished the meals upon which they could
agree, a true struggle for life began. Falk won, but was ever after a
vegetarian. Now that is not what the business man means when he speaks
of the “struggle for life”. It is an inaccurate phrase which he has
picked up in order to give dignity to something essentially trivial.
Ask him how many men he has known in his class of life who have died
of hunger. Ask him what happened to his friends after they had been
ruined. Everybody knows that a business man who has been ruined is
better off so far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has
never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined. What people
mean, therefore, by the struggle for life is really the struggle for
success. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that
they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will
fail to outshine their neighbours.
It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not
caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but
that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they
have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level. I
am thinking, of course, of men in higher walks of business, men who
already have a good income and could, if they chose, live on what
they have. To do so would seem to them shameful, like deserting from
the army in the face of the enemy, though if you ask them what public
cause they are serving by their work, they will be at a loss to reply
as soon as they have run through the platitudes to be found in the
advertisements of the strenuous life.
Consider the life of such a man. He has, we may suppose, a charming
house, a charming wife, and charming children. He wakes up early in
the morning while they are still asleep and hurries off to his office.
There it is his duty to display the qualities of a great executive;
he cultivates a firm jaw, a decisive manner of speech, and an air of
sagacious reserve calculated to impress everybody except the office
boy. He dictates letters, converses with various important persons
on the ’phone, studies the market, and presently has lunch with some
person with whom he is conducting or hoping to conduct a deal. The same
sort of thing goes on all the afternoon. He arrives home, tired, just
in time to dress for dinner. At dinner he and a number of other tired
men have to pretend to enjoy the company of ladies who have no occasion
to feel tired yet. How many hours it may take the poor man to escape it
is impossible to foresee. At last he sleeps, and for a few hours the
tension is relaxed.
The working life of this man has the psychology of a hundred-yards
race, but as the race upon which he is engaged is one whose only goal
is the grave, the concentration, which is appropriate enough for a
hundred yards, becomes in the end somewhat excessive. What does he
know about his children? On week-days he is at the office; on Sundays
he is at the golf links. What does he know of his wife? When he leaves
her in the morning, she is asleep. Throughout the evening he and she
are engaged in social duties which prevent intimate conversation. He
has probably no men friends who are important to him, although he has
a number with whom he affects a geniality that he wishes he felt. Of
springtime and harvest he knows only as they affect the market; foreign
countries he has probably seen, but with eyes of utter boredom. Books
seem to him futile, and music highbrow. Year by year he grows more
lonely; his attention grows more concentrated, and his life outside
business more desiccated. I have seen the American of this type in
later middle life, in Europe, with his wife and daughters. Evidently
they had persuaded the poor fellow that it was time he took a holiday,
and gave his girls a chance to do the Old World. The mother and
daughters in ecstasy surround him and call his attention to each new
item that strikes them as characteristic. Paterfamilias, utterly weary,
utterly bored, is wondering what they are doing in the office at this
moment, or what is happening in the baseball world. His womenkind, in
the end, give him up, and conclude that males are Philistines. It never
dawns upon them that he is a victim to their greed; nor, indeed, is
this quite the truth, any more than suttee is quite what it appeared to
a European onlooker. Probably in nine cases out of ten the widow was a
willing victim, prepared to be burnt for the sake of glory and because
religion so ordained. The business man’s religion and glory demand that
he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers
the torment gladly. If the American business man is to be made happier,
he must first change his religion. So long as he not only desires
success, but is whole-heartedly persuaded that it is a man’s duty to
pursue success, and that a man who does not do so is a poor creature,
so long his life will remain too concentrated and too anxious to be
happy. Take a simple matter, such as investments. Almost every American
would sooner get 8 per cent. from a risky investment than 4 per cent.
from a safe one. The consequence is that there are frequent losses
of money and continual worry and fret. For my part, the thing that I
should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But
what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with
a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have
hitherto been his equals. The social scale in America is indefinite
and continually fluctuating. Consequently all the snobbish emotions
become more restless than they are where the social order is fixed,
and although money in itself may not suffice to make people grand, it
is difficult to be grand without money. Moreover, money made is the
accepted measure of brains. A man who makes a lot of money is a clever
fellow; a man who does not, is not. Nobody likes to be thought a fool.
Therefore, when the market is in ticklish condition, a man feels the
way young people feel during an examination.
I think it should be admitted that an element of genuine though
irrational fear as to the consequences of ruin frequently enters into
a business man’s anxieties. Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, however rich
he became, continued to be afraid of dying in the workhouse. I have no
doubt that those who have suffered greatly through poverty in their
childhood are haunted by terrors lest their children should suffer
similarly, and feel that it is hardly possible to build up enough
millions as a bulwark against this disaster. Such fears are probably
inevitable in the first generation, but they are less likely to afflict
those who have never known great poverty. They are in any case a minor
and somewhat exceptional factor in the problem.
The root of the trouble springs from too much emphasis upon competitive
success as the main source of happiness. I do not deny that the feeling
of success makes it easier to enjoy life. A painter, let us say, who
has been obscure throughout his youth, is likely to become happier if
his talent wins recognition. Nor do I deny that money, up to a certain
point, is very capable of increasing happiness; beyond that point, I
do not think it does so. What I do maintain is that success can only
be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the
other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.
The source of this trouble is the prevalent philosophy of life in
business circles. In Europe, it is true, there are still other circles
that have prestige. In some countries there is an aristocracy; in all
there are the learned professions, and in all but a few of the smaller
countries the army and the navy enjoy great respect. Now while it is
true that there is a competitive element in success no matter what a
man’s profession may be, yet at the same time the kind of thing that
is respected is not just success, but that excellence, whatever that
may be, to which success has been due. A man of science may or may
not make money; he is certainly not more respected if he does than if
he does not. No one is surprised to find an eminent general or admiral
poor; indeed, poverty in such circumstances is, in a sense, itself an
honour. For these reasons, in Europe, the purely monetary competitive
struggle is confined to certain circles, and those perhaps not the
most influential or the most respected. In America the matter is
otherwise. The Services play too small a part in the national life for
their standards to have any influence. As for the learned professions,
no outsider can tell whether a doctor really knows much medicine, or
whether a lawyer really knows much law, and it is therefore easier
to judge of their merit by the income to be inferred from their
standard of life. As for professors, they are the hired servants of
business men, and as such win less respect than is accorded to them in
older countries. The consequence of all this is that in America the
professional man imitates the business man, and does not constitute a
separate type as he does in Europe. Throughout the well-to-do classes,
therefore, there is nothing to mitigate the bare undiluted fight for
financial success.
From quite early years American boys feel that this is the only thing
that matters, and do not wish to be bothered with any kind of education
that is devoid of pecuniary value. Education used to be conceived very
largely as a training in the capacity for enjoyment--enjoyment, I mean,
of those more delicate kinds that are not open to wholly uncultivated
people. In the eighteenth century it was one of the marks of a
“gentleman” to take a discriminating pleasure in literature, pictures,
and music. We nowadays may disagree with his taste, but it was at
least genuine. The rich man of the present day tends to be of quite a
different type. He never reads. If he is creating a picture gallery
with a view to enhancing his fame, he relies upon experts to choose his
pictures; the pleasure that he derives from them is not the pleasure
of looking at them, but the pleasure of preventing some other rich man
from having them. In regard to music, if he happens to be a Jew, he may
have genuine appreciation; if not, he will be as uncultivated as he is
in regard to the other arts. The result of all this is that he does not
know what to do with leisure. As he gets richer and richer it becomes
easier and easier to make money, until at last five minutes a day will
bring him more than he knows how to spend. The poor man is thus left
at a loose end as a result of his success. This must inevitably be the
case so long as success itself is represented as the purpose of life.
Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it,
the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.
The competitive habit of mind easily invades regions to which it does
not belong. Take, for example, the question of reading. There are two
motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that
you can boast about it. It has become the thing in America for ladies
to read (or seem to read) certain books every month; some read them,
some read the first chapter, some read the reviews, but all have these
books on their tables. They do not, however, read any masterpieces.
There has never been a month when _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_ has
been selected by the Book Clubs; there has never been a month when it
has been necessary to know about Dante. Consequently the reading that
is done is entirely of mediocre modern books and never of masterpieces.
This also is an effect of competition, not perhaps wholly bad, since
most of the ladies in question, if left to themselves, so far from
reading masterpieces, would read books even worse than those selected
for them by their literary pastors and masters.
The emphasis upon competition in modern life is connected with a
general decay of civilized standards such as must have occurred in Rome
after the Augustan age. Men and women appear to have become incapable
of enjoying the more intellectual pleasures. The art of general
conversation, for example, brought to perfection in the French salons
of the eighteenth century, was still a living tradition forty years
ago. It was a very exquisite art, bringing the highest faculties into
play for the sake of something completely evanescent. But who in our
age cares for anything so leisurely? In China the art still flourished
in perfection ten years ago, but I imagine that the missionary ardour
of the Nationalists has since then swept it completely out of
existence. The knowledge of good literature, which was universal among
educated people fifty or a hundred years ago, is now confined to a
few professors. All the quieter pleasures have been abandoned. Some
American students took me walking in the spring through a wood on the
borders of their campus; it was filled with exquisite wild flowers, but
not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would
such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody’s income.
The trouble does not lie simply with the individual, nor can a single
individual prevent it in his own isolated case. The trouble arises from
the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is
a contest, a competition, in which respect is to be accorded to the
victor. This view leads to an undue cultivation of the will at the
expense of the senses and the intellect. Or possibly, in saying this,
we may be putting the cart before the horse. Puritan moralists have
always emphasized the will in modern times, although originally it was
faith upon which they laid stress. It may be that ages of Puritanism
produced a race in which will had been overdeveloped, while the senses
and the intellect had been starved, and that such a race adopted a
philosophy of competition as the one best suited to its nature. However
that may be, the prodigious success of these modern dinosaurs, who,
like their prehistoric prototypes, prefer power to intelligence, is
causing them to be universally imitated: they have become the pattern
for the white man everywhere, and this is likely to be increasingly
the case for the next hundred years. Those, however, who are not in
the fashion may take comfort from the thought that the dinosaurs did
not ultimately triumph; they killed each other out, and intelligent
bystanders inherited their kingdom. Our modern dinosaurs are killing
themselves out. They do not, on the average, have so much as two
children per marriage; they do not enjoy life enough to wish to beget
children. At this point the unduly strenuous philosophy which they have
carried over from their Puritan forefathers shows itself unadapted to
the world. Those whose outlook on life causes them to feel so little
happiness that they do not care to beget children are biologically
doomed. Before very long they must be succeeded by something gayer and
jollier.
Competition considered as the main thing in life is too grim, too
tenacious, too much a matter of taut muscles and intent will, to make
a possible basis of life for more than one or two generations at most.
After that length of time it must produce nervous fatigue, various
phenomena of escape, a pursuit of pleasures as tense and as difficult
as work (since relaxing has become impossible), and in the end a
disappearance of the stock through sterility. It is not only work that
is poisoned by the philosophy of competition; leisure is poisoned just
as much. The kind of leisure which is quiet and restoring to the nerves
comes to be felt boring. There is bound to be a continual acceleration
of which the natural termination would be drugs and collapse. The cure
for this lies in admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a
balanced ideal of life.
CHAPTER IV
BOREDOM AND EXCITEMENT
Boredom as a factor in human behaviour has received, in my opinion, far
less attention than it deserves. It has been, I believe, one of the
great motive powers throughout the historical epoch, and is so at the
present day more than ever. Boredom would seem to be a distinctively
human emotion. Animals in captivity, it is true, become listless, pace
up and down, and yawn, but in a state of nature I do not believe that
they experience anything analogous to boredom. Most of the time they
are on the look-out for enemies, or food, or both; sometimes they
are mating, sometimes they are trying to keep warm. But even when
they are unhappy, I do not think that they are bored. Possibly the
anthropoid apes may resemble us in this respect, as in so many others,
but having never lived with them I have not had the opportunity to
make the experiment. One of the essentials of boredom consist in the
contrast between present circumstances and some other more agreeable
circumstances which force themselves irresistibly upon the imagination.
It is also one of the essentials of boredom that one’s faculties must
not be fully occupied. Running away from enemies who are trying to
take one’s life is, I imagine, unpleasant, but certainly not boring.
A man would not feel bored while he was being executed, unless he
had almost superhuman courage. In like manner no one has ever yawned
during his maiden speech in the House of Lords, with the exception of
the late Duke of Devonshire, who was reverenced by their Lordships in
consequence. Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not
necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the
victim of _ennui_ to know one day from another. The opposite of
boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.
The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings,
especially in males. I suppose that in the hunting stage it was more
easily gratified than it has been since. The chase was exciting,
war was exciting, courtship was exciting. A savage will manage to
commit adultery with a woman while her husband is asleep beside her,
knowing that it is instant death if the husband wakes. This situation,
I imagine, is not boring. But with the coming of agriculture life
began to grow dull, except, of course, for the aristocrats, who
remained, and still remain, in the hunting stage. We hear a great
deal about the tedium of machine-minding, but I think the tedium of
agriculture by old-fashioned methods is at least as great. Indeed,
contrary to what most philanthropists maintain, I should say that
the machine age has enormously diminished the sum of boredom in the
world. Among wage-earners the working hours are not solitary, while
the evening hours can be given over to a variety of amusements that
were impossible in an old-fashioned country village. Consider again
the change in lower middle-class life. In old days, after supper, when
the wife and daughters had cleared away the things, everybody sat
round and had what was called “a happy family time”. This meant that
paterfamilias went to sleep, his wife knitted, and the daughters wished
they were dead or at Timbuktu. They were not allowed to read, or to
leave the room, because the theory was that at that period their father
conversed with them, which must be a pleasure to all concerned. With
luck they ultimately married and had a chance to inflict upon their
children a youth as dismal as their own had been. If they did not have
luck, they developed into old maids, perhaps ultimately into decayed
gentlewomen--a fate as horrible as any that savages have bestowed upon
their victims. All this weight of boredom should be borne in mind in
estimating the world of a hundred years ago, and when one goes further
into the past the boredom becomes still worse. Imagine the monotony of
winter in a mediæval village. People could not read or write, they had
only candles to give them light after dark, the smoke of their one fire
filled the only room that was not bitterly cold. Roads were practically
impassable, so that one hardly ever saw anybody from another village.
It must have been boredom as much as anything that led to the practice
of witch hunts as the sole sport by which winter evenings could be
enlivened.
We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of
boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom
is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a
sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement. Girls nowadays earn
their own living, very largely because this enables them to seek
excitement in the evening and to escape “the happy family time”
that their grandmothers had to endure. Everybody who can lives in a
town; in America, those who cannot, have a car, or at the least a
motor-bicycle, to take them to the movies. And of course they have the
radio in their houses. Young men and young women meet each other with
much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid
expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a
Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel. As we rise in the social
scale the pursuit of excitement becomes more and more intense. Those
who can afford it are perpetually moving from place to place, carrying
with them as they go gaiety, dancing and drinking, but for some reason
always expecting to enjoy these more in a new place. Those who have
to earn a living get their share of boredom, of necessity, in working
hours, but those who have enough money to be freed from the need of
work have as their ideal a life completely freed from boredom. It is
a noble ideal, and far be it from me to decry it, but I am afraid
that like other ideals it is more difficult of achievement than the
idealists suppose. After all, the mornings are boring in proportion
as the previous evenings were amusing. There will be middle age,
possibly even old age. At twenty men think that life will be over at
thirty. I, at the age of fifty-eight, can no longer take that view.
Perhaps it is as unwise to spend one’s vital capital as one’s financial
capital. Perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in
life. A wish to escape from boredom is natural; indeed, all races of
mankind have displayed it as opportunity occurred. When savages have
first tasted liquor at the hands of the white men, they have found at
last an escape from age-old tedium, and, except when the Government
has interfered, they have drunk themselves into a riotous death.
Wars, pogroms, and persecutions have all been part of the flight from
boredom; even quarrels with neighbours have been found better than
nothing. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since
at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Boredom, however, is not to be regarded as wholly evil. There are two
sorts, of which one is fructifying, while the other is stultifying. The
fructifying kind arises from the absence of drugs, and the stultifying
kind from the absence of vital activities. I am not prepared to say
that drugs can play no good part in life whatsoever. There are moments,
for example, when an opiate will be prescribed by a wise physician,
and I think these moments more frequent than prohibitionists suppose.
But the craving for drugs is certainly something which cannot be
left to the unfettered operation of natural impulse. And the kind of
boredom which the person accustomed to drugs experiences when deprived
of them is something for which I can suggest no remedy except time.
Now what applies to drugs applies also, within limits, to every kind
of excitement. A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life,
in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill
that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure. A person
accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid
craving for pepper, who comes at last to be unable even to taste a
quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. There is an
element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much
excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but
dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations
for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged
surprises for beauty. I do not want to push to extremes the objection
to excitement. A certain amount of it is wholesome, but, like almost
everything else, the matter is quantitative. Too little may produce
morbid cravings, too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of
enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of
the things that ought to be taught to the young.
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have
contained uninteresting stretches. Imagine a modern American publisher
confronted with the Old Testament as a new manuscript submitted to him
for the first time. It is not difficult to think what his comments
would be, for example, on the genealogies. “My dear sir,” he would say,
“this chapter lacks pep; you can’t expect your reader to be interested
in a mere string of proper names of persons about whom you tell him so
little. You have begun your story, I will admit, in fine style, and at
first I was very favourably impressed, but you have altogether too much
wish to tell it all. Pick out the high lights, take out the superfluous
matter, and bring me back your manuscript when you have reduced it to
a reasonable length.” So the modern publisher would speak, knowing the
modern reader’s fear of boredom. He would say the same sort of thing
about the Confucian classics, the Koran, Marx’s _Capital_, and all
the other sacred books which have proved to be best sellers. Nor does
this apply only to sacred books. All the best novels contain boring
passages. A novel which sparkles from the first page to the last is
pretty sure not to be a great book. Nor have the lives of great men
been exciting except at a few great moments. Socrates could enjoy a
banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction
from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most
of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional
in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting a few friends by the way. Kant
is said never to have been more than ten miles from Königsberg in all
his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole of
the rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few
revolutions, decided to spend the remainder of his days in the British
Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic
of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort
that would look exciting to the outward eye. No great achievement is
possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that
little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement,
except such as serve to recuperate physical energy during holidays, of
which Alpine climbing may serve as the best example.
The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which
should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame
in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive
amusements, such as shows and good things to eat, and they do not
realize the importance to a child of having one day like another,
except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions. The pleasures of
childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts himself from
his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness. Pleasures
which are exciting and at the same time involve no physical exertion,
such, for example, as the theatre, should occur very rarely. The
excitement is in the nature of a drug, of which more and more will come
to be required, and the physical passivity during the excitement is
contrary to instinct. A child develops best when, like a young plant,
he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much
variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them
as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only
that certain good things are not possible except where there is a
certain degree of monotony. Take, say, Wordsworth’s _Prelude_.
It will be obvious to every reader that whatever had any value in
Wordsworth’s thoughts and feelings would have been impossible to a
sophisticated urban youth. A boy or young man who has some serious
constructive purpose will endure voluntarily a great deal of boredom
if he finds that it is necessary by the way. But constructive purposes
do not easily form themselves in a boy’s mind if he is living a life
of distractions and dissipations, for in that case his thoughts will
always be directed towards the next pleasure rather than towards the
distant achievement. For all these reasons a generation that cannot
endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly
divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital
impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.
I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly know how to express
what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than
scientific. Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth;
our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment
from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is
slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer,
and rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to
the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and
flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the
ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the
festival of Easter. I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been
kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country.
The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult
eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang
up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face
in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight.
The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive.
The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those
in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane. Many pleasures, of
which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element
of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they
cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he
knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can be called joy.
Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life
of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they
cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their
intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more
exciting dissipations. The distinction that I have in mind runs through
the whole gamut from the simplest to the most civilized occupations.
The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most
primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a
higher form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes
Shakespeare’s lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy
that made the two-year-old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the
lark”, or “Come unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems
the civilized expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old
could only find utterance in inarticulate cries. Or, again, consider
the difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an
experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that
of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there
is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is
fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the
life of Earth; sex without love is not.
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer
is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth.
It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the
desert. Among those who are rich enough to choose their way of life,
the particular brand of unendurable boredom from which they suffer is
due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear of boredom. In flying
from the fructifying kind of boredom, they fall a prey to the other far
worse kind. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it
is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
CHAPTER V
FATIGUE
Fatigue is of many sorts, some of which are a much graver obstacle to
happiness than others. Purely physical fatigue, provided it is not
excessive, tends if anything to be a cause of happiness; it leads to
sound sleep and a good appetite, and gives zest to the pleasures that
are possible on holidays. But when it is excessive it becomes a very
grave evil. Peasant women in all but the most advanced communities are
old at thirty, worn out with excessive toil. Children in the early days
of industrialism were stunted in their growth and frequently killed
by overwork in early years. The same thing still happens in China and
Japan, where industrialism is new; to some extent also in the Southern
States of America. Physical labour carried beyond a certain point is
atrocious torture, and it has very frequently been carried so far as to
make life all but unbearable. In the most advanced parts of the modern
world, however, physical fatigue has been much minimized through the
improvement of industrial conditions. The kind of fatigue that is most
serious in the present day in advanced communities is nervous fatigue.
This kind, oddly enough, is most pronounced among the well-to-do, and
tends to be much less among wage-earners than it is among business men
and brain-workers.
To escape from nervous fatigue in modern life is a very difficult
thing. In the first place, all through working hours, and still more in
the time spent between work and home, the urban worker is exposed to
noise, most of which, it is true, he learns not to hear consciously,
but which none the less wears him out, all the more owing to the
subconscious effort involved in not hearing it. Another thing which
causes fatigue without our being aware of it is the constant presence
of strangers. The natural instinct of man, as of other animals, is to
investigate every stranger of his species, with a view to deciding
whether to behave to him in a friendly or hostile manner. This instinct
has to be inhibited by those who travel in the underground in the rush
hour, and the result of inhibiting it is that they feel a general
diffused rage against all the strangers with whom they are brought
into this involuntary contact. Then there is the hurry to catch the
morning train, with the resulting dyspepsia. Consequently, by the time
the office is reached and the day’s work begins, the black-coated
worker already has frayed nerves and a tendency to view the human race
as a nuisance. His employer, arriving in the same mood, does nothing
to dissipate it in the employee. Fear of the sack compels respectful
behaviour, but this unnatural conduct only adds to the nervous strain.
If once a week employees were allowed to pull the employer’s nose
and otherwise indicate what they thought of him, the nervous tension
for them would be relieved, but for the employer, who also has his
troubles, this would not mend matters. What the fear of dismissal is
to the employee, the fear of bankruptcy is to the employer. Some,
it is true, are big enough to be above this fear, but to reach a
great position of this kind they have generally had to pass through
years of strenuous struggle, during which they had to be actively
aware of events in all parts of the world and constantly foiling the
machinations of their competitors. The result of all this is that when
sound success comes a man is already a nervous wreck, so accustomed to
anxiety that he cannot shake off the habit of it when the need for it
is past. There are, it is true, rich men’s sons, but they generally
succeed in manufacturing for themselves anxieties as similar as
possible to those that they would have suffered if they had not been
born rich. By betting and gambling, they incur the displeasure of their
fathers; by cutting short their sleep for the sake of their amusements,
they debilitate their physique; and by the time they settle down, they
have become as incapable of happiness as their fathers were before
them. Voluntarily or involuntarily, of choice or of necessity, most
moderns lead a nerve-racking life, and are continually too tired to be
capable of enjoyment without the help of alcohol.
Leaving on one side those rich men who are merely fools, let us
consider the commoner case of those whose fatigue is associated with
strenuous work for a living. To a great extent fatigue in such cases
is due to worry, and worry could be prevented by a better philosophy
of life and a little more mental discipline. Most men and women are
very deficient in control over their thoughts. I mean by this that they
cannot cease to think about worrying topics at times when no action
can be taken in regard to them. Men take their business worries to bed
with them, and in the hours of the night, when they should be gaining
fresh strength to cope with to-morrow’s troubles, they are going over
and over again in their minds problems about which at the moment
they can do nothing, thinking about them, not in a way to produce a
sound line of conduct on the morrow, but in that half-insane way that
characterizes the troubled meditations of insomnia. Something of the
midnight madness still clings about them in the morning, clouding their
judgment, spoiling their temper, and making every obstacle infuriating.
The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose
in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is
night, about nothing at all. I do not mean to suggest that at a great
crisis, for example, when ruin is imminent, or when a man has reason
to suspect that his wife is deceiving him, it is possible, except to a
few exceptionally disciplined minds, to shut out the trouble at moments
when nothing can be done about it. But it is quite possible to shut out
the ordinary troubles of ordinary days, except while they have to be
dealt with. It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can
be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about
a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all
times. When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon
as all the data are available give the matter your best thought and
make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless
some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as
indecision, and nothing is so futile.
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance
of the matter which is causing the anxiety. I have done in my time
a considerable amount of public speaking; at first every audience
terrified me, and nervousness made me speak very badly; I dreaded the
ordeal so much that I always hoped I might break my leg before I had to
make a speech, and when it was over I was exhausted from the nervous
strain. Gradually I taught myself to feel that it did not matter
whether I spoke well or ill, the universe would remain much the same
in either case. I found that the less I cared whether I spoke well
or badly, the less badly I spoke, and gradually the nervous strain
diminished almost to vanishing point. A great deal of nervous fatigue
can be dealt with in this way. Our doings are not so important as we
naturally suppose; our successes and failures do not after all matter
very much. Even great sorrows can be survived; troubles which seem as
if they must put an end to happiness for life fade with the lapse of
time until it becomes almost impossible to remember their poignancy.
But over and above these self-centred considerations is the fact that
one’s ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can centre
his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a
certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to
the pure egoist.
What might be called hygiene of the nerves has been much too little
studied. Industrial psychology, it is true, has made elaborate
investigations into fatigue, and has proved by careful statistics
that if you go on doing something for a sufficiently long time you
will ultimately get rather tired--a result which might have been
guessed without so much parade of science. The study of fatigue by
psychologists is mainly concerned with muscular fatigue, although there
are also a certain number of studies of fatigue in school children.
None of these, however, touch upon the important problem. The important
kind of fatigue is always emotional in modern life; purely intellectual
fatigue, like purely muscular fatigue, produces its own remedy in
sleep. Any person who has a great deal of intellectual work devoid of
emotion to do--say, for example, elaborate computations--will sleep off
at the end of each day the fatigue that that day has brought. The harm
that is attributed to overwork is hardly ever due to that cause, but to
some kind of worry or anxiety. The trouble with emotional fatigue is
that it interferes with rest. The more tired a man becomes, the more
impossible he finds it to stop. One of the symptoms of approaching
nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important,
and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I
were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who
considered his work important. The nervous break-down which appears to
be produced by the work is, in fact, in every case that I have ever
known of personally, produced by some emotional trouble from which the
patient attempts to escape by means of his work. He is loath to give
up his work because, if he does so, he will no longer have anything
to distract him from the thoughts of his misfortune, whatever it may
be. Of course, the trouble may be fear of bankruptcy, and in that case
his work is directly connected with his worry, but even then worry is
likely to lead him to work so long that his judgment becomes clouded
and bankruptcy comes sooner than if he worked less. In every case it is
the emotional trouble, not the work, that causes the breakdown.
The psychology of worry is by no means simple. I have spoken already of
mental discipline, namely the habit of thinking of things at the right
time. This has its importance, first because it makes it possible to
get through the day’s work with less expenditure of thought, secondly
because it affords a cure for insomnia, and thirdly because it
promotes efficiency and wisdom in decisions. But methods of this kind
do not touch the subconscious or the unconscious, and when a trouble is
grave no method is of much avail unless it penetrates below the level
of consciousness. There has been a great deal of study by psychologists
of the operation of the unconscious upon the conscious, but much less
of the operation of the conscious upon the unconscious. Yet the latter
is of vast importance in the subject of mental hygiene, and must be
understood if rational convictions are ever to operate in the realm of
the unconscious. This applies in particular in the matter of worry. It
is easy enough to tell oneself that such and such a misfortune would
not be so very terrible if it happened, but so long as this remains
merely a conscious conviction it will not operate in the watches of the
night, or prevent the occurrence of nightmares. My own belief is that a
conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient
amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious
consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which
have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying
deliberately, and in this way the unconscious can be led to do a lot of
useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon
some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with
very great intensity--the greatest intensity of which I am capable--for
a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to
speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I
return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done.
Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening
months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the
solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months
were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits. A process
in many ways analogous can be adopted with regard to anxieties. When
some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is
the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible
misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that
after all it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons
always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has
any cosmic importance. When you have looked for some time steadily at
the worst possibility and have said to yourself with real conviction,
“Well, after all, that would not matter so very much”, you will find
that your worry diminishes to a quite extraordinary extent. It may be
necessary to repeat the process a few times, but in the end, if you
have shirked nothing in facing the worst possible issue, you will find
that your worry disappears altogether, and is replaced by a kind of
exhilaration.
This is part of a more general technique for the avoidance of fear.
Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man
who has learnt not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life
enormously diminished. Now fear, in its most harmful form, arises where
there is some danger which we are unwilling to face. At odd moments
horrible thoughts dart into our minds; what they are depends upon
the person, but almost everybody has some kind of lurking fear. With
one man it is cancer, with another financial ruin, with a third the
discovery of some disgraceful secret, a fourth is tormented by jealous
suspicions, a fifth is haunted at night by the thought that perhaps the
tales of hell-fire told him when he was young may be true. Probably all
these people employ the wrong technique for dealing with their fear;
whenever it comes into their mind, they try to think of something else;
they distract their thoughts with amusement or work, or what not. Now
every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at. The effort of
turning away one’s thoughts is a tribute to the horribleness of the
spectre from which one is averting one’s gaze; the proper course with
every kind of fear is to think about it rationally and calmly, but with
great concentration, until it has become completely familiar. In the
end familiarity will blunt its terrors; the whole subject will become
boring, and our thoughts will turn away from it, not, as formerly, by
an effort of will, but through mere lack of interest in the topic. When
you find yourself inclined to brood on anything, no matter what, the
best plan always is to think about it even more than you naturally
would, until at last its morbid fascination is worn off.
One of the matters in which modern morality is most defective is this
question of fear. It is true that physical courage, especially in
war, is expected of men, but other forms of courage are not expected
of them, and no form of courage is expected of women. A woman who is
courageous has to conceal the fact if she wishes men to like her.
The man who is courageous in any matter except physical danger is
also thought ill of. Indifference to public opinion, for example, is
regarded as a challenge, and the public does what it can to punish
the man who dares to flout its authority. All this is quite opposite
to what it should be. Every form of courage, whether in men or women,
should be admired as much as physical courage is admired in a soldier.
The commonness of physical courage among young men is a proof that
courage can be produced in response to a public opinion that demands
it. Given more courage there would be less worry, and therefore less
fatigue; for a very large proportion of the nervous fatigues from
which men and women suffer at present are due to fears, conscious or
unconscious.
A very frequent source of fatigue is love of excitement. If a man could
spend his leisure in sleep, he would keep fit, but his working hours
are dreary, and he feels the need of pleasure during his hours of
freedom. The trouble is that the pleasures which are easiest to obtain
and most superficially attractive are mostly of a sort to wear out the
nerves. Desire for excitement, when it goes beyond a point, is a sign
either of a twisted disposition or of some instinctive dissatisfaction.
In the early days of a happy marriage most men feel no need of
excitement, but in the modern world marriage often has to be postponed
for such a long time that when at last it becomes financially possible
excitement has become a habit which can only be kept at bay for a short
time. If public opinion allowed men to marry at twenty-one without
incurring the financial burdens at present involved in matrimony, many
men would never get into the way of demanding pleasures as fatiguing
as their work. To suggest that this should be made possible is,
however, immoral, as may be seen from the fate of Judge Lindsey, who
has suffered obloquy, in spite of a long and honourable career, for the
sole crime of wishing to save young people from the misfortunes that
they incur as a result of their elders’ bigotry. I shall not, however,
pursue this topic any further at present, since it comes under the
heading of Envy, with which we shall be concerned in a later chapter.
For the private individual, who cannot alter the laws and institutions
under which he lives, it is difficult to cope with the situation that
oppressive moralists created and perpetuate. It is, however, worth
while to realize that exciting pleasures are not a road to happiness,
although so long as more satisfying joys remain unattainable a man
may find it hardly possible to endure life except by the help of
excitement. In such a situation the only thing that a prudent man
can do is to ration himself, and not to allow himself such an amount
of fatiguing pleasure as will undermine his health or interfere with
his work. The radical cure for the troubles of the young lies in a
change of public morals. In the meantime a young man does well to
reflect that he will ultimately be in a position to marry, and that he
will be unwise if he lives in such a way as to make a happy marriage
impossible, which may easily happen through frayed nerves and an
acquired incapacity for the gentler pleasures.
One of the worst features of nervous fatigue is that it acts as a
sort of screen between a man and the outside world. Impressions reach
him, as it were, muffled and muted; he no longer notices people
except to be irritated by small tricks or mannerisms; he derives no
pleasure from his meals or from the sunshine, but tends to become
tensely concentrated upon a few objects and indifferent to all the
rest. This state of affairs makes it impossible to rest, so that
fatigue continually increases until it reaches a point where medical
treatment is required. All this is at bottom a penalty for having lost
that contact with Earth of which we spoke in the preceding chapter.
But how such contact is to be preserved in our great modern urban
agglomerations of population, it is by no means easy to see. However,
here again we find ourselves upon the fringe of large social questions
with which in this volume it is not my intention to deal.
CHAPTER VI
ENVY
Next to worry probably one of the most potent causes of unhappiness is
envy. Envy is, I should say, one of the most universal and deep-seated
of human passions. It is very noticeable in children before they are a
year old, and has to be treated with the most tender respect by every
educator. The very slightest appearance of favouring one child at the
expense of another is instantly observed and resented. Distributive
justice, absolute, rigid, and unvarying, must be observed by anyone who
has children to deal with. But children are only slightly more open in
their expressions of envy, and of jealousy (which is a special form of
envy), than are grown-up people. The emotion is just as prevalent among
adults as among children. Take, for example, maid-servants: I remember
when one of our maids, who was a married woman, became pregnant, and
we said that she was not to be expected to lift heavy weights, the
instant result was that none of the others would lift heavy weights,
and any work of that sort that needed doing we had to do ourselves.
Envy is the basis of democracy. Heraclitus asserts that the citizens
of Ephesus ought all to be hanged because they said, “There shall be
none first among us”. The democratic movement in Greek States must have
been almost wholly inspired by this passion. And the same is true of
modern democracy. There is, it is true, an idealistic theory according
to which democracy is the best form of government. I think myself that
this theory is true. But there is no department of practical politics
where idealistic theories are strong enough to cause great changes;
when great changes occur, the theories which justify them are always a
camouflage for passion. And the passion that has given driving force
to democratic theories is undoubtedly, the passion of envy. Read the
memoirs of Madame Roland, who is frequently represented as a noble
woman inspired by devotion to the people. You will find that what made
her such a vehement democrat was the experience of being shown into the
servants’ hall when she had occasion to visit an aristocratic château.
Among average respectable women envy plays an extraordinarily large
part. If you are sitting in the Underground and a well-dressed woman
happens to walk along the car, watch the eyes of the other women. You
will see that every one of them, with the possible exception of those
who are even better dressed, will watch the woman with malevolent
glances, and will be struggling to draw inferences derogatory to her.
The love of scandal is an expression of this general malevolence:
any story against another woman is instantly believed, even on the
flimsiest evidence. A lofty morality serves the same purpose: those
who have a chance to sin against it are envied, and it is considered
virtuous to punish them for their sins. This particular form of virtue
is certainly its own reward.
Exactly the same thing, however, is to be observed among men, except
that women regard all other women as their competitors, whereas
men as a rule only have this feeling towards other men in the same
profession. Have you, reader, ever been so imprudent as to praise an
artist to another artist? Have you ever praised a politician to another
politician of the same party? Have you ever praised an Egyptologist
to another Egyptologist? If you have, it is a hundred to one that you
will have produced an explosion of jealousy. In the correspondence
of Leibniz and Huyghens there are a number of letters lamenting the
supposed fact that Newton had become insane. “Is it not sad”, they
write to each other, “that the incomparable genius of Mr. Newton should
have become overclouded by the loss of reason?” And these two eminent
men, in one letter after another, wept crocodile tears with obvious
relish. As a matter of fact, the event which they were hypocritically
lamenting had not taken place, though a few examples of eccentric
behaviour had given rise to the rumour.
Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the
most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict
misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also
himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from
what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he
deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as
it would be to secure the same advantages himself. If this passion is
allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence, and even to the
most useful exercise of exceptional skill. Why should a medical man go
to see his patients in a car when the labourer has to walk to his work?
Why should the scientific investigator be allowed to spend his time in
a warm room when others have to face the inclemency of the elements?
Why should a man who possesses some rare talent of great importance to
the world be saved from the drudgery of his own house-work? To such
questions envy finds no answer. Fortunately, however, there is in human
nature a compensating passion, namely that of admiration. Whoever
wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and
to diminish envy.
What cure is there for envy? For the saint there is the cure of
selflessness, though even in the case of saints envy of other saints
is by no means impossible. I doubt whether St. Simeon Stylites would
have been wholly pleased if he had learnt of some other saint who had
stood even longer on an even narrower pillar. But, leaving saints
out of account, the only cure for envy in the case of ordinary men
and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a
terrible obstacle to happiness. I think envy is immensely promoted
by misfortunes in childhood. The child who finds a brother or sister
preferred before himself acquires the habit of envy, and when he goes
out into the world looks for injustices of which he is the victim,
perceives them at once if they occur, and imagines them if they do
not. Such a man is inevitably unhappy, and becomes a nuisance to his
friends, who cannot be always remembering to avoid imaginary slights.
Having begun by believing that no one likes him, he at last by his
behaviour makes his belief true. Another misfortune in childhood which
has the same result is to have parents without much parental feeling.
Without having an unduly favoured brother or sister, a child may
perceive that the children in other families are more loved by their
mother and father than he is. This will cause him to hate the other
children and his own parents, and when he grows up he will feel himself
an Ishmael. Some kinds of happiness are everyone’s natural birthright,
and to be deprived of them is almost inevitably to become warped and
embittered.
But the envious man may say: “What is the good of telling me that the
cure for envy is happiness? I cannot find happiness while I continue
to feel envy, and you tell me that I cannot cease to be envious until
I find happiness.” But real life is never so logical as this. Merely
to realize the causes of one’s own envious feelings is to take a long
step towards curing them. The habit of thinking in terms of comparisons
is a fatal one. When anything pleasant occurs it should be enjoyed
to the full, without stopping to think that it is not so pleasant as
something else that may possibly be happening to someone else. “Yes,”
says the envious man, “this is a sunny day, and it is springtime, and
the birds are singing, and the flowers are in bloom, but I understand
that the springtime in Sicily is a thousand times more beautiful, that
the birds sing more exquisitely in the groves of Helicon, and that
the rose of Sharon is more lovely than any in my garden.” And as he
thinks these thoughts the sun is dimmed, and the birds’ song becomes
a meaningless twitter, and the flowers seem not worth a moment’s
regard. All the other joys of life he treats in the same way. “Yes,”
he will say to himself, “the lady of my heart is lovely, I love her
and she loves me, but how much more exquisite must have been the Queen
of Sheba! Ah, if I had but had Solomon’s opportunities!” All such
comparisons are pointless and foolish; whether the Queen of Sheba or
our next-door neighbour be the cause of discontent, either is equally
futile. With the wise man, what he has does not cease to be enjoyable
because someone else has something else. Envy, in fact, is one form of
a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing
things never in themselves, but only in their relations. I am earning,
let us say, a salary sufficient for my needs. I should be content, but
I hear that someone else whom I believe to be in no way my superior
is earning a salary twice as great as mine. Instantly, if I am of an
envious disposition, the satisfactions to be derived from what I have
grow dim, and I begin to be eaten up with a sense of injustice. For all
this the proper cure is mental discipline, the habit of not thinking
profitless thoughts. After all, what is more enviable than happiness?
And if I can cure myself of envy I can acquire happiness and become
enviable. The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the
thought that someone else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so
it goes on. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon
envied Cæsar, Cæsar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied
Hercules, who never existed. You cannot, therefore, get away from envy
by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or
legend some person even more successful than you are. You can get away
from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the
work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom
you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.
Unnecessary modesty has a great deal to do with envy. Modesty is
considered a virtue, but for my part I am very doubtful whether, in
its more extreme forms, it deserves to be so regarded. Modest people
need a great deal of reassuring, and often do not dare to attempt tasks
which they are quite capable of performing. Modest people believe
themselves to be outshone by those with whom they habitually associate.
They are therefore particularly prone to envy, and, through envy, to
unhappiness and illwill. For my part, I think there is much to be
said for bringing up a boy to think himself a fine fellow. I do not
believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every
peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The
consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds. Imagine how
unhappy the life of a peacock would be if he had been taught that it
is wicked to have a good opinion of oneself. Whenever he saw another
peacock spreading out his tail, he would say to himself: “I must not
imagine that my tail is better than that, for that would be conceited,
but oh, how I wish it were! That odious bird is so convinced of his own
magnificence! Shall I pull out some of his feathers? And then perhaps
I need no longer fear comparison with him.” Or perhaps he would lay
a trap for him, and prove that he was a wicked peacock who had been
guilty of unpeacockly behaviour, and he would denounce him to the
assembly of the leaders. Gradually he would establish the principle
that peacocks with specially fine tails are almost always wicked, and
that the wise ruler in the peacock kingdom would seek out the humble
bird with only a few draggled tail feathers. Having got this principle
accepted, he would get all the finest birds put to death, and in the
end a really splendid tail will become only a dim memory of the past.
Such is the victory of envy masquerading as morality. But where every
peacock thinks himself more splendid than any of the others, there is
no need for all this repression. Each peacock expects to win the first
prize in the competition, and each, because he values his own peahen,
believes that he has done so.
Envy is, of course, closely connected with competition. We do not envy
a good fortune which we conceive as quite hopelessly out of our reach.
In an age when the social hierarchy is fixed, the lowest classes do not
envy the upper classes so long as the division between rich and poor is
thought to be ordained by God. Beggars do not envy millionaires, though
of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful. The
instability of social status in the modern world, and the equalitarian
doctrines of democracy and socialism, have greatly extended the range
of envy. For the moment this is an evil, but it is an evil which must
be endured in order to arrive at a more just social system. As soon
as inequalities are thought about rationally they are seen to be
unjust unless they rest upon some superiority of merit. And as soon
as they are seen to be unjust, there is no remedy for the resulting
envy except the removal of the injustice. Our age is therefore one in
which envy plays a peculiarly large part. The poor envy the rich, the
poorer nations envy the richer nations, women envy men, virtuous women
envy those who, though not virtuous, remain unpunished. While it is
true that envy is the chief motive force leading to justice as between
different classes, different nations, and different sexes, it is at
the same time true that the kind of justice to be expected as a result
of envy is likely to be the worst possible kind, namely that which
consists rather in diminishing the pleasures of the fortunate than
in increasing those of the unfortunate. Passions which work havoc in
private life work havoc in public life also. It is not to be supposed
that out of something as evil as envy good results will flow. Those,
therefore, who from idealistic reasons desire profound changes in our
social system, and a great increase of social justice, must hope that
other forces than envy will be instrumental in bringing the changes
about.
All bad things are interconnected, and any one of them is liable to be
the cause of any other; more particularly fatigue is a very frequent
cause of envy. When a man feels inadequate to the work he has to do,
he feels a general discontent which is exceedingly liable to take the
form of envy towards those whose work is less exacting. One of the ways
of diminishing envy, therefore, is to diminish fatigue. But by far
the most important thing is to secure a life which is satisfying to
instinct. Much envy that seems purely professional really has a sexual
source. A man who is happy in his marriage and his children is not
likely to feel much envy of other men because of their greater wealth
or success, so long as he has enough to bring up his children in what
he feels to be the right way. The essentials of human happiness are
simple, so simple that sophisticated people cannot bring themselves to
admit what it is they really lack. The women we spoke of earlier who
look with envy on every well-dressed woman are, one may be sure, not
happy in their instinctive life. Instinctive happiness is rare in the
English-speaking world, especially among women. Civilization in this
respect appears to have gone astray. If there is to be less envy, means
must be found for remedying this state of affairs, and if no such means
are found our civilization is in danger of going down to destruction
in an orgy of hatred. In old days people only envied their neighbours,
because they knew little about anyone else. Now through education
and the Press they know much in an abstract way about large classes
of mankind of whom no single individual is among their acquaintance.
Through the movies they think they know how the rich live, through
the newspapers they know much of the wickedness of foreign nations,
through propaganda they know of the nefarious practices of all whose
skin has a pigmentation different from their own. Yellows hate whites,
whites hate blacks, and so on. All this hatred, you may say, is stirred
up by propaganda, but this is a somewhat shallow explanation. Why is
propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it
tries to stir up friendly feeling? The reason is clearly that the human
heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than
to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied,
because it feels deeply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has
somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we
ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers for man’s
enjoyment. The positive sum of pleasures in a modern man’s life is
undoubtedly greater than was to be found in more primitive communities,
but the consciousness of what might be has increased even more.
Whenever you happen to take your children to the Zoo you may observe in
the eyes of the apes, when they are not performing gymnastic feats or
cracking nuts, a strange strained sadness. One can almost imagine that
they feel they ought to become men, but cannot discover the secret of
how to do it. On the road of evolution they have lost their way; their
cousins marched on and they were left behind. Something of the same
strain and anguish seems to have entered the soul of civilized man. He
knows there is something better than himself almost within his grasp,
yet he does not know where to seek it or how to find it. In despair he
rages against his fellow man, who is equally lost and equally unhappy.
We have reached a stage in evolution which is not the final stage. We
must pass through it quickly, for if we do not, most of us will perish
by the way, and the others will be lost in a forest of doubt and fear.
Envy therefore, evil as it is, and terrible as are its effects, is not
wholly of the devil. It is in part the expression of an heroic pain,
the pain of those who walk through the night blindly, perhaps to a
better resting-place, perhaps only to death and destruction. To find
the right road out of this despair civilized man must enlarge his heart
as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so
doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe.
CHAPTER VII
THE SENSE OF SIN
Concerning the sense of sin we have already in Chapter I had occasion
to say something, but we must now go into it more fully, since it is
one of the most important of the underlying psychological causes of
unhappiness in adult life.
There is a traditional religious psychology of sin which no modern
psychologist can accept. It was supposed, especially by Protestants,
that conscience reveals to every man when an act to which he is tempted
is sinful, and that after committing such an act he may experience
either of two painful feelings, one called remorse, in which there is
no merit, and the other called repentance, which is capable of wiping
out his guilt. In Protestant countries even many of those who lost
their faith continued for a time to accept with greater or smaller
modifications the orthodox view of sin. In our own day, partly owing to
psycho-analysis, we have the opposite state of affairs: not only do the
unorthodox reject the old doctrine of sin, but many of those who still
consider themselves orthodox do so likewise. Conscience has ceased to
be something mysterious which, because it was mysterious, could be
regarded as the voice of God. We know that conscience enjoins different
acts in different parts of the world, and that broadly speaking it
is everywhere in agreement with tribal custom. What, then, is really
happening when a man’s conscience pricks him?
The word “conscience” covers, as a matter of fact, several different
feelings; the simplest of these is the fear of being found out. You,
reader, have, I am sure, lived a completely blameless life, but if
you will ask someone who has at some time acted in a manner for which
he would be punished if it became known, you will find that, when
discovery seemed imminent, the person in question repented of his
crime. I do not say that this would apply to the professional thief who
expects a certain amount of prison as a trade risk, but it applies to
what may be called the respectable offender, such as the Bank Manager
who has embezzled in a moment of stress, or the clergyman who has been
tempted by passion into some sensual irregularity. Such men can forget
their crime when there seems little chance of detection, but when they
are found out, or in grave danger of being so, they wish they had
been more virtuous, and this wish may give them a lively sense of the
enormity of their sin. Closely allied with this feeling is the fear
of becoming an outcast from the herd. A man who cheats at cards or
fails to pay his debts of honour has nothing within himself by which
to stand up against the disapproval of the herd when he is found out.
In this he is unlike the religious innovator, the anarchist, and the
revolutionary, who all feel that, whatever may be their fate in the
present, the future is with them and will honour them as much as they
are execrated in the present. These men, in spite of the hostility of
the herd, do not feel sinful, but the man who entirely accepts the
morality of the herd while acting against it suffers great unhappiness
when he loses caste, and the fear of this disaster, or the pain of
it when it has happened, may easily cause him to regard his acts
themselves as sinful.
But the sense of sin in its most important forms is something which
goes deeper. It is something which has its roots in the unconscious,
and does not appear in consciousness as fear of other people’s
disapproval. In consciousness certain kinds of acts are labelled Sin
for no reason visible to introspection. When a man commits these acts
he feels uncomfortable without quite knowing why. He wishes he were the
kind of man who could abstain from what he believes to be sin. He gives
moral admiration only to those whom he believes to be pure in heart.
He recognizes with a greater or less degree of regret that it is not
for him to be a saint; indeed, his conception of saintship is probably
one which it is nearly impossible to carry out in an ordinary everyday
life. Consequently he goes through life with a sense of guilt, feeling
that the best is not for him, and that his highest moments are those of
maudlin penitence.
The source of all this in practically every case is the moral teaching
which the man received before he was six years old at the hands of his
mother or his nurse. He learned before that age that it is wicked to
swear, and not quite nice to use any but the most ladylike language,
that only bad men drink, and that tobacco is incompatible with the
highest virtue. He learned that one should never tell a lie. And above
all he learned that any interest in the sexual parts is an abomination.
He knew these to be the view of his mother, and believed them to be
those of his Creator. To be affectionately treated by his mother, or,
if she was neglectful, by his nurse, was the greatest pleasure of his
life, and was only obtainable when he had not been known to sin against
the moral code. He therefore came to associate something vaguely
awful with any conduct of which his mother or nurse would disapprove.
Gradually as he grew older he forgot where his moral code had come from
and what had originally been the penalty for disobeying it, but he did
not throw off the moral code or cease to feel that something dreadful
was liable to happen to him if he infringed it.
Now very large parts of this infantile moral teaching are devoid
of all rational foundation and such as cannot be applied to the
ordinary behaviour of ordinary men. A man who uses what is called
“bad language”, for example, is not from a rational point of view any
worse than a man who does not. Nevertheless, practically everybody in
trying to imagine a saint would consider abstinence from swearing as
essential. Considered in the light of reason this is simply silly. The
same applies to alcohol and tobacco. With regard to alcohol the feeling
does not exist in Southern countries, and indeed there is an element
of impiety about it, since it is known that Our Lord and the Apostles
drank wine. With regard to tobacco it is easier to maintain a negative
position, since all the greatest saints lived before its use was known.
But here also no rational argument is possible. The view that no saint
would smoke is based in the last analysis upon the view that no saint
would do anything solely because it gave him pleasure. This ascetic
element in ordinary morality has become almost unconscious, but it
operates in all kinds of ways that make our moral code irrational.
In a rational ethic it will be held laudable to give pleasure to
anyone, even to oneself, provided there is no counter-balancing pain
to oneself or to others. The ideally virtuous man, if we had got rid
of asceticism, would be the man who permits the enjoyment of all good
things whenever there is no evil consequence to outweigh the enjoyment.
Take again the question of lying. I do not deny that there is a great
deal too much lying in the world, and that we should all be the better
for an increase of truthfulness, but I do deny, as I think every
rational person must, that lying is in no circumstances justified. I
once in the course of a country walk saw a tired fox at the last stages
of exhaustion still forcing himself to run. A few minutes afterwards
I saw the hunt. They asked me if I had seen the fox, and I said I had.
They asked me which way he had gone, and I lied to them. I do not think
I should have been a better man if I had told the truth.
But it is above all in the realm of sex that early moral teaching does
harm. If a child has been conventionally educated by somewhat stern
parents or nurses, the association between sin and the sex organs
is so firmly established by the time he is six years old that it is
unlikely ever to be completely undone throughout the rest of his
life. This feeling is, of course, reinforced by the Œdipus complex,
since the woman most loved in childhood is one with whom all sexual
freedoms are impossible. The result is that many adult men feel women
to be degraded by sex, and cannot respect their wives unless their
wives hate sexual intercourse. But the man whose wife is cold will be
driven by instinct to seek instinctive satisfaction elsewhere. His
instinctive satisfaction, however, even if he momentarily finds it,
will be poisoned by the sense of guilt, so that he cannot be happy
in any relation with a woman, whether in marriage or outside it. On
the woman’s side the same sort of thing happens if she has been very
emphatically taught to be what is called “pure”. She instinctively
holds herself back in her sexual relations with her husband, and
is afraid of deriving any pleasure from them. In the present day,
however, there is very much less of this on the part of women than
there was fifty years ago. I should say that at present among educated
people the sex life of men is more contorted and more poisoned by the
sense of sin than that of women.
There is beginning to be widespread awareness, though not of course
on the part of public authorities, of the evils of traditional sex
education in regard to the very young. The right rule is simple: until
a child is nearing the age of puberty teach him or her no sexual
morality whatever, and carefully avoid instilling the idea that there
is anything disgusting in the natural bodily functions. As the time
approaches when it becomes necessary to give moral instruction, be sure
that it is rational, and that at every point you can give good grounds
for what you say. But it is not on education that I wish to speak in
this book. In this book I am concerned rather with what the adult can
do to minimize the evil effects of unwise education in causing an
irrational sense of sin.
The problem here is the same as has confronted us in earlier
chapters, namely that of compelling the unconscious to take note of
the rational beliefs that govern our conscious thought. Men must not
allow themselves to be swayed by their moods, believing one thing at
one moment and another at another. The sense of sin is especially
prominent at moments when the conscious will is weakened by fatigue,
by illness, by drink, or by any other cause. What a man feels at these
moments (unless caused by drink) is supposed to be a revelation from
his higher self. “The devil was sick, the devil a saint would be.” But
it is absurd to suppose that moments of weakness give more insight
than moments of strength. In moments of weakness it is difficult to
resist infantile suggestions, but there is no reason whatsoever for
regarding such suggestions as preferable to the beliefs of the adult
man when in full possession of his faculties. On the contrary, what a
man deliberately believes with his whole reason when he is vigorous
ought to be to him the norm as to what he had better believe at all
times. It is quite possible to overcome infantile suggestions of the
unconscious, and even to change the contents of the unconscious, by
employing the right kind of technique. Whenever you begin to feel
remorse for an act which your reason tells you is not wicked, examine
the causes of your feeling of remorse, and convince yourself in
detail of their absurdity. Let your conscious beliefs be so vivid and
emphatic that they make an impression upon your unconscious strong
enough to cope with the impressions made by your nurse or your mother
when you were an infant. Do not be content with an alternation between
moments of rationality and moments of irrationality. Look into the
irrationality closely, with a determination not to respect it, and
not to let it dominate you. Whenever it thrusts foolish thoughts or
feelings into your consciousness, pull them up by the roots, examine
them, and reject them. Do not allow yourself to remain a vacillating
creature, swayed half by reason and half by infantile folly. Do not be
afraid of irreverence towards the memory of those who controlled your
childhood. They seemed to you then strong and wise because you were
weak and foolish; now that you are neither, it is your business to
examine their apparent strength and wisdom, to consider whether they
deserve that reverence that from force of habit you still bestow upon
them. Ask yourself seriously whether the world is the better for the
moral teaching traditionally given to the young. Consider how much of
unadulterated superstition goes into the make-up of the conventionally
virtuous man, and reflect that, while all kinds of imaginary moral
dangers were guarded against by incredibly foolish prohibitions, the
real moral dangers to which an adult is exposed were practically
unmentioned. What are the really harmful acts to which the average man
is tempted? Sharp practice in business of the sort not punished by
law, harshness towards employees, cruelty towards wife and children,
malevolence towards competitors, ferocity in political conflicts--these
are the really harmful sins that are common among respectable and
respected citizens. By means of these sins a man spreads misery in his
immediate circle and does his bit towards destroying civilization. Yet
these are not the things that make him, when he is ill, regard himself
as an outcast who has forfeited all claim to divine favour. These are
not the things that cause him in nightmares to see visions of his
mother bending reproachful glances upon him. Why is his subconscious
morality thus divorced from reason? Because the ethic believed in by
those who had charge of his infancy was silly; because it was not
derived from any study of the individual’s duty to the community;
because it was made up of old scraps of irrational taboos; and because
it contained within itself elements of morbidness derived from the
spiritual sickness that troubled the dying Roman Empire. Our nominal
morality has been formulated by priests and mentally enslaved women. It
is time that men who have to take a normal part in the normal life of
the world learned to rebel against this sickly nonsense.
But if the rebellion is to be successful in bringing individual
happiness and in enabling a man to live consistently by one standard,
not to vacillate between two, it is necessary that he should think
and feel deeply about what his reason tells him. Most men, when they
have thrown off superficially the superstitions of their childhood,
think that there is no more to be done. They do not realize that
these superstitions are still lurking underground. When a rational
conviction has been arrived at, it is necessary to dwell upon it, to
follow out its consequences, to search out in oneself whatever beliefs
inconsistent with the new conviction might otherwise survive, and when
the sense of sin grows strong, as from time to time it will, to treat
it not as a revelation and a call to higher things, but as a disease
and a weakness, unless of course it is caused by some act which a
rational ethic would condemn. I am not suggesting that a man should be
destitute of morality, I am only suggesting that he should be destitute
of superstitious morality, which is a very different thing.
But even when a man has offended against his own rational code, I doubt
whether a sense of sin is the best method of arriving at a better way
of life. There is in the sense of sin something abject, something
lacking in self-respect. No good was ever done to anyone by the loss
of self-respect. The rational man will regard his own undesirable
acts as he regards those of others, as acts produced by certain
circumstances, and to be avoided either by a fuller realization that
they are undesirable, or, where this is possible, by avoidance of the
circumstances that caused them.
As a matter of fact the sense of sin, so far from being a cause of a
good life, is quite the reverse. It makes a man unhappy and it makes
him feel inferior. Being unhappy, he is likely to make claims upon
other people which are excessive and which prevent him from enjoying
happiness in personal relations. Feeling inferior, he will have a
grudge against those who seem superior. He will find admiration
difficult and envy easy. He will become a generally disagreeable
person, and will find himself more and more solitary. An expansive and
generous attitude towards other people not only gives happiness to
others, but is an immense source of happiness to its possessor, since
it causes him to be generally liked. But such an attitude is scarcely
possible to the man haunted by a sense of sin. It is an outcome
of poise and self-reliance; it demands what may be called mental
integration, by which I mean that the various layers of a man’s nature,
conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, work together harmoniously
and are not engaged in perpetual battle. To produce such harmony is
possible in most cases by wise education, but where education has been
unwise it is a more difficult process. It is the process which the
psycho-analysts attempt, but I believe that in a very great many cases
the patient can himself perform the work which in more extreme cases
requires the help of the expert. Do not say: “I have no time for such
psychological labours; my life is a busy one filled with affairs, and
I must leave my unconscious to its tricks.” Nothing so much diminishes
not only happiness but efficiency as a personality divided against
itself. The time spent in producing harmony between the different
parts of one’s personality is time usefully employed. I do not suggest
that a man should set apart, say, an hour a day for self-examination.
This is to my mind by no means the best method, since it increases
self-absorption, which is part of the disease to be cured, for a
harmonious personality is directed outward. What I suggest is that a
man should make up his mind with emphasis as to what he rationally
believes, and should never allow contrary irrational beliefs to pass
unchallenged or obtain a hold over him, however brief. This is a
question of reasoning with himself in those moments in which he is
tempted to become infantile, but the reasoning, if it is sufficiently
emphatic, may be very brief. The time involved, therefore, should be
negligible.
There is in many people a dislike of rationality, and where this
exists the kind of thing that I have been saying will seem irrelevant
and unimportant. There is an idea that rationality, if allowed free
play, will kill all the deeper emotions. This belief appears to me
to be due to an entirely erroneous conception of the function of
reason in human life. It is not the business of reason to generate
emotions, though it may be part of its function to discover ways of
preventing such emotions as are an obstacle to well-being. To find ways
of minimizing hatred and envy is no doubt part of the function of a
rational psychology. But it is a mistake to suppose that in minimizing
these passions we shall at the same time diminish the strength of those
passions which reason does not condemn. In passionate love, in parental
affection, in friendship, in benevolence, in devotion to science or
art, there is nothing that reason should wish to diminish. The rational
man, when he feels any or all of these emotions, will be glad that he
feels them and will do nothing to lessen their strength, for all these
emotions are parts of the good life, the life, that is, that makes for
happiness both in oneself and in others. There is nothing irrational
in the passions as such, and many irrational people feel only the most
trivial passions. No man need fear that by making himself rational he
will make his life dull. On the contrary, since rationality consists in
the main of internal harmony, the man who achieves it is freer in his
contemplation of the world and in the use of his energies to achieve
external purposes than is the man who is perpetually hampered by inward
conflicts. Nothing is so dull as to be encased in self, nothing so
exhilarating as to have attention and energy directed outwards.
Our traditional morality has been unduly self-centred, and the
conception of sin is part of this unwise focusing of attention upon
self. To those who have never passed through the subjective moods
induced by this faulty morality, reason may be unnecessary. But to
those who have once acquired the sickness, reason is necessary in
effecting a cure. And perhaps the sickness is a necessary stage in
mental development. I am inclined to think that the man who has passed
beyond it by the help of reason has reached a higher level than the man
who has never experienced either the sickness or the cure. The hatred
of reason which is common in our time is very largely due to the fact
that the operations of reason are not conceived in a sufficiently
fundamental way. The man divided against himself looks for excitement
and distraction; he loves strong passions, not for sound reasons,
but because for the moment they take him outside himself and prevent
the painful necessity of thought. Any passion is to him a form of
intoxication, and since he cannot conceive of fundamental happiness,
all relief from pain appears to him solely possible in the form of
intoxication. This, however, is the symptom of a deep-seated malady.
Where there is no such malady, the greatest happiness comes with the
most complete possession of one’s faculties. It is in the moments when
the mind is most active and the fewest things are forgotten that the
most intense joys are experienced. This, indeed, is one of the best
touchstones of happiness. The happiness that requires intoxication of
no matter what sort is a spurious and unsatisfying kind. The happiness
that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of
our faculties, and the fullest realization of the world in which we
live.
CHAPTER VIII
PERSECUTION MANIA
In its more extreme forms persecution mania is a recognized form
of insanity. Some people imagine that others wish to kill them, or
imprison them, or to do them some other grave injury. Often the wish
to protect themselves against imaginary persecutors leads them into
acts of violence which make it necessary to restrain their liberty.
This, like many other forms of insanity, is only an exaggeration of a
tendency not at all uncommon among people who count as normal. I do
not propose to discuss the extreme forms, which are a matter for a
psychiatrist. It is the milder forms that I wish to consider, because
they are a very frequent cause of unhappiness, and because, not having
gone so far as to produce definite insanity, they are still capable of
being dealt with by the patient himself, provided he can be induced to
diagnose his trouble rightly and to see that its origin lies within
himself and not in the supposed hostility or unkindness of others.
We are all familiar with the type of person, man or woman, who,
according to his own account, is perpetually the victim of
ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery. People of this kind are often
extraordinarily plausible, and secure warm sympathy from those who have
not known them long. There is, as a rule, nothing inherently improbable
about each separate story that they relate. The kind of ill-treatment
of which they complain does undoubtedly sometimes occur. What in the
end rouses the hearer’s suspicions is the multiplicity of villains whom
it has been the sufferer’s ill-fortune to meet with. In accordance
with the doctrine of probability, different people living in a given
society are likely in the course of their lives to meet with about the
same amount of bad treatment. If one person in a given set receives,
according to his own account, universal ill-treatment, the likelihood
is that the cause lies in himself, and that he either imagines injuries
from which in fact he has not suffered, or unconsciously behaves
in such a way as to arouse uncontrollable irritation. Experienced
people therefore become suspicious of those who by their own account
are invariably ill-treated by the world; they tend, by their lack of
sympathy, to confirm these unfortunate people in the view that everyone
is against them. The trouble, in fact, is a difficult one to deal
with, since it is inflamed alike by sympathy and by lack of sympathy.
The person inclined to persecution mania, when he finds a hard-luck
story believed, will embellish it until he reaches the frontier of
credibility; when, on the other hand, he finds it disbelieved, he has
merely another example of the peculiar hard-heartedness of mankind
towards himself. The disease is one that can only be dealt with by
understanding, and this understanding must be conveyed to the patient
if it is to serve its purpose. My purpose in this chapter is to
suggest some general reflections by means of which each individual can
detect in himself the elements of persecution mania (from which almost
everybody suffers in a greater or less degree), and, having detected
them, can eliminate them. This is an important part of the conquest of
happiness, since it is quite impossible to be happy if we feel that
everybody ill-treats us.
One of the most universal forms of irrationality is the attitude taken
by practically everybody towards malicious gossip. Very few people can
resist saying malicious things about their acquaintances, and even
on occasion about their friends; yet when people hear that anything
has been said against themselves, they are filled with indignant
amazement. It has apparently never occurred to them that, just as they
gossip about everyone else, so everyone else gossips about them. This
is a mild form of the attitude which, when exaggerated, leads on to
persecution mania. We expect everybody else to feel towards us that
tender love and that profound respect which we feel towards ourselves.
It does not occur to us that we cannot expect others to think better of
us than we think of them, and the reason this does not occur to us is
that our own merits are great and obvious, whereas those of others, if
they exist at all, are only visible to a very charitable eye. When you
hear that so-and-so has said something horrid about you, you remember
the ninety-nine times when you have refrained from uttering the most
just and well-deserved criticism of him, and forget the hundredth time
when in an unguarded moment you have declared what you believe to be
the truth about him. Is this the reward, you feel, for all your long
forbearance? Yet from his point of view your conduct appears exactly
what his appears to you; he knows nothing of the times when you have
not spoken, he knows only of the hundredth time when you did speak. If
we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I
suppose the first effect would be that almost all friendships would
be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a
world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we
should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to
conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely
perfect. We know that our friends have their faults, and yet are on the
whole agreeable people whom we like. We find it, however, intolerable
that they should have the same attitude towards us. We expect them to
think that, unlike the rest of mankind, we have no faults. When we
are compelled to admit that we have faults, we take this obvious fact
far too seriously. Nobody should expect to be perfect, or be unduly
troubled by the fact that he is not.
Persecution mania is always rooted in a too exaggerated conception of
our own merits. I am, we will say, a playwright; to every unbiased
person it must be obvious that I am the most brilliant playwright of
the age. Nevertheless, for some reason, my plays are seldom performed,
and when they are, they are not successful. What is the explanation of
this strange state of affairs? Obviously that managers, actors, and
critics have combined against me for one reason or another. The reason,
of course, is highly creditable to myself: I have refused to kow-tow
to the great ones of the theatrical world; I have not flattered the
critics; my plays contain home truths which are unbearable to those
whom they hit. And so my transcendent merit languishes unrecognized.
Then there is the inventor who has never been able to get anyone to
examine the merits of his invention; manufacturers are set in their
ways and will not consider any innovation, while the few who are
progressive keep inventors of their own, who succeed in warding off the
intrusions of unauthorized genius; the learned societies, strangely
enough, lose one’s manuscripts or return them unread; individuals to
whom one appeals are unaccountably unresponsive. How is such a state of
affairs to be explained? Obviously there is a close corporation of men
who wish to divide among themselves the plums to be obtained by means
of invention; the man who does not belong to this close corporation
will not be listened to.
Then there is the man who has a genuine grievance founded upon actual
fact, but who generalizes in the light of his experience and arrives at
the conclusion that his own misfortune affords the key to the universe;
he discovers, let us say, some scandal about the Secret Service which
it is to the interest of the Government to keep dark. He can obtain
hardly any publicity for his discovery, and the most apparently
high-minded men refuse to lift a finger to remedy the evil which fills
him with indignation. So far the facts are as he says they are. But
his rebuffs have made such an impression upon him that he believes all
powerful men to be occupied wholly and solely in covering up the crimes
to which they owe their power. Cases of this kind are particularly
obstinate, owing to the partial truth of their outlook; the thing that
has touched them personally has made, as is natural, more impression
upon them than the much larger number of matters of which they have
had no direct experience. This gives them a wrong sense of proportion,
and causes them to attach undue importance to facts which are perhaps
exceptional rather than typical.
Another not uncommon victim of persecution mania is a certain type of
philanthropist who is always doing good to people against their will,
and is amazed and horrified that they display no gratitude. Our motives
in doing good are seldom as pure as we imagine them to be. Love of
power is insidious; it has many disguises, and is often the source of
the pleasure we derive from doing what we believe to be good to other
people. Not infrequently, yet another element enters in. “Doing good”
to people generally consists in depriving them of some pleasure: drink,
or gambling, or idleness, or what not. In this case there is an element
which is typical of much social morality, namely envy of those who are
in a position to commit sins from which we have to abstain if we are to
retain the respect of our friends. Those who vote, let us say, for a
law against cigarette smoking (such laws exist, or existed, in several
American States) are obviously non-smokers to whom the pleasure which
others derive from tobacco is a source of pain. If they expect those
who were previously cigarette fiends to come in a deputation and thank
them for emancipation from this odious vice, it is possible that they
may be disappointed. They may then begin to reflect that they have
given their lives for the public good, and that those who have most
reason for thanking them for their beneficent activities appear to be
the least aware of any occasion for gratitude.
One used to find the same kind of attitude on the part of mistresses
towards domestic servants whose morals they safeguarded. But in these
days the servant problem has become so acute that this form of kindness
to maids has become less common.
In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The
statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself in
order that he may be able to carry out the high and noble aims which
have led him to eschew comfort and enter the arena of public life, is
amazed at the ingratitude of the people when they turn against him. It
never occurs to him that his work may have had anything but a public
motive, or that the pleasure of controlling affairs may have in any
degree inspired his activities. The phrases which are customary on the
platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to
express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a
genuine analysis of motives. Disgusted and disillusioned, he retires
from the world after the world has retired from him, and regrets that
he ever attempted so thankless a task as the pursuit of the public
good.
These illustrations suggest four general maxims, which will prove an
adequate preventive of persecution mania if their truth is sufficiently
realized. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as
altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t over-estimate
your own merits. The third is: don’t expect others to take as much
interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don’t imagine
that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire
to persecute you. I shall say a few words about each of these maxims in
turn.
Suspicion of one’s own motives is especially necessary for the
philanthropist and the executive; such people have a vision of how
the world, or some part of it, should be, and they feel, sometimes
rightly, sometimes wrongly, that in realizing their vision they will
be conferring a boon upon mankind or some section of it. They do not,
however, adequately realize that the individuals affected by their
operations have each an equal right to his own view as to the sort of
world he wants. A man of the executive type is quite sure that his
vision is right, and that any contrary one is wrong. But his subjective
certainty affords no proof that he is objectively right. Moreover,
his belief is very often only a camouflage for the pleasure that he
derives from contemplating changes of which he is the cause. And in
addition to love of power there is another motive, namely vanity, which
operates strongly in such cases. The high-minded idealist who stands
for Parliament--on this matter I speak from experience--is astonished
by the cynicism of the electorate which assumes that he only desires
the glory of writing the letters “M.P.” after his name. When the
contest is over and he has time to think, it occurs to him that perhaps
after all the cynical electors were in the right. Idealism causes
simple motives to wear strange disguises, and therefore some dash of
realistic cynicism does not come amiss in our public men. Conventional
morality inculcates a degree of altruism of which human nature is
scarcely capable, and those who pride themselves upon their virtue
often imagine that they attain this unattainable ideal. The immense
majority of even the noblest persons’ actions have self-regarding
motives, nor is this to be regretted, since, if it were otherwise, the
human race could not survive. A man who spent his time seeing that
others were fed and forgot to feed himself would perish. He may, of
course, take nourishment solely in order to provide himself with the
necessary strength to plunge again into the battle against evil, but
it is doubtful whether food eaten with this motive could be adequately
digested, since the flow of saliva would be insufficiently stimulated.
It is better therefore that a man should eat because he enjoys his food
than that the time he spends at his meals should be solely inspired by
a desire for the public good.
And what applies to eating applies to everything else. Whatever is to
be done can only be done adequately by the help of a certain zest,
and zest is difficult without some self-regarding motive. I should
include among self-regarding motives, from this point of view, those
that concern persons biologically connected with oneself, such as the
impulse to the defence of wife and children against enemies. This
degree of altruism is part of normal human nature, but the degree
inculcated in conventional ethics is not, and is very rarely attained
genuinely. People who wish to have a high opinion of their own moral
excellence have therefore to persuade themselves that they have
achieved a degree of unselfishness that it is very unlikely that
they have achieved, and hence the endeavour after saintliness comes
to be connected with self-deception of a kind that easily leads on to
persecution mania.
The second of our four maxims, to the effect that it is unwise to
over-estimate your own merits, is covered, so far as morals are
concerned, by what we have already said. But merits other than moral
should equally not be over-estimated. The playwright whose plays never
succeed should consider calmly the hypothesis that they are bad plays;
he should not reject this out of hand as obviously untenable. If he
finds that it fits the facts, he should, as an inductive philosopher,
adopt it. It is true that there are in history cases of unrecognized
merit, but they are far less numerous than the cases of recognized
demerit. If a man is a genius whom the age will not recognize, he is
quite right to persist in his course in spite of lack of recognition.
If, on the other hand, he is an untalented person puffed up with
vanity, he will do well not to persist. There is no way of knowing to
which of these two categories one belongs if one is afflicted with the
impulse to produce unrecognized masterpieces. If you belong to the
one category, your persistence is heroic; if to the other, ludicrous.
When you have been dead a hundred years, it will be possible to guess
to which category you belonged. In the meantime, there is a test, not
perhaps infallible, but yet of considerable value, which you may apply
yourself if you suspect that you are a genius while your friends
suspect that you are not. The test is this: do you produce because you
feel an urgent compulsion to express certain ideas or feelings, or are
you actuated by the desire for applause? In the genuine artist the
desire for applause, while it usually exists strongly, is secondary,
in the sense that the artist wishes to produce a certain kind of work,
and hopes that that work may be applauded, but will not alter his
style even if no applause is forthcoming. The man, on the other hand,
to whom the desire for applause is the primary motive, has no force
within himself urging him to a particular kind of expression, and
could therefore just as well do work of some wholly different kind.
Such a man, if he fails to win applause by his art, had better give it
up. And, speaking more generally, whatever your line in life may be,
if you find that others do not rate your abilities as highly as you
do yourself, do not be too sure that it is they who are mistaken. If
you allow yourself to think this, you may easily fall into the belief
that there is a conspiracy to prevent the recognition of your merit,
and this belief is pretty sure to be the source of an unhappy life. To
recognize that your merit is not so great as you had hoped may be more
painful for a moment, but it is a pain which has an end, beyond which a
happy life again becomes possible.
Our third maxim was not to expect too much of others. It used to be
customary for invalid ladies to expect at least one of their daughters
to sacrifice themselves completely in performing the duties of a nurse,
even to the extent of forgoing marriage. This is to expect of another a
degree of altruism which is contrary to reason, since the loss to the
altruist is greater than the gain to the egoist. In all your dealings
with other people, especially with those who are nearest and dearest,
it is important and not always easy to remember that they see life
from their own angle and as it touches their own ego, not from your
angle and as it touches yours. No person should be expected to distort
the main lines of his life for the sake of another individual. On
occasion there may exist such a strong affection that even the greatest
sacrifices become natural, but if they are not natural they should
not be made, and no person should be held blameworthy for not making
them. Very often the conduct that people complain of in others is not
more than the healthy reaction of natural egoism against the grasping
rapacity of a person whose ego extends beyond its proper limits.
The fourth maxim that we mentioned consists of realizing that other
people spend less time in thinking about you than you do yourself.
The insane victim of persecution mania imagines that all sorts of
people, who, in fact, have their own avocations and interests, are
occupied morning, noon, and night in an endeavour to work a mischief
to the poor lunatic. In like manner, the comparatively sane victim of
persecution mania sees in all kinds of actions a reference to himself
which does not, in fact, exist. This idea, of course, is flattering
to his vanity. If he were a great enough man, it might be true. The
actions of the British Government for many years were mainly concerned
to thwart Napoleon. But when a person of no special importance
imagines that others are perpetually thinking about him, he is on the
road towards insanity. You make a speech, let us say, at some public
dinner. Photographs of some of the other speakers appear in the picture
papers, but there is no picture of you. How is this to be accounted
for? Obviously not because the other speakers were considered more
important; it must be because the editors of the papers had given
orders that you were to be ignored. And why should they have given such
orders? Obviously because they feared you on account of your great
importance. In this way the omission of your picture is transformed
from a slight into a subtle compliment. But self-deception of this
kind cannot lead to any solid happiness. In the back of your mind
you will know that the facts are otherwise, and in order to conceal
this from yourself as far as possible, you will have to invent more
and more fantastic hypotheses. The strain of trying to believe these
will, in the end, become very great. And since, moreover, they involve
the belief that you are the object of widespread hostility, they
will only safeguard your self-esteem by inflicting the very painful
feeling that you are at odds with the world. No satisfaction based upon
self-deception is solid, and, however unpleasant the truth may be, it
is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to
build your life in accordance with it.
CHAPTER IX
FEAR OF PUBLIC OPINION
Very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and
their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have
social relations, and more especially by those with whom they live.
It is a peculiarity of modern communities that they are divided into
sets which differ profoundly in their morals and in their beliefs. This
state of affairs began with the Reformation, or perhaps one should say
with the Renaissance, and has grown more pronounced ever since. There
were Protestants and Catholics, who differed not only in theology but
on many more practical matters. There were aristocrats who permitted
various kinds of action that were not tolerated among the bourgeoisie.
Then there came to be latitudinarians and free-thinkers who did not
recognize the duties of religious observance. In our own day throughout
the Continent of Europe there is a profound division between socialists
and others, which covers not only politics but almost every department
of life. In English-speaking countries the divisions are very numerous.
In some sets art is admired, while in others it is thought to be of the
devil, at any rate if it is modern. In some sets devotion to the Empire
is the supreme virtue, in others it is considered a vice, and in yet
others a form of stupidity. Conventional people consider adultery one
of the worst of crimes, but large sections of the population regard it
as excusable if not positively laudable. Among Catholics divorce is
totally forbidden, while most non-Catholics accept it as a necessary
alleviation of matrimony.
Owing to all these differences of outlook a person of given tastes
and convictions may find himself practically an outcast while he
lives in one set, although in another set he would be accepted as
an entirely ordinary human being. A very great deal of unhappiness,
especially among the young, arises in this way. A young man or young
woman somehow catches ideas that are in the air, but finds that these
ideas are anathema in the particular milieu in which he or she lives.
It easily seems to the young as if the only milieu with which they are
acquainted were representative of the whole world. They can scarcely
believe that in another place or another set the views which they dare
not avow for fear of being thought utterly perverse would be accepted
as the ordinary commonplaces of the age. Thus through ignorance of the
world a great deal of unnecessary misery is endured, sometimes only in
youth, but not infrequently throughout life. This isolation is not only
a source of pain, it also causes a great dissipation of energy in the
unnecessary task of maintaining mental independence against hostile
surroundings, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred produces a
certain timidity in following out ideas to their logical conclusions.
The Brontë sisters never met any congenial people until after their
books had been published. This did not affect Emily, who was heroic
and in the grand manner, but it certainly did affect Charlotte, whose
outlook, in spite of her talents, remained always to a large extent
that of a governess. Blake, like Emily Brontë, lived in extreme mental
isolation, but like her was great enough to overcome its bad effects,
since he never doubted that he was right and his critics wrong. His
attitude towards public opinion is expressed in the lines:
The only man that e’er I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli: he was both Turk and Jew.
And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?
But there are not many who have this degree of force in their inner
life. To almost everybody sympathetic surroundings are necessary to
happiness. To the majority, of course, the surroundings in which
they happen to find themselves are sympathetic. They imbibe current
prejudices in youth, and instinctively adapt themselves to the beliefs
and customs which they find in existence around them. But to a large
minority, which includes practically all who have any intellectual or
artistic merit, this attitude of acquiescence is impossible. A person
born, let us say, in some small country town finds himself from early
youth surrounded by hostility to everything that is necessary for
mental excellence. If he wishes to read serious books, other boys
despise him, and teachers tell him that such works are unsettling. If
he cares for art, his contemporaries think him unmanly, and his elders
think him immoral. If he desires any career, however respectable, which
has not been common in the circle to which he belongs, he is told that
he is setting himself up, and that what was good enough for his father
ought to be good enough for him. If he shows any tendency to criticize
his parents’ religious tenets or political affiliations, he is likely
to find himself in serious trouble. For all these reasons, to most
young men and young women of exceptional merit adolescence is a time of
great unhappiness. To their more ordinary companions it may be a time
of gaiety and enjoyment, but for themselves they want something more
serious, which they can find neither among their elders nor among their
contemporaries in the particular social setting in which chance has
caused them to be born.
When such young people go to a University they probably discover
congenial souls and enjoy a few years of great happiness. If they are
fortunate, they may succeed, on leaving the University, in obtaining
some kind of work that gives them still the possibility of choosing
congenial companions; an intelligent man who lives in a city as large
as London or New York can generally find some congenial set in which
it is not necessary to practise any constraint or hypocrisy. But if his
work obliges him to live in some smaller place, and more particularly
if it necessitates retention of the respect of ordinary people, as is
the case, for example, with a doctor or a lawyer, he may find himself
throughout his whole life practically compelled to conceal his real
tastes and convictions from most of the people that he meets in the
course of his day. This is especially true in America because of the
vastness of the country. In the most unlikely places, north, south,
east, and west, one finds lonely individuals who know from books that
there are places where they would not be lonely, but who have no chance
to live in such places, and only the rarest opportunity of congenial
conversation. Real happiness in such circumstances is impossible to
those who are built on a less magnificent scale than Blake and Emily
Brontë. If it is to become possible, some way must be found by which
the tyranny of public opinion can be either lessened or evaded, and by
which members of the intelligent minority can come to know each other
and enjoy each other’s society.
In a good many cases unnecessary timidity makes the trouble worse
than it need be. Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards
those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent
to it. A dog will bark more loudly and bite more readily when people
are afraid of him than when they treat him with contempt, and the
human herd has something of this same characteristic. If you show that
you are afraid of them, you give promise of good hunting, whereas
if you show indifference, they begin to doubt their own power and
therefore tend to let you alone. I am not, of course, thinking of
extreme forms of defiance. If you hold in Kensington the views that are
conventional in Russia, or in Russia the views that are conventional
in Kensington, you must accept the consequences. I am thinking, not
of such extremes, but of much milder lapses from conventionality,
such as failure to dress correctly or to belong to some Church or to
abstain from reading intelligent books. Such lapses, if they are done
with gaiety and insouciance, not defiantly but spontaneously, will
come to be tolerated even in the most conventional society. Gradually
it may become possible to acquire the position of licensed lunatic,
to whom things are permitted which in another man would be thought
unforgivable. This is largely a matter of a certain kind of good nature
and friendliness. Conventional people are roused to fury by departures
from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a
criticism of themselves. They will pardon much unconventionality in a
man who has enough jollity and friendliness to make it clear, even to
the stupidest, that he is not engaged in criticizing them.
This method of escaping censure is, however, impossible to many of
those whose tastes or opinions cause them to be out of sympathy with
the herd. Their lack of sympathy makes them uncomfortable and causes
them to have a pugnacious attitude, even if outwardly they conform
or manage to avoid any sharp issue. People who are not in harmony
with the conventions of their own set tend therefore to be prickly
and uncomfortable and lacking in expansive good humour. These same
people, transported into another set where their outlook is not thought
strange, will seem to change their character entirely. From being
serious, shy and retiring they may become gay and self-confident; from
being angular they may become smooth and easy; from being self-centred
they may become sociable and extravert.
Wherever possible, therefore, young people who find themselves out
of harmony with their surroundings should endeavour in the choice of
a profession to select some career which will give them a chance of
congenial companionship, even if this should entail a considerable loss
of income. Often they hardly know that this is possible, since their
knowledge of the world is very limited, and they may easily imagine
that the prejudices to which they have become accustomed at home are
world wide. This is a matter in which older men should be able to
give much assistance to the young, since a considerable experience of
mankind is essential.
It is customary in these days of psycho-analysis to assume that,
when any young person is out of harmony with his environment, the
cause must lie in some psychological disorder. This is to my mind a
complete mistake. Suppose, for example, that a young person has parents
who believe the doctrine of evolution to be wicked. Nothing except
intelligence is required in such a case to cause him to be out of
sympathy with them. To be out of harmony with one’s surroundings is, of
course, a misfortune, but it is not always a misfortune to be avoided
at all costs. Where the environment is stupid or prejudiced or cruel,
it is a sign of merit to be out of harmony with it. And to some degree
these characteristics exist in almost every environment. Galileo and
Kepler had “dangerous thoughts” (as they are called in Japan), and so
have the most intelligent men of our own day. It is not desirable that
the social sense should be so strongly developed as to cause such men
to fear the social hostility which their opinions may provoke. What is
desirable is to find ways of making this hostility as slight and as
ineffective as possible.
In the modern world the most important part of this problem arises
in youth. If a man is once launched upon the right career and in the
right surroundings, he can in most cases escape social persecution, but
while he is young and his merits are still untested, he is liable to
be at the mercy of ignorant people who consider themselves capable of
judging in matters about which they know nothing, and who are outraged
at the suggestion that so young a person may know better than they do
with all their experience of the world. Many people who have ultimately
escaped from the tyranny of ignorance have had so hard a fight and
so long a time of repression that in the end they are embittered and
their energy is impaired. There is a comfortable doctrine that genius
will always make its way, and on the strength of this doctrine many
people consider that the persecution of youthful talent cannot do much
harm. But there is no ground whatever for accepting this doctrine. It
is like the theory that murder will out. Obviously all the murders we
know of have been discovered, but who knows how many there may be which
have never been heard of? In like manner all the men of genius that
we have ever heard of have triumphed over adverse circumstances, but
that is no reason for supposing that there were not innumerable others
who succumbed in youth. Moreover, it is not a question only of genius,
but also of talent, which is just as necessary to the community. And
it is not only a question of emerging somehow, but also of emerging
unembittered and with unimpaired energy. For all these reasons the way
of youth should not be made too hard.
While it is desirable that the old should treat with respect the
wishes of the young, it is not desirable that the young should treat
with respect the wishes of the old. The reason is simple, namely that
in either case it is the lives of the young that are concerned, not
the lives of the old. When the young attempt to regulate the lives
of the old, as, for example, by objecting to the remarriage of a
widowed parent, they are quite as much in the wrong as are the old who
attempt to regulate the lives of the young. Old and young alike, as
soon as years of discretion have been reached, have a right to their
own choices, and if necessary to their own mistakes. Young people are
ill-advised if they yield to the pressure of the old in any vital
matter. Suppose, for example, that you are a young person who wishes to
go on the stage, and that your parents oppose your wish, either on the
ground that the stage is immoral or on the ground that it is socially
inferior. They may bring every kind of pressure to bear; they may tell
you that they will cast you off if you ignore their commands; they
may say that you will certainly repent within a few years; they may
mention whole strings of horrid examples of young persons who have been
rash enough to do what you contemplate doing and came to a bad end in
consequence. They may of course be right in thinking that the stage is
not the career for you; it may be that you have no talent for acting,
or that you have a bad voice. If this is the case, however, you will
soon discover it from theatrical people, and there will still be plenty
of time to adopt a different career. The arguments of parents should
not be a sufficient reason for relinquishing the attempt. If, in spite
of all they say, you carry out your intention, they will soon come
round, much sooner in fact than either you or they suppose. If on the
other hand you find professional opinion discouraging, that is another
matter, for professional opinion must always be treated with respect by
beginners.
I think that in general, apart from expert opinion, there is too much
respect paid to the opinions of others, both in great matters and in
small ones. One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is
necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything
that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary
tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of
ways. Take, for example, the matter of expenditure. Very many people
spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural
tastes would enjoin, merely because they feel that the respect of
their neighbours depends upon their possession of a good car and their
ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can
obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library
will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like
everyone else. There is, of course, no point in deliberately flouting
public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in
a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a
strength and a source of happiness. And a society composed of men
and women who do not bow too much to the conventions is a far more
interesting society than one in which all behave alike. Where each
person’s character is developed individually, differences of type are
preserved, and it is worth while to meet new people, because they are
not mere replicas of those whom one has met already. This has been one
of the advantages of aristocracy, since where status depended upon
birth behaviour was allowed to be erratic. In the modern world we are
losing this source of social freedom, and therefore a more deliberate
realization of the dangers of uniformity has become desirable. I do not
mean that people should be intentionally eccentric, which is just as
uninteresting as being conventional. I mean only that people should be
natural, and should follow their spontaneous tastes in so far as these
are not definitely anti-social.
In the modern world, owing to the swiftness of locomotion, people
are less dependent than they used to be upon their geographically
nearest neighbours. Those who have cars can regard as a neighbour any
person living within twenty miles. They have therefore a much greater
power than was formerly the case of choosing their companions. In any
populous neighbourhood a man must be very unfortunate if he cannot find
congenial souls within twenty miles. The idea that one should know
one’s immediate neighbours has died out in large centres of population,
but still lingers in small towns and in the country. It has become a
foolish idea, since there is no need to be dependent upon immediate
neighbours for society. More and more it becomes possible to choose
our companions on account of congeniality rather than on account of
mere propinquity. Happiness is promoted by associations of persons with
similar tastes and similar opinions. Social intercourse may be expected
to develop more and more along these lines, and it may be hoped that
by these means the loneliness that now afflicts so many unconventional
people will be gradually diminished almost to vanishing point. This
will undoubtedly increase their happiness, but it will of course
diminish the sadistic pleasure which the conventional at present derive
from having the unconventional at their mercy. I do not think, however,
that this is a pleasure which we need be greatly concerned to preserve.
Fear of public opinion, like every other form of fear, is oppressive
and stunts growth. It is difficult to achieve any kind of greatness
while a fear of this kind remains strong, and it is impossible to
acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for
it is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from
our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires
of those who happen to be our neighbours, or even our relations. Fear
of immediate neighbours is no doubt less than it was, but there is a
new kind of fear, namely the fear of what newspapers may say. This is
quite as terrifying as anything connected with mediæval witch-hunts.
When the newspaper chooses to make a scapegoat of some perhaps quite
harmless person, the results may be very terrible. Fortunately, as yet
this is a fate which most people escape through their obscurity, but
as publicity gets more and more perfect in its methods, there will be
an increasing danger in this novel form of social persecution. This is
too grave a matter to be treated with disdain by the individual who
is its victim, and whatever may be thought of the great principle of
the freedom of the Press, I think the line will have to be drawn more
sharply than it is by the existing libel laws, and anything will have
to be forbidden that makes life intolerable for innocent individuals,
even if they should happen to have done or said things which, published
maliciously, can cause them to become unpopular. The only ultimate cure
for this evil is, however, an increase of toleration on the part of the
public. The best way to increase toleration is to multiply the number
of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their
chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellow-men.
PART II
CAUSES OF HAPPINESS
CHAPTER X
IS HAPPINESS STILL POSSIBLE?
So far we have been considering the unhappy man; we now have the
pleasanter task of considering the happy man. From the conversation
and the books of some of my friends I have been almost led to conclude
that happiness in the modern world has become an impossibility. I
find, however, that this view tends to be dissipated by introspection,
foreign travel, and the conversation of my gardener. The unhappiness
of my literary friends I have considered in an earlier chapter; in the
present chapter I wish to make a survey of the happy people that I have
come across in the course of my life.
Happiness is of two sorts, though, of course, there are intermediate
degrees. The two sorts I mean might be distinguished as plain and
fancy, or animal and spiritual, or of the heart and of the head. The
designation to be chosen among these alternatives depends, of course,
upon the thesis to be proved. I am at the moment not concerned to
prove any thesis, but merely to describe. Perhaps the simplest way to
describe the difference between the two sorts of happiness is to say
that one sort is open to any human being, and the other only to those
who can read and write. When I was a boy I knew a man bursting with
happiness whose business was digging wells. He was of enormous height
and of incredible muscles; he could neither read nor write, and when
in the year 1885 he got a vote for Parliament, he learnt for the first
time that such an institution existed. His happiness did not depend
upon intellectual sources; it was not based upon belief in natural law,
or the perfectibility of the species, or the public ownership of public
utilities, or the ultimate triumph of the Seventh Day Adventists, or
any of the other creeds which intellectuals consider necessary to their
enjoyment of life. It was based upon physical vigour, a sufficiency
of work, and the overcoming of not insuperable obstacles in the shape
of rock. The happiness of my gardener is of the same species; he
wages a perennial war against rabbits, of which he speaks exactly as
Scotland Yard speaks of Bolsheviks; he considers them dark, designing
and ferocious, and is of opinion that they can only be met by means of
a cunning equal to their own. Like the heroes of Valhalla who spent
every day hunting a certain wild boar, which they killed every evening
but which miraculously came to life again in the morning, my gardener
can slay his enemy one day without any fear that the enemy will have
disappeared the next day. Although well over seventy, he works all day
and bicycles sixteen hilly miles to and from his work, but the fount of
joy is inexhaustible, and it is “they rabbits” that supply it.
But, you will say, these simple delights are not open to superior
people like ourselves. What joy can we experience in waging war on
such puny creatures as rabbits? The argument, to my mind, is a poor
one. A rabbit is very much larger than a yellow-fever bacillus, and yet
a superior person can find happiness in making war upon the latter.
Pleasures exactly similar to those of my gardener so far as their
emotional content is concerned are open to the most highly educated
people. The difference made by education is only in regard to the
activities by which these pleasures are to be obtained. Pleasures of
achievement demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems
doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved. This is perhaps
the chief reason why a not excessive estimate of one’s own powers is a
source of happiness. The man who underestimates himself is perpetually
being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself
is just as often surprised by failure. The former kind of surprise is
pleasant, the latter unpleasant. It is therefore wise to be not unduly
conceited, though also not too modest to be enterprising.
Of the more highly educated sections of the community, the happiest in
the present day are the men of science. Many of the most eminent of
them are emotionally simple, and obtain from their work a satisfaction
so profound that they can derive pleasure from eating and even
marrying. Artists and literary men consider it _de rigueur_ to
be unhappy in their marriages, but men of science quite frequently
remain capable of old-fashioned domestic bliss. The reason of this is
that the higher parts of their intelligence are wholly absorbed by
their work, and are not allowed to intrude into regions where they
have no functions to perform. In their work they are happy because in
the modern world science is progressive and powerful, and because its
importance is not doubted either by themselves or by laymen. They have
therefore no necessity for complex emotions, since the simpler emotions
meet with no obstacles. Complexity in emotions is like foam in a river.
It is produced by obstacles which break the smoothly flowing current.
But so long as the vital energies are unimpeded, they produce no ripple
on the surface, and their strength is not evident to the unobservant.
All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of
science. He has an activity which utilizes his abilities to the full,
and he achieves results which appear important not only to himself
but to the general public, even when it cannot in the smallest degree
understand them. In this he is more fortunate than the artist. When
the public cannot understand a picture or a poem, they conclude that
it is a bad picture or a bad poem. When they cannot understand the
theory of relativity they conclude (rightly) that their education has
been insufficient. Consequently Einstein is honoured while the best
painters are left to starve in garrets, and Einstein is happy while
the painters are unhappy. Very few men can be genuinely happy in a
life involving continual self-assertion against the scepticism of
the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie
and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need
of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his
colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of
having to choose between being despised and being despicable. If his
powers are of the first order, he must incur one or the other of these
misfortunes--the former if he uses his powers, the latter if he does
not. This has not been the case always and everywhere. There have been
times when even good artists, even when they were young, were thought
well of. Julius II, though he might ill-treat Michael Angelo, never
supposed him incapable of painting pictures. The modern millionaire,
though he may shower wealth upon elderly artists after they have lost
their powers, never imagines that their work is as important as his
own. Perhaps these circumstances have something to do with the fact
that artists are on the average less happy than men of science.
It must, I think, be admitted that the most intelligent young people in
Western countries tend to have that kind of unhappiness that comes of
finding no adequate employment for their best talents. This, however,
is not the case in Eastern countries. The intelligent young at the
present day are probably happier in Russia than anywhere else in the
world. They have there a new world to create, and an ardent faith
in accordance with which to create it. The old have been executed,
starved, exiled, or in some other way disinfected, so that they cannot,
as in every Western country, compel the young to choose between doing
harm and doing nothing. To the sophisticated Occidental the faith of
the young Russian may seem crude, but, after all, what is there to be
said against it? He _is_ creating a new world; the new world is
to his liking; the new world will almost certainly, when created, make
the average Russian happier than he was before the Revolution. It may
not be a world in which the sophisticated Western intellectual would be
happy, but the sophisticated Western intellectual does not have to live
in it. By any pragmatic test, therefore, the faith of young Russia is
justified, and to condemn it as crude can have no justification except
on a basis of theory.
In India, China, and Japan, external circumstances of a political
sort interfere with the happiness of the young intelligentsia, but
there is no such internal obstacle as exists in the West. There are
activities which appear important to the young, and, in so far as these
activities succeed, the young are happy. They feel that they have
an important part to play in the national life, and aims to pursue
which, though difficult, are not impossible to realize. Cynicism such
as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young
men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort
with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is
worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just
endurable. Throughout the East the University student can hope for more
influence upon public opinion than he can have in the modern West, but
he has much less opportunity than in the West of securing a substantial
income. Being neither powerless nor comfortable, he becomes a reformer
or a revolutionary, not a cynic. The happiness of the reformer or
revolutionary depends upon the course of public affairs, but probably
even while he is being executed he enjoys more real happiness than
is possible for the comfortable cynic. I remember a young Chinese
visitor to my school who was going home to found a similar school in a
reactionary part of China. He expected the result to be that his head
would be cut off. Nevertheless he enjoyed a quiet happiness that I
could only envy.
I do not wish to suggest, however, that these high-flown kinds of
happiness are the only possible ones. They are in fact open only to a
minority, since they require a kind of ability and a width of interest
which cannot be very common. It is not only eminent scientists who can
derive pleasure through work, nor is it only leading statesmen who
can derive pleasure through advocacy of a cause. The pleasure of work
is open to anyone who can develop some specialized skill, provided
that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without
demanding universal applause. I knew a man who had lost the use of both
legs in early youth, but he had remained serenely happy throughout a
long life; he had achieved this by writing a work in five volumes on
rose blight, on which I always understood he was the leading expert. I
have not had the pleasure of knowing any large number of conchologists,
but from those who have I have always understood that the study of
shells brings contentment to those who engage in it. I knew a man once
who was the best compositor in the world, and was sought out by all
those who devoted themselves to inventing artistic types; he derived
joy, not so much from the very genuine respect in which he was held
by persons whose respect was not lightly bestowed, as from the actual
delight in the exercise of his craft, a delight not wholly unlike that
which good dancers derive from dancing. I have known also compositors
who were experts in setting up mathematical type, or Nestorian script,
or cuneiform, or anything else that was out of the way and difficult. I
did not discover whether these men’s private lives were happy, but in
their working hours their constructive instincts were fully gratified.
It is customary to say that in our machine age there is less room than
formerly for the craftsman’s joy in skilled work. I am not at all sure
that this is true: the skilled workman nowadays works, it is true, at
quite different things from those that occupied the attention of the
mediæval guilds, but he is still very important and quite essential in
the machine economy. There are those who make scientific instruments
and delicate machines, there are designers, there are aeroplane
mechanics, chauffeurs, and hosts of others who have a trade in which
skill can be developed to almost any extent. The agricultural labourer
and the peasant in comparatively primitive communities is not, so far
as I have been able to observe, nearly as happy as a chauffeur or an
engine-driver. It is true that the work of the peasant who cultivates
his own land is varied; he ploughs, he sows, he reaps. But he is at
the mercy of the elements, and is very conscious of his dependence,
whereas the man who works a modern mechanism is conscious of power,
and acquires the sense that man is the master, not the slave, of
natural forces. It is true, of course, that work is very uninteresting
to the large body of mere machine-minders who repeat some mechanical
operation over and over again with the minimum of variation, but the
more uninteresting the work becomes, the more possible it is to get it
performed by a machine. The ultimate goal of machine production--from
which, it is true, we are as yet far removed--is a system in which
everything uninteresting is done by machines, and human beings are
reserved for the work involving variety and initiative. In such a
world the work will be less boring and less depressing than it has
been at any time since the introduction of agriculture. In taking to
agriculture mankind decided that they would submit to monotony and
tedium in order to diminish the risk of starvation. When men obtained
their food by hunting, work was a joy, as one can see from the fact
that the rich still pursue these ancestral occupations for amusement.
But with the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long
period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now
being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. It is all very
well for sentimentalists to speak of contact with the soil and the ripe
wisdom of Hardy’s philosophic peasants, but the one desire of every
young man in the countryside is to find work in towns where he can
escape from the slavery of wind and weather and the solitude of dark
winter evenings into the reliable and human atmosphere of the factory
and the cinema. Companionship and co-operation are essential elements
in the happiness of the average man, and these are to be obtained in
industry far more fully than in agriculture.
Belief in a cause is a source of happiness to large numbers of people.
I am not thinking only of revolutionaries, socialists, nationalists in
oppressed countries, and such; I am thinking also of many humbler kinds
of belief. The men I have known who believed that the English were the
lost ten tribes were almost invariably happy, while as for those who
believed that the English were only the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh,
their bliss knew no bounds. I am not suggesting that the reader should
adopt this creed, since I cannot advocate any happiness based upon what
seem to me to be false beliefs. For the same reason I cannot urge the
reader to believe that men should live exclusively upon nuts, although,
so far as my observation goes, this belief invariably ensures perfect
happiness. But it is easy to find some cause which is in no degree
fantastic, and those whose interest in any such cause is genuine are
provided with an occupation for their leisure hours and a complete
antidote to the feeling that life is empty.
Not so very far removed from the devotion to obscure causes is
absorption in a hobby. One of the most eminent of living mathematicians
divides his time equally between mathematics and stamp-collecting.
I imagine that the latter affords consolation at the moments when
he can make no progress with the former. The difficulty of proving
propositions in the theory of numbers is not the only sorrow that
stamp-collecting can cure, nor are stamps the only things that can
be collected. Consider what a vast field of ecstasy opens before the
imagination when one thinks of old china, snuff-boxes, Roman coins,
arrow-heads, and flint implements. It is true that many of us are
too “superior” for these simple pleasures. We have all experienced
them in boyhood, but have thought them, for some reason, unworthy of
a grown man. This is a complete mistake; any pleasure that does no
harm to other people is to be valued. For my part, I collect rivers: I
derive pleasure from having gone down the Volga and up the Yangtse, and
regret very much having never seen the Amazon or the Orinoco. Simple
as these emotions are, I am not ashamed of them. Or consider again the
passionate joy of the baseball fan: he turns to his newspaper with
avidity, and the radio affords him the keenest thrills. I remember
meeting for the first time one of the leading literary men of America,
a man whom I had supposed from his books to be filled with melancholy.
But it so happened that at that moment the most crucial baseball
results were coming through on the radio; he forgot me, literature, and
all the other sorrows of our sublunary life, and yelled with joy as his
favourites achieved victory. Ever since this incident I have been able
to read his books without feeling depressed by the misfortunes of his
characters.
Fads and hobbies, however, are in many cases, perhaps most, not a
source of fundamental happiness, but a means of escape from reality,
of forgetting for the moment some pain too difficult to be faced.
Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be
called a friendly interest in persons and things.
A friendly interest in persons is a form of affectionateness, but
not the form which is grasping and possessive and seeking always an
emphatic response. This latter form is very frequently a source of
unhappiness. The kind that makes for happiness is the kind that likes
to observe people and finds pleasure in their individual traits, that
wishes to afford scope for the interests and pleasures of those with
whom it is brought into contact without desiring to acquire power over
them or to secure their enthusiastic admiration. The person whose
attitude towards others is genuinely of this kind will be a source of
happiness and a recipient of reciprocal kindness. His relations with
others, whether slight or serious, will satisfy both his interests
and his affections; he will not be soured by ingratitude, since he
will seldom suffer it and will not notice when he does. The same
idiosyncrasies which would get on another man’s nerves to the point
of exasperation will be to him a source of gentle amusement. He
will achieve without effort results which another man, after long
struggles, will find to be unattainable. Being happy in himself, he
will be a pleasant companion, and this in turn will increase his
happiness. But all this must be genuine; it must not spring from an
idea of self-sacrifice inspired by a sense of duty. A sense of duty
is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish
to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation. To like many
people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all
sources of personal happiness.
I spoke also in the last paragraph of what I call a friendly interest
in things. This phrase may perhaps seem forced; it may be said that
it is impossible to feel friendly to things. Nevertheless, there is
something analogous to friendliness in the kind of interest that
a geologist takes in rocks, or an archæologist in ruins, and this
interest ought to be an element in our attitude to individuals or
societies. It is possible to have an interest in things which is
hostile rather than friendly. A man might collect facts concerning
the habitats of spiders because he hated spiders and wished to live
where they were few. This kind of interest would not afford the same
satisfaction as the geologist derives from his rocks. An interest
in impersonal things, though perhaps less valuable as an ingredient
in everyday happiness than a friendly attitude towards our fellow
creatures, is nevertheless very important. The world is vast and our
own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely
in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life
more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way
of getting even less than is possible. The man who can forget his
worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent,
or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his
excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm
which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will
in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as
possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that
interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
This preliminary survey of the possibilities of happiness will be
expanded in subsequent chapters, together with suggestions as to ways
of escaping from psychological sources of misery.
CHAPTER XI
ZEST
In this chapter I propose to deal with what seems to me the most
universal and distinctive mark of happy men, namely zest.
Perhaps the best way to understand what is meant by zest will be to
consider the different ways in which men behave when they sit down to
a meal. There are those to whom a meal is merely a bore; no matter how
excellent the food may be, they feel that it is uninteresting. They
have had excellent food before, probably at almost every meal they have
eaten. They have never known what it was to go without a meal until
hunger became a raging passion, but have come to regard meals as merely
conventional occurrences, dictated by the fashions of the society in
which they live. Like everything else, meals are tiresome, but it is
no use to make a fuss, because nothing else will be less tiresome.
Then there are the invalids who eat from a sense of duty, because the
doctor has told them that it is necessary to take a little nourishment
in order to keep up their strength. Then there are the epicures, who
start hopefully, but find that nothing has been quite so well cooked as
it ought to have been. Then there are the gormandizers, who fall upon
their food with eager rapacity, eat too much, and grow plethoric and
stertorous. Finally there are those who begin with a sound appetite,
are glad of their food, eat until they have had enough, and then stop.
Those who are set down before the feast of life have similar attitudes
towards the good things which it offers. The happy man corresponds to
the last of our eaters. What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in
relation to life. The man who is bored with his meals corresponds to
the victim of Byronic unhappiness. The invalid who eats from a sense
of duty corresponds to the ascetic, the gormandizer to the voluptuary.
The epicure corresponds to the fastidious person who condemns half the
pleasures of life as unæsthetic. Oddly enough, all these types, with
the possible exception of the gormandizer, feel contempt for the man of
healthy appetite and consider themselves his superior. It seems to them
vulgar to enjoy food because you are hungry or to enjoy life because it
offers a variety of interesting spectacles and surprising experiences.
From the height of their disillusionment they look down upon those
whom they despise as simple souls. For my part I have no sympathy with
this outlook. All disenchantment is to me a malady, which, it is true,
certain circumstances may render inevitable, but which none the less,
when it occurs, is to be cured as soon as possible, not to be regarded
as a higher form of wisdom. Suppose one man likes strawberries and
another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no
abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or
that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good; to
the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them
has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life
is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both
must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in
more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that
extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is
still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for
reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. The
more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness
he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one
thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested
in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as
are necessary to fill our days. We are all prone to the malady of the
introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out
before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But
let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert’s
unhappiness.
There were once upon a time two sausage machines, exquisitely
constructed for the purpose of turning pig into the most delicious
sausages. One of these retained his zest for pig and produced sausages
innumerable; the other said: “What is pig to me? My own works are far
more interesting and wonderful than any pig.” He refused pig and set
to work to study his inside. When bereft of its natural food, his
inside ceased to function, and the more he studied it, the more empty
and foolish it seemed to him to be. All the exquisite apparatus by
which the delicious transformation had hitherto been made stood still,
and he was at a loss to guess what it was capable of doing. This second
sausage machine was like the man who has lost his zest, while the first
was like the man who has retained it. The mind is a strange machine
which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing
ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless,
and unlike the sausage machine it must seize its materials for itself,
since events only become experiences through the interest that we take
in them: if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them. The
man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy
of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can
find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most
varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and
recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns.
The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be
remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the
street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had
come down in the world as the result of drink, and that his wife was
no longer so fond of him as she used to be. Life could never be boring
to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest.
Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a
country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the
vegetation, another in the geology, yet another in the agriculture, and
so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and,
other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them
is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.
How extraordinarily different, again, are the attitudes of different
people to their fellow-men. One man, in the course of a long train
journey, will fail entirely to observe any of his fellow travellers,
while another will have summed them all up, analysed their characters,
made a shrewd guess at their circumstances, and perhaps even
ascertained the most secret histories of several of them. People differ
just as much in what they feel towards others as in what they ascertain
about them. Some men find almost everybody boring, others quickly and
easily develop a friendly feeling towards those with whom they are
brought in contact, unless there is some definite reason for feeling
otherwise. Take again such a matter as travel: some men will travel
through many countries, going always to the best hotels, eating exactly
the same food as they would eat at home, meeting the same idle rich
whom they would meet at home, conversing on the same topics upon which
they converse at their own dinner-table. When they return, their only
feeling is one of relief at having done with the boredom of expensive
locomotion. Other men wherever they go see what is characteristic, make
the acquaintance of people who typify the locality, observe whatever
is of interest either historically or socially, eat the food of the
country, learn its manners and its language, and come home with a new
stock of pleasant thoughts for winter evenings.
In all these different situations the man who has the zest for life has
the advantage over the man who has none. Even unpleasant experiences
have their uses to him. I am glad to have smelt a Chinese crowd
and a Sicilian village, though I cannot pretend that my pleasure
was very great at the moment. Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks,
mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant
experiences, provided they do not go so far as to impair health. They
say to themselves in an earthquake, for example, “So that is what an
earthquake is like”, and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge
of the world increased by this new item. It would not be true to say
that such men are not at the mercy of fate, for if they should lose
their health they would be very likely to lose their zest at the same
time, though this is by no means certain. I have known men die at
the end of years of slow torture, and yet retain their zest almost
till the last moment. Some forms of ill-health destroy zest, others
do not. I do not know whether the biochemists are able as yet to
distinguish between these kinds. Perhaps when biochemistry has made
further advances we shall all be able to take tablets that will ensure
our feeling an interest in everything, but until that day comes we are
compelled to depend upon common-sense observation of life to judge what
are the causes that enable some men to take an interest in everything,
while compelling others to take an interest in nothing.
Zest is sometimes general, sometimes specialized. It may be very
specialized indeed. Readers of Borrow may remember a character who
occurs in _Lavengro_. He had lost his wife, to whom he was
devoted, and felt for a time that life had grown utterly barren. But by
profession he was a tea merchant, and in order to endure life he taught
himself unaided to read the Chinese inscriptions on the tea-chests
that passed through his hands. In the end this gave him a new interest
in life, and he began to study with avidity everything that concerned
China. I have known men who were entirely absorbed in the endeavour to
find out all about the Gnostic heresy, and other men whose principal
interest lay in collating the manuscripts and early editions of Hobbes.
It is quite impossible to guess in advance what will interest a man,
but most men are capable of a keen interest in something or other,
and when once such an interest has been aroused their life becomes
free from tedium. Very specialized interests are, however, a less
satisfactory source of happiness than a general zest for life, since
they can hardly fill the whole of a man’s time, and there is always
the danger that he may come to know all there is to know about the
particular matter that has become his hobby.
It will be remembered that among our different types at the banquet
we included the gormandizer, whom we were not prepared to praise. The
reader may think that the man with zest whom we have been praising does
not differ in any definable way from the gormandizer. The time has come
when we must try to make the distinction between the two types more
definite.
The ancients, as everyone knows, regarded moderation as one of
the essential virtues. Under the influence of romanticism and the
French Revolution this view was abandoned by many, and overmastering
passions were admired, even if, like those of Byron’s heroes, they
were of a destructive and anti-social kind. The ancients, however,
were clearly in the right. In the good life there must be a balance
between different activities, and no one of them must be carried so
far as to make the others impossible. The gormandizer sacrifices all
other pleasures to that of eating, and by so doing diminishes the
total happiness of his life. Many other passions besides eating may
be carried to a like excess. The Empress Josephine was a gormandizer
in regard to clothes. At first Napoleon used to pay her dressmaker’s
bills, though with continually increasing protest. At last he told her
that she really must learn moderation, and that in future he would
only pay her bills when the amount seemed reasonable. When her next
dressmaker’s bill came in, she was for a moment at her wits’ end,
but presently she bethought herself of a scheme. She went to the War
Minister and demanded that he should pay her bill out of the funds
provided for the war. Since he knew that she had the power to get him
dismissed, he did so, and the French lost Genoa in consequence. So
at least some books say, though I am not prepared to vouch for the
exact truth of the story. For our purpose it is equally apt whether
true or an exaggeration, since it serves to show how far the passion
for clothes may carry a woman who has the opportunity to indulge
it. Dipsomaniacs and nymphomaniacs are obvious examples of the same
kind of thing. The principle in these matters is fairly obvious.
All our separate tastes and desires have to fit into the general
framework of life. If they are to be a source of happiness they must
be compatible with health, with the affection of those whom we love,
and with the respect of the society in which we live. Some passions
can be indulged to almost any extent without passing beyond these
limits, others cannot. The man, let us say, who loves chess, if he
happens to be a bachelor with independent means, need not restrict
his passion in any degree, whereas if he has a wife and children and
no independent means, he will have to restrict it very severely. The
dipsomaniac and the gormandizer, even if they have no social ties, are
unwise from a self-regarding point of view, since their indulgence
interferes with health, and gives them hours of misery, in return for
minutes of pleasure. Certain things form a framework within which any
separate passion must live if it is not to become a source of misery.
Such things are health, the general possession of one’s faculties, a
sufficient income to provide for necessaries, and the most essential
social duties, such as those towards wife and children. The man
who sacrifices these things for chess is essentially as bad as the
dipsomaniac. The only reason we do not condemn him so severely is that
he is much less common, and that only a man of somewhat rare abilities
is likely to be carried away by absorption in so intellectual a game.
The Greek formula of moderation practically covers these cases. The man
who likes chess sufficiently to look forward throughout his working
day to the game that he will play in the evening is fortunate, but
the man who gives up work in order to play chess all day has lost the
virtue of moderation. It is recorded that Tolstoy, in his younger and
unregenerate days, was awarded the military cross for valour in the
field, but when the time came for him to be presented with it, he was
so absorbed in a game of chess that he decided not to go. We can
hardly find fault with Tolstoy on this account, since to him it might
well be a matter of indifference whether he won military decorations or
not, but in a lesser man such an act would have been one of folly.
As a limitation upon the doctrine that has just been set forth,
it ought to be admitted that some performances are considered so
essentially noble as to justify the sacrifice of everything else on
their behalf. The man who loses his life in the defence of his country
is not blamed if thereby his wife and children are left penniless. The
man who is engaged in experiments with a view to some great scientific
discovery or invention is not blamed afterwards for the poverty that
he has made his family endure, provided that his efforts are crowned
with ultimate success. If, however, he never succeeds in making the
discovery or the invention that he was attempting, public opinion
condemns him as a crank, which seems unfair, since no one in such
an enterprise can be sure of success in advance. During the first
millennium of the Christian era a man who abandoned his family for a
saintly life was praised, though nowadays it would be held that he
ought to make some provision for them.
I think there is always some deep-seated psychological difference
between the gormandizer and the man of healthy appetite. The man in
whom one desire runs to excess at the expense of all others is usually
a man with some deep-seated trouble, who is seeking to escape from a
spectre. In the case of the dipsomaniac this is obvious: men drink in
order to forget. If they had no spectres in their lives, they would
not find drunkenness more agreeable than sobriety. As the legendary
Chinaman said: “Me no drinkee for drinkee, me drinkee for drunkee.”
This is typical of all excessive and one-sided passions. It is not
pleasure in the object itself that is sought, but oblivion. There is,
however, a very great difference according as oblivion is sought in a
sottish manner or by the exercise of faculties in themselves desirable.
Borrow’s friend who taught himself Chinese in order to be able to
endure the loss of his wife was seeking oblivion, but he sought it in
an activity that had no harmful effects, but on the contrary improved
his intelligence and his knowledge. Against such forms of escape there
is nothing to be said. It is otherwise with the man who seeks oblivion
in drinking or gambling or any other form of unprofitable excitement.
There are, it is true, border-line cases. What should we say of the man
who runs mad risks in aeroplanes or on mountain tops, because life has
become irksome to him? If his risks serve any public object, we may
admire him, but if not, we shall have to place him only slightly above
the gambler and drunkard.
Genuine zest, not the sort that is really a search for oblivion, is
part of the natural make-up of human beings except in so far as it
has been destroyed by unfortunate circumstances. Young children are
interested in everything that they see and hear; the world is full of
surprises to them, and they are perpetually engaged with ardour in the
pursuit of knowledge, not, of course, of scholastic knowledge, but
of the sort that consists in acquiring familiarity with the objects
that attract their attention. Animals, even when adult, retain their
zest provided they are in health. A cat in an unfamiliar room will not
sit down until it has sniffed at every corner on the off-chance that
there may be a smell of mouse somewhere. The man who has never been
fundamentally thwarted will retain his natural interest in the external
world, and so long as he retains it he will find life pleasant unless
his liberty is unduly curtailed. Loss of zest in civilized society is
very largely due to the restrictions upon liberty which are essential
to our way of life. The savage hunts when he is hungry, and in so doing
is obeying a direct impulse. The man who goes to his work every morning
at a certain hour is actuated fundamentally by the same impulse,
namely the need to secure a living, but in his case the impulse does
not operate directly and at the moment when it is felt: it operates
indirectly through abstractions, beliefs and volitions. At the moment
when the man starts off to his work he is not feeling hungry, since he
has just had his breakfast. He merely knows that hunger will recur,
and that going to his work is a means of satisfying future hunger.
Impulses are irregular, whereas habits, in a civilized society, have to
be regular. Among savages, even collective enterprises, in so far as
they exist, are spontaneous and impulsive. When the tribe is going to
war the tom-tom rouses military ardour, and herd excitement inspires
each individual to the necessary activity. Modern enterprises cannot
be managed in this way. When a train has to be started at a given
moment it is impossible to inspire the porters, the engine-driver, and
the signalman by means of barbaric music. They must each do their job
merely because it has to be done; their motive, that is to say, is
indirect: they have no impulse towards the activity, but only towards
the ultimate reward of the activity. A great deal of social life has
the same defect. People converse with each other, not from any wish to
do so, but because of some ultimate benefit that they hope to derive
from co-operation. At every moment of life the civilized man is hedged
about by restrictions of impulse: if he happens to feel cheerful he
must not sing or dance in the street, while if he happens to feel sad
he must not sit on the pavement and weep, for fear of obstructing
pedestrian traffic. In youth his liberty is restricted at school, in
adult life it is restricted throughout his working hours. All this
makes zest more difficult to retain, for the continual restraint tends
to produce weariness and boredom. Nevertheless, a civilized society
is impossible without a very considerable degree of restraint upon
spontaneous impulse, since spontaneous impulse will only produce the
simplest forms of social co-operation, not those highly complex forms
which modern economic organization demands. In order to rise above
these obstacles to zest a man needs health and superabundant energy,
or else, if he has that good fortune, work that he finds interesting
on its own account. Health, so far as statistics can show, has been
steadily improving in all civilized countries during the last hundred
years, but energy is more difficult to measure, and I am doubtful
whether physical vigour in moments of health is as great as it was
formerly. The problem here is to a great extent a social problem, and
as such I do not propose to discuss it in the present volume. The
problem has, however, a personal and psychological aspect which we have
already discussed in connection with fatigue. Some men retain their
zest in spite of the handicaps of civilized life, and many men could do
so if they were free from the inner psychological conflicts upon which
a great part of their energy is expended. Zest demands energy more that
sufficient for the necessary work, and this in turn demands the smooth
working of the psychological machine. Of the causes promoting the
smooth working I shall have more to say in later chapters.
In women, less nowadays than formerly, but still to a very large
extent, zest has been greatly diminished by a mistaken conception of
respectability. It was thought undesirable that women should take an
obvious interest in men, or that they should display too much vivacity
in public. In learning not to be interested in men they learned very
frequently to be interested in nothing, or at any rate in nothing
except a certain kind of correct behaviour. To teach an attitude of
inactivity and withdrawal towards life is clearly to teach something
very inimical to zest, and to encourage a certain kind of absorption in
self which is characteristic of highly respectable women, especially
when they are uneducated. They do not have the interest in sport that
average men have, they care nothing about politics, towards men their
attitude is one of prim aloofness, towards women their attitude is
one of veiled hostility based upon the conviction that other women
are less respectable than they are themselves. They boast that they
keep themselves to themselves; that is to say, their lack of interest
in their fellow creatures appears to them in the light of a virtue.
For this, of course, they are not to blame; they are only accepting
the moral teaching that has been current for thousands of years where
women are concerned. They are, however, victims, much to be pitied, of
a system of repression whose iniquity they have failed to perceive. To
such women all that is ungenerous appears good and all that is generous
appears evil. In their own social circle they do what they can to kill
joy, in politics they love repressive legislation. Fortunately the type
is growing less common, but it is still far more prevalent than is
supposed by those who live in emancipated circles. I recommend anyone
who doubts this statement to go the round of a number of lodging-houses
seeking a lodging, and to take note of the landladies that he will meet
during his search. He will find that they are living by a conception of
female excellence which involves as an essential part the destruction
of all zest for life, and that their minds and hearts are dwarfed
and stunted as a result. Between male and female excellence rightly
conceived there is no difference, or at any rate no difference such
as tradition inculcates. For women as for men zest is the secret of
happiness and well-being.
CHAPTER XII
AFFECTION
One of the chief causes of lack of zest is the feeling that one is
unloved, whereas conversely the feeling of being loved promotes
zest more than anything else does. A man may have the feeling of
being unloved for a variety of reasons. He may consider himself such
a dreadful person that no one could possibly love him; he may in
childhood have had to accustom himself to receiving less love than
fell to the share of other children; or he may in fact be a person
whom nobody loves. But in this latter event the cause probably lies
in a lack of self-confidence due to early misfortune. The man who
feels himself unloved may take various attitudes as a result. He
may make desperate efforts to win affection, probably by means of
exceptional acts of kindness. In this, however, he is very likely to be
unsuccessful, since the motive of the kindnesses is easily perceived
by their beneficiaries, and human nature is so constructed that it
gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it. The
man, therefore, who endeavours to purchase affection by benevolent
actions becomes disillusioned by experience of human ingratitude. It
never occurs to him that the affection which he is trying to buy is
of far more value than the material benefits which he offers as its
price, and yet the feeling that this is so is at the basis of his
actions. Another man, observing that he is unloved, may seek revenge
upon the world, either by stirring up wars and revolutions, or by a
pen dipped in gall, like Dean Swift. This is an heroic reaction to
misfortune, requiring a force of character sufficient to enable a
man to pit himself against the rest of the world. Few men are able
to reach such heights; the great majority, both of men and women, if
they feel themselves unloved, sink into a timid despair relieved only
by occasional gleams of envy and malice. As a rule, the lives of such
people become extremely self-centred, and the absence of affection
gives them a sense of insecurity from which they instinctively seek
to escape by allowing habit to dominate their lives utterly and
completely. For those who make themselves the slaves of unvarying
routine are generally actuated by fear of a cold outer world, and by
the feeling that they will not bump into it if they walk along the same
paths that they have walked along on previous days.
Those who face life with a feeling of security are much happier than
those who face it with a feeling of insecurity, at any rate so long
as their sense of security does not lead them to disaster. And in a
very great many cases, though not in all, a sense of security will
itself help a man to escape dangers to which another would succumb.
If you are walking over a chasm on a narrow plank, you are much more
likely to fall if you feel fear than if you do not. And the same thing
applies to the conduct of life. The fearless man may, of course, meet
with sudden disaster, but it is likely that he will pass unscathed
through many difficult situations in which a timid man would come to
grief. This useful kind of self-confidence has, of course, innumerable
forms. One man is confident on mountains, another on the sea, and yet
another in the air. But general self-confidence towards life comes more
than anything else from being accustomed to receive as much of the
right sort of affection as one has need for. And it is this habit of
mind considered as a source of zest that I wish to speak about in the
present chapter.
It is affection received, not affection given, that causes this
sense of security, though it arises most of all from affection
which is reciprocal. Strictly speaking, it is not only affection
but also admiration that has this effect. Persons whose trade is to
secure public admiration, such as actors, preachers, speakers, and
politicians, come to depend more and more upon applause. When they
receive their due meed of public approbation their life is full of
zest; when they do not, they become discontented and self-centred.
The diffused good will of a multitude does for them what is done
for others by the more concentrated affection of the few. The child
whose parents are fond of him accepts their affection as a law of
nature. He does not think very much about it, although it is of great
importance to his happiness. He thinks about the world, about the
adventures that come his way and the more marvellous adventures that
will come his way when he is grown up. But behind all these external
interests there is the feeling that he will be protected from disaster
by parental affection. The child from whom for any reason parental
affection is withdrawn is likely to become timid and unadventurous,
filled with fears and self-pity, and no longer able to meet the world
in a mood of gay exploration. Such a child may set to work at a
surprisingly early age to meditate on life and death and human destiny.
He becomes an introvert, melancholy at first, but seeking ultimately
the unreal consolations of some system of philosophy or theology. The
world is a higgledy-piggledy place, containing things pleasant and
things unpleasant in haphazard sequence. And the desire to make an
intelligible system or pattern out of it is at bottom an outcome of
fear, in fact a kind of agoraphobia or dread of open spaces. Within
the four walls of his library the timid student feels safe. If he can
persuade himself that the universe is equally tidy, he can feel almost
equally safe when he has to venture forth into the streets. Such a man,
if he had received more affection, would have feared the real world
less, and would not have had to invent an ideal world to take its place
in his beliefs.
By no means all affection, however, has this effect in encouraging
adventurousness. The affection given must be itself robust rather than
timid, desiring excellence even more than safety on the part of its
object, though of course by no means indifferent to safety. The timid
mother or nurse, who is perpetually warning children against disasters
that may occur, who thinks that every dog will bite and that every cow
is a bull, may produce in them a timidity equal to her own, and may
cause them to feel that they are never safe except in her immediate
neighbourhood. To the unduly possessive mother this feeling on the
part of a child may be agreeable: she may desire his dependence upon
herself more than his capacity to cope with the world. In that case
her child is probably worse off in the long run than he would be if he
were not loved at all. The habits of mind formed in early years are
likely to persist through life. Many people when they fall in love look
for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of
being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are
not praiseworthy. To many men home is a refuge from the truth: it is
their fears and their timidities that make them enjoy a companionship
in which these feelings are put to rest. They seek from their wives
what they obtained formerly from an unwise mother, and yet they are
surprised if their wives regard them as grown-up children.
To define the best kind of affection is not altogether easy, since
clearly there will be _some_ protective element in it. We do
not feel indifferent to the hurts of people whom we love. I think,
however, that apprehension of misfortune, as opposed to sympathy
with a misfortune that has actually occurred, should play as small a
part as possible in affection. Fear for others is only a shade better
than fear for ourselves. Moreover, it is very often a camouflage for
possessiveness. It is hoped that by rousing their fears a more complete
empire over them can be obtained. This, of course, is one of the
reasons why men have liked timid women, since by protecting them they
came to own them. The amount of solicitude of which a person can be the
object without damage to himself depends upon his character: a person
who is hardy and adventurous can endure a great deal without damage,
whereas a timid person should be encouraged to expect little in this
way.
Affection received has a two-fold function. We have spoken of it
hitherto in connection with security, but in adult life it has an even
more essential biological purpose, namely parenthood. To be unable
to inspire sex love is a grave misfortune to any man or woman, since
it deprives him or her of the greatest joys that life has to offer.
This deprivation is almost sure sooner or later to destroy zest and
produce introversion. Very frequently, however, previous misfortunes
in childhood have produced defects of character which are the cause of
failure to obtain love in later years. This is perhaps more true where
men are concerned than it is as regards women, for on the whole women
tend to love men for their character while men tend to love women for
their appearance. In this respect, it must be said, men show themselves
the inferiors of women, for the qualities that men find pleasing in
women are on the whole less desirable than those that women find
pleasing in men. I am not at all sure, however, that it is easier to
acquire a good character than a good appearance; at any rate, the steps
necessary for the latter are better understood and more readily pursued
by women than are the steps necessary for the former by men.
We have been speaking hitherto of the affection of which a person is
the object. I wish now to speak of the affection that a person gives.
This also is of two different kinds, one of which is perhaps the
most important expression of a zest for life, while the other is an
expression of fear. The former seems to me wholly admirable, while the
latter is at best a consolation. If you are sailing in a ship on a fine
day along a beautiful coast, you admire the coast and feel pleasure in
it. This pleasure is one derived entirely from looking outward, and has
nothing to do with any desperate need of your own. If, on the other
hand, your ship is wrecked and you swim towards the coast, you acquire
for it a new kind of love: it represents security against the waves,
and its beauty or ugliness becomes an unimportant matter. The better
sort of affection corresponds to the feeling of the man whose ship is
secure, the less excellent sort corresponds to that of the shipwrecked
swimmer. The first of these kinds of affection is only possible in so
far as a man feels safe, or at any rate is indifferent to such dangers
as beset him; the latter kind, on the contrary, is caused by the
feeling of insecurity. The feeling caused by insecurity is much more
subjective and self-centred than the other, since the loved person is
valued for services rendered, not for intrinsic qualities. I do not,
however, wish to suggest that this kind of affection has no legitimate
part to play in life. In fact, almost all real affection contains
something of both kinds in combination, and in so far as affection
does really cure the sense of insecurity, it sets a man free to feel
again that interest in the world which in moments of danger and fear
is obscured. But while recognizing the part that such affection has
to play in life, we must still hold that it is less excellent than
the other kind, since it depends upon fear, and fear is an evil, and
also because it is more self-centred. In the best kind of affection
a man hopes for a new happiness rather than for escape from an old
unhappiness.
The best type of affection is reciprocally life-giving; each receives
affection with joy and gives it without effort, and each finds the
whole world more interesting in consequence of the existence of this
reciprocal happiness. There is, however, another kind, by no means
uncommon, in which one person sucks the vitality of the other, one
receives what the other gives, but gives almost nothing in return. Some
very vital people belong to this bloodsucking type. They extract the
vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow
interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull. Such
people use others as means to their own ends, and never consider them
as ends in themselves. Fundamentally they are not interested in those
whom for the moment they think they love; they are interested only in
the stimulus to their own activities, perhaps of a quite impersonal
sort. Evidently this springs from some defect in their nature, but
it is one not altogether easy either to diagnose or to cure. It is
a characteristic frequently associated with great ambition, and is
rooted, I should say, in an unduly one-sided view of what makes human
happiness. Affection in the sense of a genuine reciprocal interest of
two persons in each other, not solely as means to each other’s good,
but rather as a combination having a common good, is one of the most
important elements of real happiness, and the man whose ego is so
enclosed within steel walls that this enlargement of it is impossible
misses the best that life has to offer, however successful he may be
in his career. Ambition which excludes affection from its purview is
generally the result of some kind of anger or hatred against the human
race, produced by unhappiness in youth, by injustices in later life, or
by any of the causes which lead to persecution mania. A too powerful
ego is a prison from which a man must escape if he is to enjoy the
world to the full. A capacity for genuine affection is one of the
marks of the man who has escaped from this prison of self. To receive
affection is by no means enough; affection which is received should
liberate the affection which is to be given, and only where both exist
in equal measure does affection achieve its best possibilities.
Obstacles, psychological and social, to the blossoming of reciprocal
affection are a grave evil, from which the world has always suffered
and still suffers. People are slow to give admiration for fear it
should be misplaced; they are slow to bestow affection for fear
that they should be made to suffer either by the person upon whom
they bestow it or by a censorious world. Caution is enjoined both
in the name of morality and in the name of worldly wisdom, with the
result that generosity and adventurousness are discouraged where the
affections are concerned. All this tends to produce timidity and
anger against mankind, since many people miss throughout life what is
really a fundamental need, and to nine out of ten an indispensable
condition of a happy and expansive attitude towards the world. It is
not to be supposed that those who are what is called immoral are in
this respect superior to those who are not. In sex relations there
is very often almost nothing that can be called real affection; not
infrequently there is even a fundamental hostility. Each is trying
not to give himself or herself away, each is preserving fundamental
loneliness, each remains intact and therefore unfructified. In such
experiences there is no fundamental value. I do not say that they
should be carefully avoided, since the steps necessary to this end
would be likely to interfere also with the occasions where a more
valuable and profound affection could grow up. But I do say that the
only sex relations that have real value are those in which there is no
reticence and in which the whole personality of both becomes merged in
a new collective personality. Of all forms of caution, caution in love
is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FAMILY
Of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past none
is in the present day so disorganized and derailed as the family.
Affection of parents for children and of children for parents is
capable of being one of the greatest sources of happiness, but in
fact at the present day the relations of parents and children are, in
nine cases out of ten, a source of unhappiness to both parties, and
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a source of unhappiness to at
least one of the two parties. This failure of the family to provide
the fundamental satisfaction which in principle it is capable of
yielding is one of the most deep-seated causes of the discontent which
is prevalent in our age. The adult who wishes to have a happy relation
with his own children or to provide a happy life for them must reflect
deeply upon parenthood, and, having reflected, must act wisely. The
subject of the family is far too vast to be dealt with in this volume
except in relation to our own special problem, namely the conquest of
happiness. And even in relation to that problem we can deal with it
only in so far as amelioration lies within the power of each individual
without alterations in the social structure.
This is, of course, a very grave limitation, for the causes of family
unhappiness in our day are of the most diverse sorts, psychological,
economic, social, educational, and political. Where the well-to-do
sections of the community are concerned, two causes have combined to
make women feel parenthood a burden far heavier than it was ever felt
to be in former times. These two causes are, on the one hand, the
opening of careers to single women; on the other hand, the decay of
domestic service. In old days women were driven into marriage by the
intolerable conditions of life for the spinster. The spinster had to
live at home in economic dependence, first upon her father, and then
upon some reluctant brother. She had no occupations to fill her days
and no liberty to enjoy herself outside the sheltered walls of the
family mansion. She had neither the opportunity nor the inclination
for sexual adventure, which she herself profoundly believed to be an
abomination except within marriage. If, in spite of all safeguards,
she lost her virtue through the wiles of some designing fascinator,
her situation was pitiable in the extreme. It is delineated quite
accurately in _The Vicar of Wakefield_:
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from ev’ry eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom is--to die.
The modern spinster does not consider death necessary in these
circumstances. If she has had a good education, she has no difficulty
in making a comfortable living, and is therefore independent of
parental approval. Since parents have lost their economic power over
their daughters, they have become much more chary of expressing moral
disapproval of them; there is not much use in scolding a person who
won’t stay to be scolded. The unmarried young woman of the professional
classes is therefore able nowadays, provided she is not below the
average in intelligence and attractiveness, to enjoy a thoroughly
agreeable life so long as she can keep free from the desire for
children. But if this desire overwhelms her, she is compelled to
marry, and almost certainly to lose her job. She sinks to a much lower
level of comfort than that to which she has been accustomed, since
her husband’s income is very likely no larger than that which she was
previously earning, and has to provide for a family instead of only a
single woman. After having enjoyed independence, she finds it galling
to have to look to another for every penny of necessary expenditure.
For all these reasons such women hesitate to embark upon maternity.
A woman who nevertheless does take the plunge finds herself, as
compared with the women of former generations, confronted with a new
and appalling problem, namely the paucity and bad quality of domestic
service. In consequence of this, she becomes tied to her house,
compelled to perform herself a thousand trivial tasks quite unworthy
of her ability and training, or, if she does not perform them herself,
to ruin her temper by scolding the maids who neglect them. In regard
to the physical care of her children, if she has taken pains to
become well-informed in this matter, she finds that it is impossible,
without grave risk of disaster, to entrust the children to nurses, or
even to leave to others the most elementary precautions in regard to
cleanliness and hygiene, unless she can afford a nurse who has had
an expensive training at some institute. Weighed down by a mass of
trivial detail, she is fortunate indeed if she does not soon lose all
her charm and three-quarters of her intelligence. Too often through
the mere performance of necessary duties such women become wearisome
to their husbands and a nuisance to their children. When the evening
comes and her husband returns from his work, the woman who talks
about her day-time troubles is a bore, and the woman who does not is
absent-minded. In relation to her children, the sacrifices that she
has made in order to have them are so present to her mind that she
is almost sure to demand more reward than it is desirable to expect,
while the constant habit of attending to trivial details will have made
her fussy and small-minded. This is the most pernicious of all the
injustices that she has to suffer: that in consequence of doing her
duty by her family she has lost their affection, whereas if she had
neglected them and remained gay and charming they would probably have
loved her.[4]
These troubles are essentially economic, and so is another which is
almost equally grave. I mean the difficulties in regard to housing
which result from the concentration of populations in large cities. In
the Middle Ages cities were as rural as the country is now. Children
still sing the nursery rhyme:
Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree
As full of apples as may be,
The little boys of London town
They run with sticks to knock them down.
And then they run from hedge to hedge
Until they come to London Bridge.
Paul’s steeple is gone, and I do not know at what date the hedges
disappeared between St. Paul’s and London Bridge. It is many centuries
since the little boys of London town could enjoy such pleasures as
this rhyme suggests, but until not so very long ago the bulk of the
population lived in the country. The towns were not very vast; it was
easy to get out of them, and by no means uncommon to find gardens
attached to many houses in them. Nowadays there is in England an
immense preponderance of the urban over the rural population. In
America this preponderance is as yet slight, but it is very rapidly
increasing. Cities like London and New York are so large that it takes
a very long time to get out of them. Those who live in the city usually
have to be content with a flat, to which, of course, not a square
inch of soil is attached, and in which people of moderate means have
to be content with the absolute minimum of space. If there are young
children, life in a flat is difficult. There is no room for them to
play, and there is no room for their parents to get away from their
noise. Consequently professional men tend more and more to live in the
suburbs. This is undoubtedly desirable from the point of view of the
children, but it adds considerably to the fatigue of the man’s life,
and greatly diminishes the part which he can play in the family.
Such large economic problems, however, it is not my intention to
discuss, since they lie outside the problem with which we are
concerned, namely what the individual can here and now do to find
happiness. We come nearer to this problem when we pass to the
psychological difficulties which exist in the present age in the
relations of parents and children. These are really part of the
problems raised by democracy. In old days there were masters and
slaves: the masters decided what was to be done, and on the whole
liked their slaves, since their slaves ministered to their happiness.
The slaves may possibly have hated their masters, though this did
not happen nearly so universally as democratic theory would have
us suppose. But even if they did hate their masters, their masters
remained unaware of this fact, and the masters at any rate were
happy. With the general acceptance of democratic theory all this was
changed: slaves who had acquiesced before ceased to acquiesce; masters
who had formerly had no doubts as to their rights became hesitant
and uncertain. Friction arose and caused unhappiness on both sides.
I am not saying all this as an argument against democracy, for the
troubles in question are only such as are inevitable in any important
transition. But it is no use to blink the fact that, while this
transition is in progress, it makes the world uncomfortable.
The change in the relation between parents and children is a particular
example of the general spread of democracy. Parents are no longer sure
of their rights as against their children; children no longer feel
that they owe respect to their parents. The virtue of obedience, which
was formerly exacted without question, has become unfashionable, and
rightly so. Psycho-analysis has terrified educated parents with the
fear of the harm they may unwittingly do their children. If they kiss
them, they may produce an Œdipus complex; if they do not they may
produce a fury of jealousy. If they order the children to do things
they may be producing a sense of sin; if they do not, the children
acquire habits which the parents think undesirable. When they see their
baby sucking his thumb, they draw all kinds of terrifying inferences,
but they are quite at a loss as to what to do to stop him. Parenthood,
which used to be a triumphant exercise of power, has become timid,
anxious, and filled with conscientious doubts. The old simple joys are
lost, and that at the very moment when, owing to the new freedom of
single women, the mother has had to sacrifice much more than formerly
in deciding upon maternity. In these circumstances conscientious
mothers ask too little of their children, and unconscientious mothers
ask too much. Conscientious mothers restrain their natural affection
and become shy; unconscientious mothers seek in their children a
compensation for the joys that they have had to forgo. In the one
case the child’s affections are starved, in the other they are
over-stimulated. In neither case is there any of that simple and
natural happiness that the family at its best can provide.
In view of all these troubles, is it any wonder that the birth-rate
declines? The decline of the birth-rate in the population at large has
reached a point which shows that the population will soon begin to
dwindle, but among the well-to-do classes this point has long ago been
passed, not only in one country, but in practically all the most highly
civilized countries. There are not very many statistics available as
to the birth-rate among the well-to-do, but two facts may be quoted
from Jean Ayling’s book alluded to above. It appears that in Stockholm
in the years 1919 to 1922 the fertility of professional women was only
one-third of that of the population at large, and that among the four
thousand graduates of Wellesley College, U.S.A., in the period 1896
to 1913 the total number of children is about three thousand, whereas
to prevent an actual dwindling of the stock there should have been
eight thousand children none of whom had died young. There can be
no doubt that the civilization produced by the white races has this
singular characteristic, that in proportion as men and women absorb
it, they become sterile. The most civilized are the most sterile; the
least civilized are the most fertile; and between the two there is a
continual gradation. At present the most intelligent sections of the
Western nations are dying out. Within a very few years the Western
nations as a whole will be diminishing in numbers except in so far
as their stocks are replenished by immigration from less civilized
regions. And as soon as the immigrants acquire the civilization of
the country of their adoption they in turn will become comparatively
sterile. It is clear that a civilization which has this characteristic
is unstable; unless it can be induced to reproduce its numbers, it
must sooner or later die out and give place to some other civilization
in which the urge towards parenthood has retained enough strength to
prevent the population from declining.
Official moralists in every Western country have endeavoured to treat
this problem by means of exhortations and sentimentality. On the one
hand, they say that it is the duty of every married couple to have
as many children as God wills, regardless of any prospect that such
children may have of health and happiness. On the other hand, male
divines prate about the sacred joys of motherhood and pretend that a
large family of diseased and poverty-stricken infants is a source
of happiness. The State joins in with the argument that an adequate
crop of cannon fodder is necessary, for how can all these exquisite
and ingenious weapons of destruction function adequately unless there
are sufficient populations left for them to destroy? Strange to say,
the individual parent, even if he accepts these arguments as applied
to others, remains entirely deaf to them as applied to himself. The
psychology of the divines and the patriots is at fault. The divines
may succeed so long as they can successfully threaten hell-fire, but
it is only a minority of the population that now takes this threat
seriously. And no threat short of this is adequate to control behaviour
in a matter so essentially private. As for the State, its argument
is altogether too ferocious. People may agree that others ought to
provide cannon fodder, but they are not attracted by the prospect of
having their own children used in this way. All that the State can do,
therefore, is to endeavour to keep the poor in ignorance, an effort
which, as the statistics show, is singularly unsuccessful except in
the most backward of Western countries. Very few men or women will
have children from a sense of public duty, even if it were far clearer
than it is that any such public duty exists. When men and women have
children, they do so either because they believe that children will
add to their happiness, or because they do not know how to prevent
them. The latter reason still operates very powerfully, but it is
steadily diminishing in potency. And nothing that either the State
or the Churches can do will prevent this diminution from continuing.
It is necessary, therefore, if the white races are to survive, that
parenthood should again become capable of yielding happiness to parents.
When one considers human nature apart from the circumstances of the
present day, it is clear, I think, that parenthood is psychologically
capable of providing the greatest and most enduring happiness that
life has to offer. This, no doubt, is more true of women than of men,
but it is more true of men than most moderns are inclined to suppose.
It is taken for granted in almost all literature before the present
age. Hecuba cares more for her children than for Priam; MacDuff cares
more for his children than for his wife. In the Old Testament both men
and women are passionately concerned to leave descendants; in China
and Japan this attitude has persisted down to our own day. It will be
said that this desire is due to ancestor worship. I think, however,
that the contrary is the truth, namely that ancestor worship is a
reflection of the interest people take in the persistence of their
family. Reverting to the professional women whom we were considering
a moment ago, it is clear that the urge to have children must be very
powerful, for otherwise none of them would make the sacrifices required
in order to satisfy it. For my own part, speaking personally, I have
found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other that I have
experienced. I believe that when circumstances lead men or women to
forgo this happiness, a very deep need remains ungratified, and that
this produces a dissatisfaction and listlessness of which the cause
may remain quite unknown. To be happy in this world, especially when
youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated
individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life
flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. As a
conscious sentiment, expressed in set terms, this involves no doubt
a hyper-civilized and intellectual outlook upon the world, but as a
vague instinctive emotion it is primitive and natural, and it is its
absence that is hyper-civilized. A man who is capable of some great
and remarkable achievement which sets its stamp upon future ages may
gratify this feeling through his work, but for men and women who have
no exceptional gifts, the only way to do so is through children. Those
who have allowed their procreative impulses to become atrophied have
separated themselves from the stream of life, and in so doing have
run a grave risk of becoming desiccated. For them, unless they are
exceptionally impersonal, death ends all. The world that shall come
after them does not concern them, and because of this their doings
appear to themselves trivial and unimportant. To the man or woman
who has children and grandchildren and loves them with a natural
affection, the future is important, at any rate to the limit of their
lives, not only through morality or through an effort of imagination,
but naturally and instinctively. And the man whose interests have
been stretched to this extent beyond his personal life is likely to
be able to stretch them still further. Like Abraham, he will derive
satisfaction from the thought that his seed are to inherit the promised
land even if this is not to happen for many generations. And through
such feelings he is saved from the sense of futility which otherwise
deadens all his emotions.
The basis of the family is, of course, the fact that parents feel a
special kind of affection towards their own children, different from
that which they feel towards each other or towards other children. It
is true that some parents feel little or no parental affection, and
it is also true that some women are capable of feeling an affection
for children not their own almost as strong as that which they could
feel for their own. Nevertheless, the broad fact remains that parental
affection is a special kind of feeling which the normal human being
experiences towards his or her own children, but not towards any
other human being. This emotion is one which we inherit from our
animal ancestors. In this respect Freud seems to me not sufficiently
biological in his outlook, for anyone who will observe an animal mother
with her young can see that her behaviour towards them follows an
entirely different pattern from her behaviour towards the male with
whom she has sex relations. And this same different and instinctive
pattern, though in a modified and less definite form, exists among
human beings. If it were not for this special emotion there would be
almost nothing to be said for the family as an institution, since
children might equally well be left to the care of professionals. As
things are, however, the special affection which parents have for
children, provided their instincts are not atrophied, is of value both
to the parents themselves and to the children. The value of parental
affection to children lies largely in the fact that it is more reliable
than any other affection. One’s friends like one for one’s merits,
one’s lovers for one’s charms; if the merits or the charms diminish,
friends and lovers may vanish. But it is in times of misfortune that
parents are most to be relied upon, in illness, and even in disgrace
if the parents are of the right sort. We all feel pleasure when we are
admired for our merits, but most of us are sufficiently modest at heart
to feel that such admiration is precarious. Our parents love us because
we are their children, and this is an unalterable fact, so that we feel
more safe with them than with anyone else. In times of success this may
seem unimportant, but in times of failure it affords a consolation and
a security not to be found elsewhere.
In all human relations it is fairly easy to secure happiness for one
party, but much more difficult to secure it for both. The gaoler may
enjoy guarding the prisoner; the employer may enjoy browbeating the
employee; the ruler may enjoy governing his subjects with a firm hand;
and the old-fashioned father no doubt enjoyed instilling virtue into
his son by means of the rod. These, however, are one-sided pleasures;
to the other party in the transaction the situation is less agreeable.
We have come to feel that there is something unsatisfactory about
these one-sided delights: we believe that a good human relation should
be satisfying to both parties. This applies more particularly to the
relations of parents and children, with the result that parents obtain
far less pleasure from children than they did formerly, while children
reciprocally suffer less at the hands of their parents than they did
in bygone generations. I do not think there is any real reason why
parents should derive less happiness from their children than they did
in former times, although undoubtedly this is the case at present.
Nor do I think that there is any reason why parents should fail to
increase the happiness of their children. But this requires, as do all
those equal relationships at which the modern world aims, a certain
delicacy and tenderness, a certain reverence for another personality,
which are by no means encouraged by the pugnacity of ordinary life.
Let us consider the happiness of parenthood, first in its biological
essence, and then as it may become in a parent inspired by that kind
of attitude towards other personalities which we have been suggesting
as essential to a world that believes in equality.
The primitive root of the pleasure of parenthood is two-fold. On the
one hand there is the feeling of part of one’s own body externalized,
prolonging its life beyond the death of the rest of one’s body, and
possibly in its turn externalizing part of itself in the same fashion,
and so securing the immortality of the germ-plasm. On the other hand
there is an intimate blend of power and tenderness. The new creature
is helpless, and there is an impulse to supply its needs, an impulse
which gratifies not only the parent’s love towards the child, but
also the parent’s desire for power. So long as the infant is felt to
be helpless, the affection which is bestowed upon it does not feel
unselfish, since it is in the nature of protection to a vulnerable
portion of oneself. But from a very early age there comes to be a
conflict between love of parental power and desire for the child’s
good, for, while power over the child is to a certain extent decreed
by the nature of things, it is nevertheless desirable that the child
should as soon as possible learn to be independent in as many ways as
possible, which is unpleasant to the power impulse in a parent. Some
parents never become conscious of this conflict, and remain tyrants
until the children are in a position to rebel. Others, however, become
conscious of it, and thus find themselves a prey to conflicting
emotions. In this conflict their parental happiness is lost. After
all the care that they have bestowed on the child, they find to their
mortification that he turns out quite different from what they had
hoped. They wanted him to be a soldier, and they find him a pacifist,
or, like Tolstoy, they wanted him to be a pacifist, and he joins the
Black Hundreds. But it is not only in these later developments that
the difficulty is felt. If you feed an infant who is already capable
of feeding himself, you are putting love of power before the child’s
welfare, although it seems to you that you are only being kind in
saving him trouble. If you make him too vividly aware of dangers, you
are probably actuated by a desire to keep him dependent upon you. If
you give him demonstrative affection to which you expect a response,
you are probably endeavouring to grapple him to you by means of his
emotions. In a thousand ways, great and small, the possessive impulse
of parents will lead them astray, unless they are very watchful or very
pure in heart. Modern parents, aware of these dangers, sometimes lose
confidence in handling their children, and become therefore even less
able to be of use to them than if they permitted themselves spontaneous
mistakes, for nothing causes so much worry in a child’s mind as lack
of certainty and self-confidence on the part of an adult. Better than
being careful, therefore, is to be pure in heart. The parent who
genuinely desires the child’s welfare more than his or her power over
the child will not need textbooks on psycho-analysis to say what should
and what should not be done, but will be guided aright by impulse.
And in that case the relation of parent and child will be harmonious
from first to last, causing no rebellion in the child and no feeling
of frustration in the parent. But this demands on the part of the
parent from the first a respect for the personality of the child--a
respect which must be not merely a matter of principle, whether moral
or intellectual, but something deeply felt with almost mystical
conviction to such a degree that possessiveness and oppression become
utterly impossible. It is of course not only towards children that an
attitude of this sort is desirable: it is very necessary in marriage,
and in friendship also, though in friendship it is less difficult. In a
good world it would pervade the political relations between groups of
human beings, though this is so distant a hope that we need not linger
over it. But universal as is the need for this kind of gentleness, it
is needed most of all where children are concerned, because of their
helplessness, and because their small size and feeble strength cause
vulgar souls to despise them.
But to return to the problems with which this book is concerned, the
full joy of parenthood in the modern world is only to be obtained by
those who can deeply feel this attitude of respect towards the child
of which I have been speaking. For to them there will be no irksome
restraint upon their love of power, and no need to dread the bitter
disillusionment which despotic parents experience when their children
acquire freedom. And to the parent who has this attitude there is more
joy in parenthood than ever was possible to the despot in the hey-day
of parental power. For the love that has been purged by gentleness
of all tendency towards tyranny can give a joy more exquisite, more
tender, more capable of transmuting the base metal of daily life into
the pure gold of mystic ecstasy, than any emotion that is possible to
the man still fighting and struggling to maintain his ascendancy in
this slippery world.
While I attach a very high value to the parental emotion, I do not draw
the inference, which is too commonly drawn, that mothers should do as
much as possible themselves for their children. There is a convention
on this subject which was all very well in the days when nothing was
known about the care of children except the unscientific odds and ends
that old women handed on to younger ones. Nowadays there is a great
deal in the care of children which is best done by those who have
made a special study of some department of this subject. In relation
to that part of their education which is _called_ “education”
this is recognized. A mother is not expected to teach her son the
calculus, however much she may love him. So far as the acquisition of
book-learning is concerned, it is recognized that children can acquire
it better from those who have it than from a mother who does not have
it. But in regard to many other departments in the care of children
this is not recognized, because the experience required is not yet
recognized. Undoubtedly certain things are better done by the mother,
but as the child gets older, there will be an increasing number of
things better done by someone else. If this were generally recognized,
mothers would be saved a great deal of labour which is irksome to them,
because it is not that in which they have professional competence. A
woman who has acquired any kind of professional skill ought, both for
her own sake and for that of the community, to be free to continue to
exercise this skill in spite of motherhood. She may be unable to do
so during the later months of pregnancy and during lactation, but a
child over nine months old ought not to form an insuperable barrier
to its mother’s professional activities. Whenever society demands
of a mother sacrifices to her child which go beyond reason, the
mother, if she is not unusually saintly, will expect from her child
compensations exceeding those she has a right to expect. The mother
who is conventionally called self-sacrificing is, in a great majority
of cases, exceptionally selfish towards her children, for, important
as parenthood is as an element in life, it is not satisfying if it is
treated as the whole of life, and the unsatisfied parent is likely to
be an emotionally grasping parent. It is important, therefore, quite
as much in the interests of the children as in those of the mother,
that motherhood should not cut her off from all other interests and
pursuits. If she has a real vocation for the care of children and that
amount of knowledge which will enable her to care adequately for her
own children, her skill ought to be more widely used, and she ought to
be engaged professionally in the care of some group of children which
may be expected to include her own. It is right that parents, provided
they fulfil the minimum requirements insisted upon by the State, should
have a say as to how their children are cared for and by whom, so long
as they do not go outside the ranks of qualified persons. But there
should be no convention demanding that every mother should do herself
what some other woman can do better. Mothers who feel baffled and
incompetent when faced with their children, as many mothers do, should
have no hesitation in having their children cared for by women who have
an aptitude for this work and have undergone the necessary training.
There is no heaven-sent instinct which teaches women the right thing
to do by their children, and solicitude when it goes beyond a point
is a camouflage for possessiveness. Many a child is psychologically
ruined by ignorant and sentimental handling on the part of its mother.
It has always been recognized that fathers cannot be expected to do
very much for their children, and yet children are quite as apt to
love their fathers as to love their mothers. The relation of the
mother to the child will have in future to resemble more and more that
which at present the father has, if women’s lives are to be freed from
unnecessary slavery and children are to be allowed to profit by the
scientific knowledge which is accumulating as to the care of their
minds and bodies in early years.
CHAPTER XIV
WORK
Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among
the causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful
question. There is certainly much work which is exceedingly irksome,
and an excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that,
provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to
most people less painful than idleness. There are in work all grades,
from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights, according
to the nature of the work and the abilities of the worker. Most of
the work that most people have to do is not in itself interesting,
but even such work has certain great advantages. To begin with, it
fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what
one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own
time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything
sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide
on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have
been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last
product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached
this level. Moreover, the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome.
Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to
be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are
not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as
the price of their freedom from drudgery. At times they may find relief
by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round the world, but the
number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past.
Accordingly, the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if
they were poor, while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy
with innumerable trifles of whose earth-shaking importance they are
firmly persuaded.
Work, therefore, is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of
boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary
though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom
that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. With this
advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays
much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to
work so hard as to impair his vigour, he is likely to find far more
zest in his free time than an idle man could possibly find.
The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is
that it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In
most work success is measured by income, and while our capitalistic
society continues, this is inevitable. It is only where the best work
is concerned that this measure ceases to be the natural one to apply.
The desire that men feel to increase their income is quite as much a
desire for success as for the extra comforts that a higher income can
procure. However dull work may be, it becomes bearable if it is a means
of building up a reputation, whether in the world at large or only in
one’s own circle. Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential
ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men this comes
chiefly through their work. In this respect those women whose lives
are occupied with house-work are much less fortunate than men, or than
women who work outside the home. The domesticated wife does not receive
wages, has no means of bettering herself, is taken for granted by her
husband (who sees practically nothing of what she does), and is valued
by him not for her house-work but for quite other qualities. Of course,
this does not apply to those women who are sufficiently well-to-do to
make beautiful houses and beautiful gardens and become the envy of
their neighbours; but such women are comparatively few, and for the
great majority house-work cannot bring as much satisfaction as work of
other kinds brings to men and to professional women.
The satisfaction of killing time and of affording some outlet, however
modest, for ambition, belongs to most work, and is sufficient to make
even a man whose work is dull happier on the average than a man who has
no work at all. But when work is interesting, it is capable of giving
satisfaction of a far higher order than mere relief from tedium. The
kinds of work in which there is some interest may be arranged in a
hierarchy. I shall begin with those which are only mildly interesting
and end with those that are worthy to absorb the whole energies of a
great man.
Two chief elements make work interesting: first, the exercise of skill,
and second, construction.
Every man who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys exercising it
until it has become a matter of course, or until he can no longer
improve himself. This motive to activity begins in early childhood: a
boy who can stand on his head becomes reluctant to stand on his feet.
A great deal of work gives the same pleasure that is to be derived
from games of skill. The work of a lawyer or a politician must contain
in a more delectable form a great deal of the same pleasure that is
to be derived from playing bridge. Here, of course, there is not only
the exercise of skill but the outwitting of a skilled opponent. Even
where this competitive element is absent, however, the performance of
difficult feats is agreeable. A man who can do stunts in an aeroplane
finds the pleasure so great that for the sake of it he is willing to
risk his life. I imagine that an able surgeon, in spite of the painful
circumstances in which his work is done, derives satisfaction from
the exquisite precision of his operations. The same kind of pleasure,
though in a less intense form, is to be derived from a great deal of
work of a humbler kind. I have even heard of plumbers who enjoyed
their work, though I have never had the good fortune to meet one. All
skilled work can be pleasurable, provided the skill required is either
variable or capable of indefinite improvement. If these conditions
are absent, it will cease to be interesting when a man has acquired
his maximum skill. A man who runs three-mile races will cease to find
pleasure in this occupation when he passes the age at which he can
beat his own previous record. Fortunately there is a very considerable
amount of work in which new circumstances call for new skill and a man
can go on improving, at any rate until he has reached middle age. In
some kinds of skilled work, such as politics, for example, it seems
that men are at their best between sixty and seventy, the reason being
that in such occupations a wide experience of other men is essential.
For this reason successful politicians are apt to be happier at the age
of seventy than any other men of equal age. Their only competitors in
this respect are the men who are the heads of big businesses.
There is, however, another element possessed by the best work, which
is even more important as a source of happiness than is the exercise
of skill. This is the element of constructiveness. In some work,
though by no means in most, something is built up which remains as a
monument when the work is completed. We may distinguish construction
from destruction by the following criterion. In construction the
initial state of affairs is comparatively haphazard, while the final
state of affairs embodies a purpose; in destruction the reverse is the
case: the initial state of affairs embodies a purpose, while the final
state of affairs is haphazard, that is to say, all that is intended by
the destroyer is to produce a state of affairs which does not embody
a certain purpose. This criterion applies in the most literal and
obvious case, namely the construction and destruction of buildings. In
constructing a building a previously made plan is carried out, whereas
in destroying it no one decides exactly how the materials are to lie
when the demolition is complete. Destruction is of course necessary
very often as a preliminary to subsequent construction; in that case it
is part of a whole which is constructive. But not infrequently a man
will engage in activities of which the purpose is destructive without
regard to any construction that may come after. Frequently he will
conceal this from himself by the belief that he is only sweeping away
in order to build afresh, but it is generally possible to unmask this
pretence, when it is a pretence, by asking him what the subsequent
construction is to be. On this subject it will be found that he will
speak vaguely and without enthusiasm, whereas on the preliminary
destruction he has spoken precisely and with zest. This applies to not
a few revolutionaries and militarists and other apostles of violence.
They are actuated, usually without their own knowledge, by hatred; the
destruction of what they hate is their real purpose, and they are
comparatively indifferent to the question what is to come after it.
Now I cannot deny that in the work of destruction as in the work of
construction there may be joy. It is a fiercer joy, perhaps at moments
more intense, but it is less profoundly satisfying, since the result is
one in which little satisfaction is to be found. You kill your enemy,
and when he is dead your occupation is gone, and the satisfaction that
you derive from victory quickly fades. The work of construction, on the
other hand, when completed, is delightful to contemplate, and moreover
is never so fully completed that there is nothing further to do about
it. The most satisfactory purposes are those that lead on indefinitely
from one success to another without ever coming to a dead end; and in
this respect it will be found that construction is a greater source of
happiness than destruction. Perhaps it would be more correct to say
that those who find satisfaction in construction find in it greater
satisfaction than the lovers of destruction can find in destruction,
for if once you have become filled with hate you will not easily derive
from construction the pleasure which another man would derive from it.
At the same time few things are so likely to cure the habit of hatred
as the opportunity to do constructive work of an important kind.
The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive
enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer,
although unfortunately in its highest forms it is only open to men
of exceptional ability. Nothing can rob a man of the happiness of
successful achievement in an important piece of work, unless it be
the proof that after all his work was bad. There are many forms of
such satisfaction. The man who by a scheme of irrigation has caused
the wilderness to blossom like the rose enjoys it in one of its most
tangible forms. The creation of an organization may be a work of
supreme importance. So is the work of those few statesmen who have
devoted their lives to producing order out of chaos, of whom Lenin is
the supreme type in our day. The most obvious examples are artists
and men of science. Shakespeare says of his verse: “So long as men
can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this.” And it cannot be
doubted that the thought consoled him for misfortune. In his sonnets he
maintains that the thought of his friend reconciled him to life, but
I cannot help suspecting that the sonnets he wrote to his friend were
even more effective for this purpose than the friend himself. Great
artists and great men of science do work which is in itself delightful;
while they are doing it, it secures them the respect of those whose
respect is worth having, which gives them the most fundamental kind
of power, namely power over men’s thoughts and feelings. They have
also the most solid reasons for thinking well of themselves. This
combination of fortunate circumstances ought, one would think, to
be enough to make any man happy. Nevertheless it is not so. Michael
Angelo, for example, was a profoundly unhappy man and maintained (not,
I am sure, with truth) that he would not have troubled to produce works
of art if he had not had to pay the debts of his impecunious relations.
The power to produce great art is very often, though by no means
always, associated with a temperamental unhappiness, so great that but
for the joy which the artist derives from his work he would be driven
to suicide. We cannot therefore maintain that even the greatest work
must make a man happy; we can only maintain that it must make him less
unhappy. Men of science, however, are far less often temperamentally
unhappy than artists are, and in the main the men who do great work in
science are happy men, whose happiness is derived primarily from their
work.
One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day
is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find
no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have
to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines,
who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as
pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists either in
England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper
for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small
minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute
their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work
cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling
himself to the doing of it a man has to make himself so cynical that he
can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever.
I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation
is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to
do work that is satisfactory to a man’s constructive impulses without
entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of
his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more
highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account.
Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the
man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.
The satisfaction of constructive work, though it may, as things are,
be the privilege of a minority, can nevertheless be the privilege of
a quite large minority. Any man who is his own master in his work can
feel it; so can any man whose work appears to him useful and requires
considerable skill. The production of satisfactory children is a
difficult constructive work capable of affording profound satisfaction.
Any woman who has achieved this can feel that as a result of her labour
the world contains something of value which it would not otherwise
contain.
Human beings differ profoundly in regard to the tendency to regard
their lives as a whole. To some men it is natural to do so, and
essential to happiness to be able to do so with some satisfaction. To
others life is a series of detached incidents without directed movement
and without unity. I think the former sort are more likely to achieve
happiness than the latter, since they will gradually build up those
circumstances from which they can derive contentment and self-respect,
whereas the others will be blown about by the winds of circumstance
now this way, now that, without ever arriving at any haven. The habit
of viewing life as a whole is an essential part both of wisdom and of
true morality, and is one of the things which ought to be encouraged in
education. Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it
is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent
purpose embodies itself mainly in work.
CHAPTER XV
IMPERSONAL INTERESTS
In this chapter I wish to consider not those major interests about
which a man’s life is built, but those minor interests which fill his
leisure and afford relaxation from the tenseness of his more serious
pre-occupations. In the life of the average man his wife and children,
his work and his financial position occupy the main part of his anxious
and serious thought. Even if he has extra-matrimonial love affairs,
they probably do not concern him as profoundly in themselves as in
their possible effects upon his home life. The interests which are
bound up with his work I am not for the present regarding as impersonal
interests. A man of science, for example, must keep abreast of research
in his own line. Towards such research his feelings have the warmth
and vividness belonging to something intimately concerned with his
career, but if he reads about research in some quite other science with
which he is not professionally concerned he reads in quite a different
spirit, not professionally, less critically, more disinterestedly. Even
if he has to use his mind in order to follow what is said, his reading
is nevertheless a relaxation, because it is not connected with his
responsibilities. If the book interests him, his interest is impersonal
in a sense which cannot be applied to the books upon his own subject.
It is such interests lying outside the main activities of a man’s life
that I wish to speak about in the present chapter.
One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is
inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical
importance in one’s own life. The result of this is that the conscious
mind gets no rest from a certain small number of matters, each of
which probably involves some anxiety and some element of worry.
Except in sleep the conscious mind is never allowed to lie fallow
while subconscious thought matures its gradual wisdom. The result is
excitability, lack of sagacity, irritability, and a loss of sense of
proportion. All these are both causes and effects of fatigue. As a man
gets more tired, his external interests fade, and as they fade he loses
the relief which they afford him and becomes still more tired. This
vicious circle is only too apt to end in a breakdown. What is restful
about external interests is the fact that they do not call for any
action. Making decisions and exercising volition are very fatiguing,
especially if they have to be done hurriedly and without the help of
the subconscious. Men who feel that they must “sleep on it” before
coming to an important decision are profoundly right. But it is not
only in sleep that the subconscious mental processes can work. They can
work also while a man’s conscious mind is occupied elsewhere. The man
who can forget his work when it is over and not remember it until it
begins again next day is likely to do his work far better than the man
who worries about it throughout the intervening hours. And it is very
much easier to forget work at the times when it ought to be forgotten
if a man has many interests other than his work than it is if he has
not. It is, however, essential that these interests should not exercise
those very faculties which have been exhausted by his day’s work. They
should not involve will and quick decision, they should not, like
gambling, involve any financial element, and they should as a rule
not be so exciting as to produce emotional fatigue and preoccupy the
subconscious as well as the conscious mind.
A great many amusements fulfil all these conditions. Watching games,
going to the theatre, playing golf, are all irreproachable from this
point of view. For a man of a bookish turn of mind reading unconnected
with his professional activities is very satisfactory. However
important a worry may be, it should not be thought about throughout the
whole of the waking hours.
In this respect there is a great difference between men and women. Men
on the whole find it very much easier to forget their work than women
do. In the case of women whose work is in the home this is natural,
since they do not have the change of place that a man has when he
leaves the office to help them to acquire a new mood. But if I am not
mistaken, women whose work is outside the home differ from men in
this respect almost as much as those who work at home. They find it,
that is to say, very difficult to be interested in anything that has
for them no practical importance. Their purposes govern their thoughts
and their activities, and they seldom become absorbed in some wholly
irresponsible interest. I do not of course deny that exceptions exist,
but I am speaking of what seems to me to be the usual rule. In a
woman’s college, for example, the women teachers, if no man is present,
talk shop in the evening, while in a man’s college the men do not. This
characteristic appears to women as a higher degree of conscientiousness
than that of men, but I do not think that in the long run it improves
the quality of their work. And it tends to produce a certain narrowness
of outlook leading not infrequently to a kind of fanaticism.
All impersonal interests, apart from their importance as relaxation,
have various other uses. To begin with, they help a man to retain his
sense of proportion. It is very easy to become so absorbed in our
own pursuits, our own circle, our own type of work, that we forget
how small a part this is of the total of human activity and how many
things in the world are entirely unaffected by what we do. Why should
one remember this? you may ask. There are several answers. In the
first place, it is good to have as true a picture of the world as is
compatible with necessary activities. Each of us is in the world for no
very long time, and within the few years of his life has to acquire
whatever he is to know of this strange planet and its place in the
universe. To ignore our opportunities for knowledge, imperfect as they
are, is like going to the theatre and not listening to the play. The
world is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or
surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that
it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer.
Then again a sense of proportion is very valuable and at times very
consoling. We are all inclined to get unduly excited, unduly strained,
unduly impressed with the importance of the little corner of the world
in which we live, and of the little moment of time comprised between
our birth and death. In this excitement and over-estimation of our
own importance there is nothing desirable. True, it may make us work
harder, but it will not make us work better. A little work directed to
a good end is better than a great deal of work directed to a bad end,
though the apostles of the strenuous life seem to think otherwise.
Those who care much for their work are always in danger of falling
into fanaticism, which consists essentially in remembering one or two
desirable things while forgetting all the rest, and in supposing that
in the pursuit of these one or two any incidental harm of other sorts
is of little account. Against this fanatical temper there is no better
prophylactic than a large conception of the life of man and his place
in the universe. This may seem a very big thing to invoke in such a
connection, but apart from this particular use it is in itself a thing
of great value.
It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become
too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and
too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey
of the world. You become absorbed, let us say, in a political contest,
and work hard for the victory of your own party. So far, so good. But
it may happen in the course of the contest that some opportunity of
victory presents itself which involves the use of methods calculated
to increase hatred, violence and suspicion in the world. For example,
you may find that the best road to victory is to insult some foreign
nation. If your mental purview is limited to the present, or if you
have imbibed the doctrine that what is called efficiency is the only
thing that matters, you will adopt such dubious means. Through them
you will be victorious in your immediate purpose, while the more
distant consequences may be disastrous. If, on the other hand, you
have as part of the habitual furniture of your mind the past ages of
man, his slow and partial emergence out of barbarism, and the brevity
of his total existence in comparison with astronomical epochs--if,
I say, such thoughts have moulded your habitual feelings, you will
realize that the momentary battle upon which you are engaged cannot be
of such importance as to risk a backward step towards the darkness
out of which we have been slowly emerging. Nay, more, if you suffer
defeat in your immediate objective, you will be sustained by the same
sense of its momentariness that made you unwilling to adopt degrading
weapons. You will have, beyond your immediate activities, purposes that
are distant and slowly unfolding, in which you are not an isolated
individual but one of the great army of those who have led mankind
towards a civilized existence. If you have attained to this outlook,
a certain deep happiness will never leave you, whatever your personal
fate may be. Life will become a communion with the great of all ages,
and personal death no more than a negligible incident.
If I had the power to organize higher education as I should
wish it to be, I should seek to substitute for the old orthodox
religions--which appeal to few among the young, and those as a rule
the least intelligent and the most obscurantist--something which is
perhaps hardly to be called religion, since it is merely a focusing
of attention upon well-ascertained facts. I should seek to make young
people vividly aware of the past, vividly realizing that the future
of man will in all likelihood be immeasurably longer than his past,
profoundly conscious of the minuteness of the planet upon which we live
and of the fact that life on this planet is only a temporary incident;
and at the same time with these facts which tend to emphasize the
insignificance of the individual I should present quite another set
of facts designed to impress upon the mind of the young the greatness
of which the individual is capable, and the knowledge that throughout
all the depths of stellar space nothing of equal value is known to us.
Spinoza long ago wrote of human bondage and human freedom; his form and
his language make his thought difficult of access to all but students
of philosophy, but the essence of what I wish to convey differs little
from what he has said.
A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly,
what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows
himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes,
dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of
greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the
winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe. He will
see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations
will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he
will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of
value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose
mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In
emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he
will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his
outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.
Leaving these large speculations and returning to our more immediate
subject, namely the value of impersonal interests, there is another
consideration which makes them a great help towards happiness. Even
in the most fortunate lives there are times when things go wrong.
Few men except bachelors have never quarrelled with their wives; few
parents have not endured grave anxiety owing to the illnesses of their
children; few business men have avoided times of financial stress; few
professional men have not known periods when failure stared them in
the face. At such times a capacity to become interested in something
outside the cause of anxiety is an immense boon. At such times, when
in spite of anxiety there is nothing to be done at the moment, one man
will play chess, another will read detective stories, a third will
become absorbed in popular astronomy, a fourth will console himself by
reading about the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees. Any one of these
four is acting wisely, whereas the man who does nothing to distract his
mind and allows his trouble to acquire a complete empire over him is
acting unwisely and making himself less fit to cope with his troubles
when the moment for action arrives. Very similar considerations apply
to irreparable sorrows such as the death of some person deeply loved.
No good is done to anyone by allowing oneself to become sunk in grief
on such an occasion. Grief is unavoidable and must be expected, but
everything that can be done should be done to minimize it. It is mere
sentimentality to aim, as some do, at extracting the very uttermost
drop of misery from misfortune. I do not of course deny that a man may
be broken by sorrow, but I do say that every man should do his utmost
to escape this fate, and should seek any distraction, however trivial,
provided it is not in itself harmful or degrading. Among those that I
regard as harmful and degrading I include such things as drunkenness
and drugs, of which the purpose is to destroy thought, at least for the
time being. The proper course is not to destroy thought but to turn
it into new channels, or at any rate into channels remote from the
present misfortune. It is difficult to do this if life has hitherto
been concentrated upon a very few interests and those few have now
become suffused with sorrow. To bear misfortune well when it comes,
it is wise to have cultivated in happier times a certain width of
interests, so that the mind may find prepared for it some undisturbed
place suggesting other associations and other emotions than those which
are making the present difficult to bear.
A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by
the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world
which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be
defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired
as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure
in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may
strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary
that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the
whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident.
For all these reasons the man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at
the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those
central ones upon which his life is built.
CHAPTER XVI
EFFORT AND RESIGNATION
The golden mean is an uninteresting doctrine, and I can remember when I
was young rejecting it with scorn and indignation, since in those days
it was heroic extremes that I admired. Truth, however, is not always
interesting, and many things are believed because they are interesting
although, in fact, there is little other evidence in their favour. The
golden mean is a case in point: it may be an uninteresting doctrine,
but in a very great many matters it is a true one.
One respect in which it is necessary to preserve the golden mean is as
regards the balance between effort and resignation. Both doctrines have
had extreme advocates. The doctrine of resignation has been preached
by saints and mystics; the doctrine of effort has been preached by
efficiency experts and muscular Christians. Each of these opposing
schools has had a part of the truth, but not the whole. I want in this
chapter to try and strike the balance, and I shall begin with the case
in favour of effort.
Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops
into the mouth, like a ripe fruit, by the mere operation of fortunate
circumstances. That is why I have called this book _The Conquest of
Happiness_. For in a world so full of avoidable and unavoidable
misfortunes, of illness and psychological tangles, of struggle and
poverty and ill will, the man or woman who is to be happy must find
ways of coping with the multitudinous causes of unhappiness by which
each individual is assailed. In some rare cases no great effort may
be required. A man of easy good nature, who inherits an ample fortune
and enjoys good health together with simple tastes, may slip through
life comfortably and wonder what all the fuss is about; a good-looking
woman of an indolent disposition, if she happens to marry a well-to-do
husband who demands no exertion from her, and if after marriage she
does not mind growing fat, may equally enjoy a certain lazy comfort,
provided she has good luck as regards her children. But such cases
are exceptional. Most people are not rich; many people are not born
good-natured; many people have uneasy passions which make a quiet and
well-regulated life seem intolerably boring; health is a blessing which
no one can be sure of preserving; marriage is not invariably a source
of bliss. For all these reasons, happiness must be, for most men and
women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods, and in this
achievement effort, both inward and outward, must play a great part.
The inward effort may include the effort of necessary resignation; for
the present, therefore, let us consider only outward effort.
In the case of any person, whether man or woman, who has to work for
a living, the need of effort in this respect is too obvious to need
emphasizing. The Indian fakir, it is true, can make a living without
effort by merely offering a bowl for the alms of the faithful, but in
Western countries the authorities do not view with a favourable eye
this method of obtaining an income. Moreover, the climate makes it less
pleasant than in hotter and dryer countries: in the winter-time, at any
rate, few people are so lazy as to prefer idleness out of doors to work
in heated rooms. Resignation alone, therefore, is not in the West one
of the roads to fortune.
To a very large percentage of men in Western countries, more than a
bare living is necessary to happiness, since they desire the feeling of
being successful. In some occupations, such, for example, as scientific
research, this feeling can be obtained by men who do not earn a large
income, but in the majority of occupations income has become the
measure of success. At this point we touch upon a matter in regard to
which an element of resignation is desirable in most cases, since in a
competitive world conspicuous success is possible only for a minority.
Marriage is a matter in regard to which effort may or may not be
necessary, according to circumstances. Where one sex is in the
minority, as men are in England and women are in Australia, members
of that sex require, as a rule, little effort in order to marry as
they wish. For members of the sex which is in the majority, however,
the opposite is the case. The amount of effort and thought expended
in this direction by women where they are in the majority is obvious
to anyone who will study the advertisements in women’s magazines.
Men, where they are in a majority, frequently adopt more expeditious
methods, such as skill with the revolver. This is natural, since
a majority of men occurs most frequently on the border-line of
civilization. I do not know what men would do if a discriminating
pestilence caused them to become a majority in England; they might have
to revert to the manners of gallants in a bygone age.
The amount of effort involved in the successful rearing of children is
so evident that probably no one would deny it. Countries which believe
in resignation and what is mistakenly called a “spiritual” view of life
are countries with a high infant mortality. Medicine, hygiene, asepsis,
suitable diet, are things not achieved without mundane pre-occupations;
they require energy and intelligence directed to the material
environment. Those who think that matter is an illusion are apt to
think the same of dirt, and by so thinking to cause their children to
die.
Speaking more generally, one may say that some kind of power forms the
normal and legitimate aim of every person whose natural desires are
not atrophied. The kind of power that a man desires depends upon his
predominant passions; one man desires power over the actions of men,
another desires power over their thoughts, a third power over their
emotions. One man desires to change the material environment, another
desires the sense of power that comes from intellectual mastery.
Every kind of public work involves desire for some kind of power,
unless it is undertaken solely with a view to the wealth obtainable
by corruption. The man who is actuated by purely altruistic suffering
caused by the spectacle of human misery will, if his suffering is
genuine, desire power to alleviate misery. The only man totally
indifferent to power is the man totally indifferent to his fellow-men.
Some form of desire for power is therefore to be accepted as part of
the equipment of the kind of men out of whom a good community can be
made. And every form of desire for power involves, so long as it is
not thwarted, a correlative form of effort. To the mentality of the
West this conclusion may seem a commonplace, but there are not a few
in Western countries who coquette with what is called “the wisdom of
the East” just at the moment when the East is abandoning it. To them
perhaps what we have been saying may appear questionable, and if so, it
has been worth saying.
Resignation, however, has also its part to play in the conquest of
happiness, and it is a part no less essential than that played by
effort. The wise man, though he will not sit down under preventable
misfortunes, will not waste time and emotion upon such as are
unavoidable, and even such as are in themselves avoidable he will
submit to if the time and labour required to avoid them would interfere
with the pursuit of some more important object. Many people get into
a fret or a fury over every little thing that goes wrong, and in
this way waste a great deal of energy that might be more usefully
employed. Even in the pursuit of really important objects it is unwise
to become so deeply involved emotionally that the thought of possible
failure becomes a constant menace to peace of mind. Christianity
taught submission to the will of God, and even for those who cannot
accept this phraseology there should be something of the same kind
pervading all their activities. Efficiency in a practical task is not
proportional to the emotion that we put into it; indeed, emotion is
sometimes an obstacle to efficiency. The attitude required is that of
doing one’s best while leaving the issue to fate. Resignation is of
two sorts, one rooted in despair, the other in unconquerable hope.
The first is bad; the second is good. The man who has suffered such
fundamental defeat that he has given up hope of serious achievement may
learn the resignation of despair, and, if he does, he will abandon all
serious activity. He may camouflage his despair by religious phrases,
or by the doctrine that contemplation is the true end of man, but
whatever disguise he may adopt to conceal his inward defeat, he will
remain essentially useless and fundamentally unhappy. The man whose
resignation is based on unconquerable hope acts in quite a different
way. Hope which is to be unconquerable must be large and impersonal.
Whatever my personal activities, I may be defeated by death, or by
certain kinds of diseases; I may be overcome by my enemies; I may
find that I have embarked upon an unwise course which cannot lead to
success. In a thousand ways the failure of purely personal hopes may be
unavoidable, but if personal aims have been part of larger hopes for
humanity, there is not the same utter defeat when failure comes. The
man of science who desires to make great discoveries himself may fail
to do so, or may have to abandon his work owing to a blow on the head,
but if he desires profoundly the progress of science and not merely his
personal contribution to this object, he will not feel the same despair
as would be felt by a man whose research had purely egoistic motives.
The man who is working for some much needed reform may find all his
efforts side-tracked by a war, and may be forced to realize that what
he has worked for will not come about in his lifetime. But he need
not on that account sink into complete despair, provided that he is
interested in the future of mankind apart from his own participation in
it.
The cases we have been considering are those in which resignation
is most difficult; there are a number of others in which it is much
easier. These are the cases in which only subsidiary purposes suffer a
check, while the major purposes of life continue to offer a prospect
of success. A man, for example, who is engaged in important work shows
a failure in the desirable kind of resignation if he is distracted by
matrimonial unhappiness; if his work is really absorbing, he should
regard such incidental troubles in the way in which one regards a wet
day, that is to say, as a nuisance about which it would be foolish to
make a fuss.
Some people are unable to bear with patience even those minor troubles
which make up, if we permit them to do so, a very large part of life.
They are furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their
dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes, and
vowing vengeance against the whole industrial order when their clothes
fail to return from the sanitary steam laundry. The energy that such
people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely
directed, to make and unmake empires. The wise man fails to observe the
dust that the housemaid has not dusted, the potato that the cook has
not cooked, and the soot that the sweep has not swept. I do not mean
that he takes no steps to remedy these matters, provided he has time
to do so; I mean only that he deals with them without emotion. Worry
and fret and irritation are emotions which serve no purpose. Those who
feel them strongly may say that they are incapable of overcoming them,
and I am not sure that they can be overcome by anything short of that
fundamental resignation of which we spoke earlier. The same kind of
concentration upon large impersonal hopes which enables a man to bear
personal failure in his work, or the troubles of an unhappy marriage,
will also make it possible for him to be patient when he misses a train
or drops his umbrella in the mud. If he is of a fretful disposition, I
am not sure that anything less than this will cure him.
The man who has become emancipated from the empire of worry will find
life a much more cheerful affair than it used to be while he was
perpetually being irritated. Personal idiosyncrasies of acquaintances,
which formerly made him wish to scream, will now seem merely amusing.
When Mr. A. for the three hundred and forty-seventh time relates the
anecdote of the Bishop of Tierra del Fuego, he amuses himself by noting
the score, and feels no inclination to attempt a vain diversion by an
anecdote of his own. When his bootlace breaks just as he is in a hurry
to catch an early morning train, he reflects, after the appropriate
expletives, that in the history of the cosmos the event in question
has no very great importance. When he is interrupted in a proposal
of marriage by a visit of a tedious neighbour, he considers that all
mankind have been liable to this disaster, with the exception of Adam,
and that even he had his troubles. There is no limit to what can be
done in the way of finding consolation from minor misfortunes by
means of bizarre analogies and quaint parallels. Every civilized man
or woman has, I suppose, some picture of himself or herself, and is
annoyed when anything happens that seems to spoil this picture. The
best cure is to have not only one picture, but a whole gallery, and to
select the one appropriate to the incident in question. If some of the
portraits are a trifle laughable, so much the better; it is not wise to
see oneself all day long as a hero of high tragedy. I do not suggest
that one should see oneself always as a clown in comedy, for those who
do this are even more irritating; a little tact is required in choosing
a rôle appropriate to the situation. Of course, if you can forget
yourself and not play a part at all that is admirable. But if playing a
part has become second nature, consider that you act in repertory, and
so avoid monotony.
Many active people are of opinion that the slightest grain of
resignation, the faintest gleam of humour, would destroy the energy
with which they do their work and the determination by which, as
they believe, they achieve success. These people, in my opinion, are
mistaken. Work that is worth doing can be done even by those who do
not deceive themselves either as to its importance or as to the ease
with which it can be done. Those who can only do their work when
upheld by self-deception had better first take a course in learning to
endure the truth before continuing their career, since sooner or later
the need of being sustained by myths will cause their work to become
harmful instead of beneficial. It is better to do nothing than to
do harm. Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the
harmful work. A little time spent in learning to appreciate facts is
not time wasted, and the work that will be done afterwards is far less
likely to be harmful than the work done by those who need a continual
inflation of their ego as a stimulant to their energy. A certain
kind of resignation is involved in willingness to face the truth
about ourselves; this kind, though it may involve pain in the first
moments, affords ultimately a protection--indeed the only possible
protection--against the disappointments and disillusionments to which
the self-deceiver is liable. Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the
long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things
which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an
indispensable condition of secure and lasting happiness.
CHAPTER XVII
THE HAPPY MAN
Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances
and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the
part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that
so far as this part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very
simple one. It is thought by many, among whom I think we must include
Mr. Krutch, whom we considered in an earlier chapter, that happiness
is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. It is
thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their sorrows have
complicated and highly intellectualized sources. I do not believe that
such things are genuine causes of either happiness or unhappiness;
I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy will, as a
rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a
happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his
beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain
things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are
simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and
the respect of one’s own herd. To some people parenthood also is
essential. Where these things are lacking, only the exceptional man can
achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained by
well-directed effort, the man who is still unhappy is suffering from
some psychological maladjustment which, if it is very grave, may need
the services of a psychiatrist, but can in ordinary cases be cured by
the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right
way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man
should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and
interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavour
therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the
world, to aim at avoiding self-centred passions and at acquiring those
affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from
dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men
to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves
constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such passions
some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and
self-admiration. In all these our desires are centred upon ourselves:
there is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern
lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is
the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so
anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth. But the
thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the
rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far
more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from
the first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at
bottom that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest
some untoward event should force unwelcome realizations upon them.
One of the great drawbacks to self-centred passions is that they afford
so little variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it
is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound
in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness
of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin
is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast
universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he
himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of
traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of
self-absorption.
The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections
and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests
and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an
object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient
of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands
affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives
affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless
to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might
lend money at interest, for a calculated affection is not genuine and
is not felt to be so by the recipient.
What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self?
So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness,
he continues to be self-centred and therefore does not get outside
the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine
interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine.
Although this difficulty is real, there is nevertheless much that he
can do if he has rightly diagnosed his trouble. If, for example, his
trouble is due to a sense of sin, conscious or unconscious, he can
first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful,
and then proceed, by the kind of technique that we have considered in
earlier chapters, to plant this rational conviction in his unconscious
mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral
activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is
probable that genuinely objective interests will arise spontaneously.
If his trouble is self-pity, he can deal with it in the same manner
after first persuading himself that there is nothing extraordinarily
unfortunate in his circumstances. If fear is his trouble, let him
practise exercises designed to give courage. Courage in war has
been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a
great part of the training of boys and young men has been devoted to
producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But
moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied;
they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every
day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful
as the Boy Scout’s daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that
life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course
you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and in
intelligence. Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years
will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in
so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.
What the objective interests are to be that will arise in you when
you have overcome the disease of self-absorption must be left to the
spontaneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances. Do
not say to yourself in advance, “I should be happy if I could become
absorbed in stamp-collecting”, and thereupon set to work to collect
stamps, for it may well happen that you will fail altogether to find
stamp-collecting interesting. Only what genuinely interests you can be
of any use to you, but you may be pretty sure that genuine objective
interests will grow up as soon as you have learnt not to be immersed in
self.
The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.
Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so
doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial
leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed;
in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always
of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that
kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and
naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of
his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial.
I have written in this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who
regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the
point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be
recommended by the sane moralist. The moralist, however, is too apt,
though this is not, of course, universally true, to stress the act
rather than the state of mind. The effects of an act upon the agent
will be widely different, according to his state of mind at the moment.
If you see a child drowning and save it as the result of a direct
impulse to bring help, you will emerge none the worse morally. If,
on the other hand, you say to yourself, “It is the part of virtue to
succour the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must
save this child”, you will be an even worse man afterwards than you
were before. What applies in this extreme case applies in many other
instances that are less obvious.
There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the
attitude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is
recommended by the traditional moralists. The traditional moralist, for
example, will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense
he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point,
but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one’s own happiness
is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry
him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the
same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities
of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be
altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those
whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole
antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in
the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine
interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests
a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard
separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with
other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends
upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is
disintegration within the self through lack of co-ordination between
the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration
between the self and society, where the two are not knit together by
the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the
man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose
personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the
world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying
freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords,
untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really
separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound
instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to
be found.
INDEX
acquiescence, the attitude of, 128
admiration, 86, 106
adolescence often a time of great unhappiness, 129
affection, 175, 177–85, 243
alcohol, 16, 71, 100
altruism, 118–20, 123
America, 49, 51, 130
Angelo, Michael, 216
animals and boredom, 57, 94
anxieties, 77
applause, desire for, 122
aristocracy, one of the advantages of, 137
ascetic element in morality, 100
autobiography, the author’s 18–19
Bacon, Roger, 35–6
belief in a cause, 152–3
birth-rate, decline of the, 193–4
Blake, William, 128
boredom, 18, 57–68, 209
Brontë, Emily and Charlotte, 128
Browning, Robert, 37–8
business man, the, 46–50
Byron, 28
Caution in love, 185
child and envy, the, 83, 87
child and inventiveness, the, 64
China and Japan, 148–9
cities, 190
competition, 91
competitive success and happiness, 50, 52, 55
congenial companionship, 132, 138, 152
conscience, 96–7
conscious upon the unconscious, operation of the, 76, 102, 220–1
constructiveness, 212–14, 217
conventional people, 131
courage, 79, 244–5
craftsman’s joy, the, 150–1
creeds, 241
cure for envy, 86–9
Democracy, 84, 91, 191
diversity of morals and beliefs, 126
drink, 16, 25, 169, 228
drugs, 61–2, 228
Earth, contact with, 66–8, 81
_Ecclesiastes_, 28–31, 33
effort, 230–4
ego, unimportance of one’s, 74, 123, 222
emotional fatigue, 74–5
enjoyment, 16, 51
environment, 133
envy, 80–95
envy, fatigue as a cause of, 92
excitement, 58, 60, 62, 65, 79–81, 110
external interests, 220, 222
Family, the, 186–207
fanaticism, 222–3
fatigue, 69–81, 92, 220
fear, 77–9, 242, 244
fear of public opinion, 126–39
flat, life in a, 190–1
freedom of the Press, 139
Golden mean, the, 230
gormandizer, the, 158, 165–8
grief, 227–8
Happiness an achievement, 231
happiness and competitive success, 50
happiness, sources of, 143–4, 148–9, 152–7, 166, 174, 197, 208,
210, 217–18, 226, 228–9, 231, 234, 240–5
happiness, the best touchstone for, 110
happiness the only cure for envy, 86–7
hatred, the habit of, 213–14
hatred stirred by propaganda, 94
hedonism, 246
herd, fear of the, 97–8, 126, 131–3
hobbies, 153–4
hope must be impersonal, 236
housewife, the, 188–9, 210
Ibsen, 41–2
idealistic theories, 84, 92, 119
ill-treatment, hallucinations of, 111–13
impersonal interests, 219, 227
individual, problem of the, 17
infantile moral teaching, 99, 101, 104–5
infantile suggestions, 103
insanity, 111, 124
instinctive happiness, rareness of, 93
intelligentsia, young, 148
interest in oneself, 19
interest in persons, 154–5
interest in things, 156
introvert, malady of the, 160, 180
Justice and envy, 92
Krutch, J. W., 28, 32–8, 41–4, 241
Leisure, employment of, 52–3, 55–6
Lenin, 215
_Liaisons Dangereuses_, 22
love, 36–41, 67, 247
lunacy, 23–4, 111
Malicious gossip, 113–14
marriage, 80–1, 232
_Massenmench_, Ernst Toller’s, 43
masters and slaves, 191
maternal element in love, the, 21
maxims to prevent persecution mania, 118–25
megalomania, 23–5
mental discipline, 72, 75, 89
minor interests, 219, 229
moderation, 165, 167
_Modern Temper, The_, Krutch’s, 28, 32–34
modesty, 89–90
monk, the, 19–20
monotony, 64–5
moralist, the traditional, 246–7
motherhood, 204–7
Napoleon, 24
Narcissism, 20–3, 25
nervous breakdown, 75
nervous fatigue, 69–70, 73, 81, 220
Objective interests, 243, 245
oblivion, 169
Œdipus complex, the, 101, 192
opinions of others, the, 136
overwork, 74
Parental affection, 198–9
parental feeling, 41
parenthood, 200–4
parents and children, 192–3
passions and reason, the, 108–10, 166–7
peacocks, 90–1
persecution mania, 111–25
pessimism, 32–4
philosophy of competition, 54–5
physical fatigue, 69
pleasure of work, the, 149–52, 211–12, 216
pleasure, pursuit of, 16, 25, 80–1
pleasures of achievement, 145
pleasures of great men, the, 64
power, love of, 23–4, 119, 203, 233–4
preventatives of persecution mania, 118
propaganda and hatred, 93–4
proportion, sense of, 116, 221–3
Protestantism and sin, 96
Protestants and Catholics, 126–7
psycho-analytic repression, 24
public opinion, tyranny of, 130, 136, 138–9
Puritanism, 54–5
Rationality, 108–9
reading, 52–3, 63
reason, hatred of, 109–10
religion, 225, 241
Religious Orders, 35
religious psychology of sin, 96
resignation, 230–40
_Retreat from Parenthood_, Jean Aylin’s, 189
Roland, Madame, 84
Russian, the young, 148
Sages of antiquity, the, 36
scientists, happiness of, 145–7
secret of happiness, 157
security, sense of, 176–7
self-absorption, 20, 107, 243, 245
self-centred passions, 242–3
self-confidence, 177
self-deception, 124–5
self-denial, 245–7
self-regarding motives, 120
sense of sin, 20–1, 35, 96, 98, 102, 106, 244
sex and sin, 101–2
sex attraction, 67, 184
sex education, 102
sex majority, 232–3
sexual source of envy, 93
Shakespeare, 41–3, 67, 215
sin, consciousness of, 20–1, 35, 96, 98, 102, 106, 109, 243
skill, 211, 224
social freedom, 137
social inequalities, 91
social justice, 92
social persecution, 139
social system, the, 17
socialism, equalitarian doctrines of, 91
Solomon, 31–3, 88
Spinoza, 226
spinster, the, 187
sterility and civilization, 194
Stoics, the, 40
struggle for life, the, 45–6
superstitions of childhood, 105
Test of genius, 122
toleration, 139
tragedy, 41–4
tyranny of public opinion, 130
Unhappiness, Causes of, 17–18, 24–5, 27, 111, 127, 155, 185, 208,
220, 231, 235, 242, 244, 247
unhappiness, kinds of, 15–16, 27
unloved, feeling of being, 175–6
unrecognized merit, 121
Vanity, 23, 119
Victorians and love, the, 36–9
Women and external interests, 222
women and zest, 172–4
Wordsworth, 65
work, 208–18, 223
worry, 72–3, 75–8, 237–8
Youth and the tyranny of ignorance, 133–5
Zest, 158–9, 161, 163–5, 169–75, 209, 228
[Illustration]
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ecclesiastes was not, of course, really written by Solomon, but it
is convenient to allude to the author by this name.
[2] Quoted from Coulton’s _From St. Francis to Dante_, p. 57.
[3] Mistranslated in English as _Masses and Men_, whereas the
correct translation is _The Mass-Man_.
[4] This whole problem as it affects the professional classes is
treated with remarkable insight and constructive ability in _The
Retreat from Parenthood_, by Jean Aylin.
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.
2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have
been retained as in the original.
3. Italics are shown as _xxx_.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS ***
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