THE HUNT FOR HAPPINESS. T HERE is a dialogue in the
new Fortnightly by the late l'rancis Adams,—the gentleman, we believe, who shot himself, not long ago, to cut short, by a very brief period, the anguish of a painful death,—on what the writer calls "The Hunt for Happiness." It is a dialogue of very con- siderable literary subtlety and delicacy, and gives us a high idea of the intellectual capacity of the man who wrote it. But so far from indicating any mastery of the meaning and significance of life, it seems to us to indicate only that the writer could not see the forest for the multitude of trees. He misses the most impressive of the aspects of life, in the crowd of fragmentary sensations and emotions by which his mind is agitated. The two men between whom the dialogue is supposed to be conducted, are respectively an Individualist and a Socialist,—the former a cynic, who thinks that every one is always pursuing the phantom of egoistic happiness in vain; the latter a dreamer, who thinks that if men would only seek a state of society iu which the happiness of the masses, as an organised whole, were the object pursued, rather than the happiness of the selfish individual ego, there might be at least some faint hope that the phantom in the pursuit of which life is passed, would not turn out quite so shadowy or illusory. Both agree that life is full of illusion ; but while one of them thinks that life is essentially so, the other hopes (faintly) that it may be only because men have hitherto been so selfish that the happiness of the many has been wholly sacrificed to the happiness of the few who are somewhat abler and shrewder than their neighbours. The view of the writer may be gauged by one skilful touch of Randal's,—the older and more cynical of the two interlocutors, —who has been maintaining that when you come to know the men and women who seem to have something in them, better, you are always disappointed, and find that there was nothing in them to justify the hopes you had formed of the fresh- ness and interest of their personality, and that but for the continual variations in the kaleidoscope of human events, —but for the perpetual incitements to curiosity which the shiftings and permutations of the human scenery afford us,—life would be simply intolerable. They meet on the top of a hill near Cannes some young girl, ap- parently a Swede or Dane, whose light sarcasm at the mis- take one of them has made in regarding the cross on the summit of the hill as a religious symbol, and in her criti- cism of Maupassant, interests them. She is called away by her sister just as the conversation has raised a hope that there is something original in her. Randal, the older and more cynical of the two, is delighted. "Didn't I tell you," he says, "that the perpetual arrival of events saves us P That girl's grimace over the cross and the inscrip- tion has put me into my better humour. And she went pre- cisely in the nick of time. There was nothing in her, nothing, nothing ! Three more minutes and our plummets would have been rattling on the shallow bottom of her poor little soul, and she would have left us disconsolate. Now we shall both of us talk with an animated inconsistency, (and that means talk well,) and when you are next by yourself, you will be able to think about her for a quarter-of-an-hour or so, and exaggerate her possibilities." And accordingly they proceed to talk with "an animated inconsistency" about the illusion of life, and to come to the conclusion that the only beautiful and beneficent thing in life is the death which closes it with an eternal silence, which in their "animated inconsistency" the friends agree to call "peace ;" though why there should be more peace in ceasing to be, than there was in not having begun to be, it is not easy to conjecture. Sophocles made one of his choruses of old men say, "Not to be born is much the best ; " But he did not venture to make even them say that not to be born is peace. Peace is a positive experi- ence, and not the absence of all experience. It is the re- conciliation of the soul to the master power that rules the world, not the cessation of all experience, whether sweet or bitter, on the subject. Silence is often the occasion for peace, because silence is an opportunity for the deeper life.
But as for extinction, it is no more peace than it is pain. Peace is just as much a positive and vivid experience as pain. If Death is "beautiful and beneficent," it cannot be extinction ; and if it be extinction, as the friends agree, it can no more be beautiful and beneficent than it can be hideous and malicious. "Animated inconsistency" can hardly go farther than the conclusion of the dialogue appears to take us.
The whole drift of the dialogue is this :—While the -indi- vidualist maintains that the most eager and superb selfish- ness is the most natural of all states, though it, too, proves a pure illusion, and ends in inspiring hate of life, he holds that the disinterested and altruistic bias leads to a still more complete illusion, and ends in inspiring a still deeper hatred of life. Randal says : "The brigand, the ruffian, alone appeals to me personally. I prefer Benvenuto Cellini to Francis of Assisi, and Dick Turpin to John Howard the philanthropist." But he finds his friend's socialistic ideal still more empty and hollow than his own. Here is the upshot of the discussion :— "Individualistic civilisations, you confess, have had magnificent results, but have always failed, you declare, to achieve anything like permanency or success. Have socialistic civilisations achieved even the magnificent results, to say nothing of the permanency or success ? Napoleon's France went to pieces in a superbly insane effort to assert itself in actual dorninency over all Europe, but at least it lived fully and intensely. Would the slow rotting dissolu- tion of a community bred upon pawn et circenses have boon better P' There have been no socialistic civilisations,' said Wilson.—' Oh, listen to him!' cried Randal. Listen to the ingenuous young man ! He imagines that modern industrial socialism is unique, and hasn't occurred a hundred times in history already I He imagines that when it has satisfied the physical needs of all, it will continue to load a strenuous intellectual life, in order to make us all into young gods and goddesses, and not into devotees of skittles and beer and tea and scandal! No, in the new civilisation of socialism, my friends, human nature will be completely changed. For we are at last about to realise the kingdom of heaven on earth, my friends, and attune the souls of the masses to the pitch of cherubim and seraphim, while all the individualising infants shall be treated in foundling asylums as pitiful samples of a vicious atavism.'—Wilson made no reply, looking in front of him.
Now; said Randal, I am once more waiting to be confuted:— 'I can't confute you. Perhaps you are right. Who knows ? No one can see more than a few steps ahead. We all have the hope- less sadness of our limitations, and it is easy to destroy the little nest of trust which, like to frail and migrant birds, we construct with dreams of downy fledglings, eager for the skies.'—There was a long silence.—Then Randal said gently, You make me remind myself of the brutal heedless schoolboy who has just wrecked such a nest, from the sheer wanton sense of his brutal heedlessness. Forgive me r—And he extended his left hand. Wilson took it with his right and pressed it.—' It is nothing,' ho said, for, again, perhaps you are wrong. Who knows P"
The "animated inconsistency" here, is, we may say, ostenta- tiously shown. The admirer of brigands and highwaymen is overcome with pain at the thought of the cruel carelessness of a boyish birdsnester, and stretches out his hand to his friend to ask forgiveness for his cynicism in dissipating his dream of a strenuous intellectual society as the natural fruit of the new altruism. Surely this might have suggested to him that there is something in the illusions of life of which he makes such bitter complaint, that is directly favourable to the development of a form of character of which he himself, by his regrets and excuses, shows his appreciation. Indeed, nothing can be more certain• than not only that a "hunt for happiness" is far from being the single motive-power of human character,—for this even the author of this dialogue successfully disproves, by showing that a vast number of human actions are performed under the pressure of irresistible motives which very often totally ignore individual happiness, and not unfrequently compel a plunge into positive misery,— but that there is such a thing as the deliberate pursuit of ends which are altogether independent of the motive which the more cynical of the interlocutors of this dialogue erects into the only inspiring force of human life. Though far from true, it would be much nearer the truth to treat the attempt to escape from unhappiness, as the greatest of all the stimu- lants which act upon the human consciousness, than to speak of the directly attractive power of expected happiness as constituting such a stimulant. The inherent restlessness of human nature is due, not to visions of unrealised joy, but to keen experience of realised pain. And the men who take part in this dialogue betray that this is BO by their rhap- sodical panegyrics on "beautiful and beneficent Death." All that,—at least in their own conception,—death can do for them is to set them free from pangs from which they actu- ally suffer, not to bestow upon them joys in which they have no sort of belief. Yet, as both Randal and Wilson are suffi- ciently inconsistent in their conversation to manage to convey to us, they do gain, and gain greatly in character, by resist- ing this involuntary impulse to escape from all suffering, and by confronting and even overcoming it for the sake of others. The Socialist shows this by his wistful hope that if men live for each other instead of for themselves, they may regenerate, or partially regenerate, the society in which this motive takes a prominent position ; while even the cynic, by asking forgive- ness of his friend for damping his aspirations, and reprobating the cruelty of children who destroy a nest of fledgelings in order that they may have the temporary ecetacy of making prize of it, shows that in his secret heart he too condemns the coarse selfishness of unregenerate men, and prefers that con- sideration for others which age and experience have taught him, to the predatory self-will to which his youth was confessedly devoted. Might not this have suggested to the writer of the dialogue that illusion and pain are after all not as maleficent in- cidents of life as he had imagined,—that character grows under those self.denials from which human nature so sensitively shrinks,—if at least they are boldly faced and accepted in something of the soldier's spirit ? Why is it that we so much admire the calm indifference to danger and death which the true soldier exhibits, if it be not that the human character gains in force and significance by that conquest of the nerves and of the cowardly heart, which military obedience and prompti- tude seem to compel ? And if that be so in the case of the disciplined soldier in actual war, why should it not be just as true,—as indeed it is,—of the disciplined soldier of the inward campaigns through which we have all of us to pass? These pessimists in their extravagant indignation at the necessity for human suffering, seem quite to forget that, so far as we can judge, the greatest characters of which we have any experience have all been forme a by it, and that far from its being the pure evil they imagine, it is the most purifying and stimulating of all the influences to which human nature is subjected. Pain may be a mystery, but it is not half so much of a mystery as those imagine who conceive that life, if it does not succeed in securing our grasp of a certain amount of enjoyment, is a profitless and wasted affair. The real end of life is the formation of a noble character, and we do not hesitate to say that very few characters of the highest calibre have ever been formed with- out learning, not indeed to despise pain, but to endure it, and to learn from it lessons which have seldom indeed been learnt without its aid. That the chase of happiness is the chief business of life is simply false ; that even intolerable restlessness under unhappiness is irresistible is not true ; but the pessimists who converse in the pages of the late Francis Adams, might have found some better and truer conclusion to their dialogue than they did, if it had struck them that everything that fascinated them in each other, was due to their friend's manly resistance to these impatient promptings, and his wish to attain qualities in which be had been pro- foundly deficient so long as he pursued the chase of selfish pleasure or fled in panic from irremediable pain.
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